When President Trump ordered a ban on transgender female athletes in women’s sports, he wasn’t looking only at American schools and colleges.

He wants a ban that extends to global sports.

His executive order Wednesday also instructed the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio , to lobby the International Olympic Committee to limit participation in women’s competition categories to athletes who were born female. And Trump indicated that his administration could deny visas to international athletes if it deemed them to be “males seeking to participate in women’s sports.”

But Trump’s order arrived as views on transgender athletes were already undergoing a profound shift among sports leaders.

Five out of the seven candidates running to lead the IOC have said they favor stricter rules for defining female athletes. And policies barring any athlete who has undergone male puberty from competing in women’s events have been enacted by some of the biggest sports governing bodies, including the international federations for swimming and track and field.

In December, the LPGA announced that same policy, saying it “prioritizes the competitive integrity of women’s professional tournaments and elite amateur competitions.” Around the same time the NCAA signaled it would move immediately in the face of any federal order to exclude male-born athletes from women’s sports—and then did exactly that this week.

The new IOC president—who will be elected next month—will set the tone for many other Olympic sports organizations.

Longtime IOC member Kirsty Coventry, a former swimmer from Zimbabwe and the only woman running for IOC president, told The Wall Street Journal this week that she supports barring transgender athletes who were deemed male at birth from competing in women’s events in Olympic sport.

IOC presidential candidate Seb Coe also said he would explore a total ban on transgender female athletes competing in women’s events at the Games. As leader of track and field governing body World Athletics, he ushered in rules barring any athlete who had gone through male puberty from female competition categories.

Coe said he also opposed the participation in women’s Olympic events of women with differences in sexual development (DSD), a condition that at birth can confer male sex characteristics on females. In World Athletics competitions, DSD athletes are required to show that their testosterone is below a certain level.

“We need to find a way to ensure Trans and DSD athletes feel included and are able to participate,” Coe said in a written statement. “It is just not in the female category.”

Another IOC presidential candidate, international ski federation president Johan Eliasch, said he favors a uniform approach across all sports. IOC presidential candidate Juan Antonio Samaranch, an IOC vice president and the son of the 1980s and 1990s president of the same name, said “the IOC must lead on this and set a clear direction for all Olympic sports.”

IOC presidential candidate David Lappartient , president of the world cycling governing body UCI, said he doesn’t favor uniform gender-eligibility criteria for Olympic sports. But during his leadership, the UCI banned cyclists who have undergone male puberty from competing in women’s races.

The rapid swing among global sports leaders has come despite the fact that relatively few transgender athletes have competed in international sports. To date, one openly transgender female athlete has competed in a women’s category at the Olympics: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, at the Tokyo Games in the summer of 2021.

But that hasn’t stopped the issue from attracting outsize attention. On his road to the White House, Trump seized on the controversy at the 2024 Paris Olympics over the eligibility of a female Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, who is not transgender .

The flare-up over Khelif was fueled by the sport’s world governing body, the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association . In 2023, the IOC stripped the IBA of its Olympic authority over governance and corruption concerns. Still, during the Paris Olympics the IBA said it had disqualified Khelif and another woman from the 2023 world championships because they had “competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Khelif is recognized as female on her passport, and has only ever competed in women’s events. She also hasn’t identified herself as having DSD. “I am a woman like any other woman,” she said after the Olympic title. “I was born a woman.”

Write to Rachel Bachman at Rachel.Bachman@wsj.com and Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com