Sex testing all women athletes is a discriminatory rights violation

Kyle Knight and Alex Müller

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced last week that they are going to genetically sex test all women athletes. The newly announced policy follows a secret process the IOC initiated last year, ostensibly to “protect the female category.”

Sex testing has a sordid history of use by sporting bodies to target women athletes who, often through variations in their sex characteristics, or intersex traits, have higher than typical natural testosterone. The practice—in its many forms—has been debunked as unethical, unscientific, and unworkable, and has often relied on racist gender stereotypes. Moreover, there is no scientific consensus that higher than typical testosterone in women confers an athletic advantage.

Only women have been targeted with sex testing, never men, illustrating its discriminatory nature. The vague language of sex testing regulations, sport-governing bodies’ exclusive control over their implementation, and the arbitrary application of unscientific methods, is a form of surveillance of women.

Athletes such as India’s Dutee Chand, South Africa’s Caster Semenya, and Algeria’s Imane Khelif have faced high-profile public attacks due to sex testing policies. Other athletes have quit, been disqualified, and even died by suicide. Margaret Wambui, a medalist in the 2014 Rio Olympics who was subsequently ruled ineligible through sex testing called the sex testing regulations for track and field “the soft fingertips of World Athletics’  iron fist.”

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Semenya’s favor in 2025, saying that the Swiss government had failed to effectively protect her rights in its oversight of World Athletics, the international federation governing her sport, which had ruled Semenya ineligible several times since 2009.

In recent years, the IOC had championed  inclusion, publishing its own framework that condemned sex testing and favored more equity-focused evaluations of fairness in women’s sports. The new regulations are a disturbing about-face.  While the Committee  said its decision to return to sex testing was “evidence-based and expert-informed”, it has not made this evidence publicly available or identified the experts.

The test the IOC is suggesting this time—a swab to look for the SRY gene found on the Y chromosome —has been used before, with disastrous results. When Atlanta hosted the 1996 summer games, several women athletes were misclassified as men.

What this means for the 2028 Los Angeles Games is that all women—but no men—will need to submit to a medically unnecessary and scientifically inaccurate test that will determine the rest of their careers. The IOC’s proposed sex testing also creates ethical conflicts for physicians who will need to carry out the test. They will face a situation of dual loyalty: a conflict between their duties to their patients and their obligations to their employers.

Genetic testing requires voluntary, informed consent—but consent cannot be freely given when it is a condition of athletic eligibility. What women athletes are faced with is not a true choice, but an environment of coercion: undergo this test, or end your career. If the test deems you ineligible.

Furthermore, the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine and many national laws, such as in France, prohibit genetic testing without a legitimate medical purpose, a threshold that sex testing for sports eligibility fails to meet. This implicates physicians, the athletics associations that hire them to implement the regulations, and governments in human rights violations against women athletes.

Hundreds of human rights organizations, legal and medical scholars, and France’s sports minister, have already condemned the IOC’s latest plot twist on sex testing. Sport governing officials should listen and return sex testing to the history books.

Kyle Knight is adjunct professor of public health at the University of San Francisco, United States.

Dr. Alex Müller is LGBT rights director at Human Rights Watch,  Berlin, Germany.