World Athletics has tightened regulations over the participation of transgender women in female competitions. Two years ago, the international federation of all athletics sports banned all transgender women who had gone through male puberty before transitioning from female categories.
Now, after finding that male advantages can appear even before puberty, they take measures even further by adding a mandatory testing to verify their biological sex. The test will be a "genetic passport", that will be done only once in their career and will be non-invasive - a cheek swab test and dried blood test - with the goal of checking if athletes have presence of the SRY gene, which appears in the Y chromosome and would make them biologically male. This would affect not only trans women, but also women with DSD conditions (difference of sex development), which is the case of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, which causes higher levels of testosterone and usually gives them physical superiority that is deemed unfair over other athletes.
This will make World Athletics the first international sports federation to reintroduce sex tests, which will cause greater exclusion in women's sports, aligning them not only with Donald Trump's policies of banning trans women from female sports, but also with Kirsty Coventry's views, the new IOC president, which will be in charge for the next eight years, including the 2028 Olympic Games, and unlike prior IOC presidents, does not rule out the idea of sex testing.
Sebastian Coe, World Athletics president, said that this measure is "a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition", and they aim to introduce them in time for the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September 2025.