Transgender Olympians
NBC News claims that “transgender women are banned from participating in the Olympics” starting in 2028.
IN FACT, the new International Olympic Committee (IOC) policy explicitly allows “XY transgender” athletes — aka “biological males” — to compete in “any male category” and in “events that do not classify athletes by sex.” Here are the salient facts:
The new IOC policy states that “eligibility for any female category is limited to biological females” as determined by a “once-in-a-lifetime” “unintrusive” “gene screening via saliva, cheek swab or blood sample.”
Per the IOC, this policy is “necessary” to “ensure fairness” and to “protect safety, particularly in contact sports,” because “male sex provides a performance advantage in all sports and events that rely on strength, power and endurance.”
The new policy is at odds with the assertions of people like:
- IOC spokesman Mark Adams, who declared in 2024 that allowing biological males to box against females has “worked.”
- U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), who alleged in 2025 that a bill to ban males from competing in female athletic programs is unnecessary because she “played co-ed sports all the time” in “gym class.”
While the IOC, AOC, and many others were making such assertions, Just Facts repeatedly documented the following facts:
- A 2020 study in the journal Sports Medicine found that “strength, lean body mass, muscle size and bone density are only trivially affected” by the testosterone suppression meds that biological males use to compete in female sports. This gives them a “major performance” advantage and has “safety implications” in sports where strength is critical, like wrestling, boxing, and weightlifting.
- A 2021 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that lean body mass and muscle area “in transwomen remain above those” of biological women “even after 36 months of hormone therapy.”
- Based on dozens of studies, a 2024 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports concluded that the IOC’s framework for transgender competitors “does not protect fairness for female athletes.”
Years later, the IOC has now come to grips with these realities, writing that the “latest scientific evidence, including developments since 2021,” show “it is universally accepted that providing for a female category is necessary to allow both males and females equal access to elite sport.”
