The Olympics Just Succumbed to a Ridiculous Gender Panic. Here’s Who It’s Really Going to Hurt.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The International Olympic Committee has instituted mandatory sex testing for every single athlete who aims to compete in women’s sports, the organization announced last week. This regressive policy, which will come into play at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles and formally resumes the Olympics’ long and shameful tradition of sex testing women , is effectively a ban on transgender women.

That’s ghoulish. Equally ghoulish but less discussed so far is that it’s also a ban on most intersex women. “Because of the way that anti-trans legislation and policies are drawn up these days, 99.

9 percent of it is going to impact intersex people, because it’s usually just picking a single sex characteristic and saying, This defines maleness and femaleness ,” said Erika Lorshbough, executive director of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth . Intersex is an umbrella term for people who have variations in their sex traits or reproductive anatomy. In practice, the test will be a cheek swab or blood work to detect the presence of the SRY gene.

In the IOC’s words, that serves as “highly accurate evidence that an athlete has experienced male sex development. ” The reality is much more complicated—for example, not everyone with XY chromosomes even develops testes. The very scientist who discovered the SRY gene opposes policymakers’ use of it to screen out trans and intersex women from sports .