World Athletics approved new testing protocols to keep men from entering women’s athletic competitions. The test keeps anyone who has experienced male puberty from participating in female events.
The new rule, announced in a press release, states, “All athletes wishing to compete in the female category at the World Championships are required to undergo a once-in-a-lifetime test for the SRY gene.”
The SRY gene is found on the Y chromosome. It “provides instructions for making a protein called the sex-determining region Y protein” which is “involved in male-typical sex development.”
The regulations call for a simple “cheek swab or blood test, whichever is more convenient.” The new regulations go into effect on September 1.
World Athletics is the international governing body for “the sport of athletics,” which includes track and field, cross country, race walking and road running events. The organization establishes rules and regulations for these sports, manages world records, organizes world championships and manages the Olympic program for athletics.
The announcement said the test is “extremely accurate, and the risk of a false negative or positive is extremely unlikely.” Individuals who test positive for the SRY gene will be advised to undergo “further medical assessment” to determine if they have undergone male puberty.
As a result, males who claim to be female will not be able to enter women’s track and field events at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe commented on the new rule, saying,
The philosophy that we hold dear in World Athletics is the protection and the promotion of the integrity of women’s sport. It is really important in a sport that is permanently trying to attract more women that they enter a sport believing there is no biological glass ceiling. The test to confirm biological sex is a very important step in ensuring this is the case.
Coe won gold medals in the men’s 1,500 meter races in the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. He won silver medals in the men’s 800 meter races those same years.
In response to the announcement about protecting women’s sports, The Paradox Team, which produces “science-based educational media,” highlighted a helpful animated video they created to explain the issues involved in testing for the SRY gene: “Sex Screening in Sports: How it Works.”
Zachry Elliot, founder and editor-in-chief of The Paradox Team, posted the video on X in response to World Athletics announcement.
The video first explains that “males have significant performance advantages compared to females of equal height, weight, and age,” including “larger skeletal structures, greater muscle mass with stronger muscles capable of producing force more rapidly, stronger tendons and ligaments, larger hearts and lungs and a higher oxygen-carrying capacity.”
The video goes on to describe development of these differences in male bodies, “These advantages arise from a combination of testes, high testosterone production, and a functional androgen receptor response that drives physical changes in the male’s body throughout childhood and puberty, a process called androgenization.”
Because of the athletic benefits from androgens, all who wish to compete in women’s sports should be screened before they are allowed to do so. According to The Paradox Institute, the cheek swab test is inexpensive; “simple, fast and non-invasive”; and “is highly predictive of male development, accurately classifying over 99.99% of individuals as either male or female.”
Despite critics who complain that keeping males out of girls and women’s sports means intrusive “genital checks,” a simple cheek swab or blood test is all that is needed to resolve the issue for almost all individuals.
The Paradox Team acknowledges that in very rare instances, “developmental disorders may cause discrepancies between the screen result and an individual’s actual development.” There are a very few XY women – with extremely rare developmental anomalies – who never experienced male levels of testosterone. Because these athletes would test positive for the SRY gene, they would undergo further medical examination to determine the nature of their developmental anomaly and whether this disqualifies them from competing in women’s sports.
The video explains that two rare disorders of sexual development (DSD) may produce an SRY positive result for these women. The first infrequently occurring DSD is 46:XY Swyer Syndrome, where the individual has the SRY gene, but a mutation results in the failure to develop male testes, so the person is not exposed to male hormones and develops internal and external female genitalia.
Despite the presence of the Y gene, the individual has developed as female.
A second rare DSD occurs when an XY individual has Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), where a “mutation in the androgen receptor gene blocks their body’s ability to respond to testosterone.” Such individuals develop “female-typical external anatomy and never undergo male physiological development,” as their bodies do not respond to male hormones.
While a women with CAIS has XY chromosomes, the developmental anomaly means she has not gone through male puberty and has developed as a female.
Finally, there is another DSD called 46:XY 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiency (5-ARD), which is quite different from the two previous disorders.
In most males, some of the body’s testosterone is converted by the 5-ARD enzyme into the male sex hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Both testosterone and DHT play a role in male sexual development.
But as “Sex Screening in Sports: How it Works” explains, a deficiency in DHT leads to cases where “the male’s external genitalia are underdeveloped or even female-like.”
At puberty, these males – who may have appeared to be female up until that point – suddenly begin male physical development as their testes produce testosterone. As the video makes clear, “Since they experience testosterone-driven male development, they do have the male performance advantage.”
The Paradox Team explains, “The key distinction is whether an athlete has experienced testosterone-driven male development (as in the case of XY 5-ARD) or has not (as in the cases of Swyer Syndrome and CAIS).”
The team also explains why these cheek swab tests are necessary, saying, “With no official sex screening in place since 1996, male athletes with XY 5-ARD have competed and won medals in women’s Olympic events due to their testosterone-driven male development.”
As Daily Citizen has previously reported, male athletes Imane Khelif and Lu Yu-Ting won Olympic medals in boxing, robbing women of opportunities. Other athletes with 5-ARD have won Olympic medals, especially in track events.
It’s good news that World Athletics is now protecting women’s athletics from male athletes who have distinct advantages in sports. With the rise of transgenderism in recent years, a number of other sports groups have taken steps to protect girls and women’s sports.
But there is still a long way to go, and we encourage more sports governing bodies to follow suit.
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