The International Athletics Federation introduces compulsory genetic test to compete in the women’s category

The International Athletics Federation, the World Athletics, has agreed to introduce compulsory genetic test to participate in female categories. The agency has approved the recommendations of the group of experts after having opened a consultation of the past Frebrero on the new guidelines, which in practice means closing the door to trans women and many women who were born with some difference in sexual development (DSD, as the Federation calls them).

“We will stubbornly protect the female category and do everything necessary to get it,” the president of World Athletics, the British Sebastian Coe, told the press at the end of the meeting of the council held in Nankín (China). The decision is achieved at a time when this issue is once again on the table of the International Olympic Committee after the election of her new president, Kristy Coventry, which is committed to assuming greater leadership in the matter.

In athletics, which in recent years has hardened its eligibility policy, there is already a decision already taken from now on, only women with “female biological sex” and those with XY chromosomes can be made in the female category, but they have insensitivity to androgens insensitivity (that is, their body does not recognize male hormones such as testosterone). That is why athletes, to be authorized, must be submitted as a condition prior to a genetic saliva test to determine the presence or not of the SRY gene (responsible for the development of male sexual characteristics).

Until now, World Athletics (WA), chaired by Sebastian Coe, only allowed to run in international competitions to trans women in case they had begun their transition before puberty or 12 years and that they maintained a level of testosterone below 2.5 nanomles per liter in blood. For their part, DSD athletes – a term that refers to those who were born with a chromosomal, hormonal or sexual anatomy that does not fit the medical and social canons for female and male bodies – could compete if they reduced their testosterone.

Known is the case of the South African athlete Casteter Semenya, which battles in the European Court of Human Rights because it refuses to be discussed to lower the amount of testosterone that its body produces naturally. It is not the only one and neither does athletics in the only sport in which this type of rules have been discussed for years: during the Paris Olympic Games, the case of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, on which a buculated campaign blurred by the extreme right worldwide and the one who was accused of “being a man” was lifted.

World Athlelics now considers that the rules must be the same for trans women and for DSD women. “It is important to do this because it maintains everything we have been talking about not limiting ourselves to talking about integrity in women’s sports, but really guaranteeing it,” Coe added this Tuesday.