The Ugly History Behind the Olympics’ New Gender Test

On March 26, the International Olympic Committee announced that all athletes competing in women’s sports will be required to undergo genetic eligibility testing. Claiming to be concerned with “fairness” and “the protection of the female category,” the IOC aims to ban transgender women from future Olympic games by screening for the SRY gene, which is usually found on the Y chromosome. The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles will be the first games with this policy in effect.

For queer historian and writer Michael Waters, the IOC’s announcement elicited a feeling of déjà vu: The institution has employed similar gender verification rules before—only to abandon them amid public backlash. In his 2024 book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, Waters traces the history of trans athletes in the early 20th century, showing how a World War II–era moral panic around gender expression directly informs today’s anti-trans attacks.

I spoke with Waters about his book, the history of sex testing in international sports, and how the IOC’s latest policy marks a return to a discriminatory model of gender surveillance that draws from a dark eugenic past.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

Let’s start with the basics: What is the IOC’s new policy on sex testing, and how does it differ from previous approaches?

The IOC’s new policy is resurrecting a policy of genetic testing that actually had been active for a few decades in the 20th century. In the 1960s, when the IOC first introduced genetic testing, it used these things called Barr body tests, which essentially were measuring the presence of XX chromosomes. Anyone without two X chromosomes would have been kicked out of women’s sports.

“These tests that the IOC and a lot of sports federations are now presenting as new, non-invasive, cutting-edge technology—they have literally used these before and found that they were, on one hand, inaccurate in creating these false positives, and on the other hand, just in violation of people’s human rights.”

There actually were some high-profile cases of cis women athletes who had a multiplicity of chromosomes—who did not just have XX—who were pushed out of sports because they failed this gene test. There’s this Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967 who had played in elite track and field competition before, and then when the Track and Field Federation implemented the first version of chromosome testing, she failed for vaguely explained reasons. An official said that she had “one chromosome too many,” and then she was banned from sports entirely. After that moment, the IOC stopped releasing and trying to publicize the banning of certain women from sports, but many more probably were kicked out because of failed tests that we just don’t know about.

The version of genetic testing that the IOC implemented in the late 1960s, and that continued on until the end of the 1990s, accrued so much backlash and criticism—from scientists, from athletes, from politicians, and actually the whole government of Norway banned this sort of genetic testing for sports practice—that around 2000 the IOC just got rid of genetic testing policies wholesale.

In the early 2000s, the IOC started to move toward creating some path to participation for trans women athletes. There were a lot of restrictions around how trans women could compete; the earliest rules required people to have gone through some sort of surgery-based medical care. And eventually, in 2021, the IOC kind of just stopped implementing any requirements overall and created this framework that would allow individual sports federations to make their own policies around which women can compete in women’s sports.

So what’s happening here is after this brief period of the IOC saying, “We’re going to leave it up to the individual athletic federations,” now they’re stepping back in and saying, “Okay, here is our policy.” While they’re framing it as this new thing that has risen out of discussion with stakeholders, really this is a direct resurrection of the policy that they had in the ’90s that was widely derided and abandoned.

Did anything in particular happen socially or culturally in the late 1990s that caused the IOC to abandon........

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