Penna Dexter

Competitive fairness returns to the highest level of amateur sports. The International Olympic Committee has announced that, beginning with the 2028 games in Los Angeles, participation in women’s competitions is reserved only for biological females.

IOC President Kirsty Coventry stated in a video that “The scientific evidence is very clear: male chromosomes give performance advantages in sports that rely on strength, power, or endurance.”

This is normal and fair, but critiques from the Left began immediately.

I googled the topic and was confronted with the initial AI Overview that shows up at the beginning of every Google search. It described “a new restrictive policy on transgender athletes.”

This policy is not new — it simply returns participation in men’s and women’s sports to what it was before 2015. That’s the year, a framework was adopted allowing transgender women — biological men — to compete based on sufficient suppression of testosterone levels.

Requirements remained unclear and inconsistent. In 2021 the IOC instructed international federations to come up with their own guidelines.

Before the 2024 Paris Olympics, three top-tier sports — track and field, swimming, and cycling — excluded transgender women who had been through male puberty.

Last June, former Zimbabwean politician Kirsty Coventry became IOC President. An Olympic swimmer and seven-time medalist, she argues, “As a former athlete, I passionately believe in the rights of all Olympians to take part in fair competition.” She pledged to introduce a blanket ban on allowing so-called transgender women to compete in female Olympic sports.

Upon announcing the policy, she said, “It is absolutely clear that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category.”

Groups opposing the IOC announcement argue for inclusion and against what they have termed “the presumption of advantage.” But the male advantage in terms of strength, power, and endurance is not a presumption. It’s a reality that the IOC is finally recognizing.