This is why the Joint Statement on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination in Sport, issued in Geneva on 25 February 2026 by independent UN human rights experts, deserves attention because it raises justified concerns about genetic gatekeeping, biological essentialism and decisions made through procedures that are difficult to examine and even harder to challenge. The likely costs, the experts argue, fall on equality, dignity, privacy, bodily integrity and mental health.
World Athletics (WA) and World Boxing have already moved to require genetic testing linked to the SRY gene as a condition for entry into the women’s category. The test is described as simple and definitive: a one-time cheek swab, saliva sample or blood test. But sport has been here before. Broad sex testing was progressively abandoned in the late 20th century after sustained criticism and evidence of harm. The point was not that fairness does not matter; it was that genes are a blunt instrument, and that the athletes who “fail” such tests can pay a price that outlasts a career.
With Los Angeles 2028 approaching, the United States is also seeking to shape the global framework. President Trump’s executive order, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, makes the intention clear by treating sex as a firm regulatory boundary, intensifying Title IX enforcement, and nudging the IOC toward eligibility criteria based on sex rather than gender identity. Whatever the domestic political reading, the international implication is straightforward: a national culture-war dispute is being projected onto the world’s biggest sporting spectacle.
That leaves the IOC at a critical junction. Under Kirsty Coventry, it has established a working group on the “protection of the female category”, and new criteria are reportedly expected in the first half of 2026. Trust in the IOC’s process has yet to be earned because it has not said who sits on the working group or who it has consulted.
An IOC decision aligned with WA also seems likely because it will look administratively clean. Although genetic sex testing can create the impression of neutrality, it is not the same as producing a fair and defensible policy.
Biology has shown that sex development cannot be reduced to a single marker that reliably sorts all bodies into two tidy categories. Chromosomes, gonads, hormone pathways and phenotype do not always align. That is precisely why blanket sex testing fell into disrepute: when the science becomes complicated, institutions are tempted to simplify it by force.
“Take the test or don’t compete” is not meaningful consent. It is coercion framed as procedure. Add the risks attached to genetic disclosure, uneven access to counselling, and uncertain data protection, and what is described as “integrity” constitutes a violation of athletes’ bodily autonomy and medical privacy.
Rules in practice are often shaped by bias, prejudice and suspicion: an athlete judged too muscular, too dominant, insufficiently feminine. Most competitors are never asked to prove anything. A small number are asked repeatedly. Those athletes are disproportionately from the Global South, and the pattern often tracks narrow, racialised expectations of femininity. Critics of World Athletics’ DSD regulations have long argued that the logic becomes circular: being singled out is taken as evidence that singling out was justified.
When athletes challenge these decisions, they rarely do so in a transparent public forum. They enter expensive arbitration and constrained review procedures with limited visibility. This is one of the core points in the UN experts’ warning: when rights are at stake, closed processes erode trust and weaken legitimacy.
None of this is an argument against protecting women’s sport. Fairness and safety matter. The lingering question is whether sport will defend the female category through coercive monitoring and genetic screening, or through evidence-based, proportionate standards designed with transparency, accountability and human rights in mind.
If the run-up to Los Angeles 2028 normalises genetic gatekeeping under the IOC’s backing, the Olympic movement will be reviving a dark historical suspicion under a modern, tidy label. It will also, once again, ask a small, vulnerable minority of athletes to carry the human cost.
