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World Athletics’ Sex Testing Policy Revives a Harmful, Discredited Practice
World Athletics calls it “protecting” women’s sports. History calls it discrimination.
Apr 09, 2025
On March 25, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe announced that the track and field governing body would introduce chromosomal testing of women athletes to “doggedly protect the female category.” Concern around “protecting” women athletes and the women’s category has resurged in recent years as the issue of transgender participation in sport has become politically expedient in the United States culture war, culminating in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January banning athletes from participation on teams that don’t align with the sex assigned to them at birth.
Sex and gender verification has been utilized by sport organizations for over a century. Previous methods included “nude parade” physical examinations requiring genital inspection, chromosomal testing, and testosterone level testing. However, World Athletics (previously known as the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF) stopped mandatory sex testing in 1991, due to scientific inaccuracy, inability to prove unfair advantages, and ethical concerns. Women athletes could continue to be tested if their gender presentation was deemed “suspicious.” Notably, Indian track star Pratima Gaonkar committed suicide in 2001 after failing a sex test. In the 2010s, South African distance runner Caster Semenya and Indian hurdler Dutee Chand endured intense public scrutiny over their sex and gender after they were assumed to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. This is one of many conditions that are broadly classified as differences of sexual development (DSDs), and can occur for many reasons but are usually linked to sex chromosomes or anomalies in how the body produces or responds to hormones such as testosterone.
Unlike the World Athletics’s 2023 policy that banned trans athletes from competing in the women’s category, this policy targets women who were assigned “female” at birth, identify as women, and have always lived as women. They simply don’t have the XX chromosomes that World Athletics now deems necessary.
Chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical.
The new policy requires mandatory chromosomal testing, including a check swab and dry-blood test. While World Athletics claims to have consulted 70 sporting and advocacy groups, it is unclear who was included. Their cited scientific bibliography is largely authored by individuals affiliated with World Athletics, ignoring significant research questioning the ethics and efficacy of female eligibility policies in sport. Notably absent are two pieces by Roger Pielke and colleagues: one exposing flaws in World Athletics’ original 2011 policy and another reaffirming those issues after the organization admitted its female eligibility research was flawed.
The well-established problem with World Athletics’ chromosomal testing is that it actually has no linkage to performance. Put simply, “failing” a chromosomal, DNA, or sex test tells us nothing about whether an athlete will destroy a world record or even win a race. “Failed” tests, more often than not, indicate a chromosomal anomaly—something that neither enhances an individual’s athletic ability nor impedes their quality of life (if this were the case, it would probably be diagnosed way before an elite sport competition!). The inability of chromosomal testing to determine an “unfair” performance advantage was resoundingly proven by geneticists, bioethicists, medical researchers, physicians, and endocrinologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was what led to the abolition of mandatory sex testing.
Systematically, policies like these disproportionately target women from the Global South and reinforce racial and gender biases. A 2020 Human Rights Watch report detailed discrimination, surveillance, and coerced medical intervention that elite athletes from the Global South experienced when seeking to comply with sex testing practices. The women interviewed detailed how medical practitioners did not fully explain the tests and procedures conducted, and the humiliation and discrimination they experienced in their communities when their medical records were disclosed without informed consent. This may be why earlier, in 2019, the World Medical Association released a notice imploring physicians to “take no part in implementing new eligibility regulations for classifying female athletes.”
These concerns highlight the urgency for educating sport governing bodies, and the general public, about the broader implications for the autonomy and safety of girls and women that can result from “protective” policies in sport. While the new World Athletics policy does not mandate surgical alteration, history shows the risks of such regulations. In 2013, four elite women athletes underwent gonadectomies and partial clitoridectomies—an unnecessary and harmful procedure classified as a form of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)--to comply with eligibility rules. These policies can serve to legitimize and reinforce cultural practices with serious health risks for girls and women.
Women athletes must already carefully negotiate their athleticism with market-driven expectations of femininity to secure sponsorship deals, which are especially critical for women athletes because of the sport industry’s pervasive pay inequity. Mainstream beauty norms—favoring whiteness, thinness, and hairlessness—inform which bodies will be deemed “suspicious” under World Athletics’ new policy. Black and brown athletes, particularly those with more muscular builds and deeper voices, are more likely to be targeted. Research shows that elite women athletes already feel they are forced to choose between appearing “strong” or “feminine”; the reintroduction of sex testing may add further pressure for women athletes to conform with rigid gender norms to avoid harassment and surveillance. Athletes like Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Semenya endured an onslaught of online attacks following public scrutiny of their gender. Women in sports generally already face disproportionate abuse, with an NCAA study finding that women basketball players receive three times more abusive messages than their male counterparts.
World Athletics’ claims that chromosomal testing will protect women athletes and the women’s category. However, chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical. Rather than “protecting” the women’s category, these regulations reinforce harmful gender norms, disproportionately target women from marginalized backgrounds, and risk severe personal and professional consequences for women athletes.
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The Super Bowl May Stand as the US' Most Visible Symbol of Plutocratic Excess
As corporate executives get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses, average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites.
Feb 09, 2025
About three score years ago, on a January Sunday afternoon in 1967, some of us gathered in college dorm basement lounges to watch pro football’s historic first “Super Bowl.” A good bit has changed since then—in football and America.
The changes in pro football could hardly be more striking. Today’s players dwarf the size and strength of players back then. National Football League linemen here in the 2020s, for instance, weigh on average well over 300 pounds and stand almost six-and-a-half feet tall. Pro football players of that size simply “didn’t exist” before 1980.
Contemporary players earn much more as well. The first NFL collective bargaining agreement, signed a year after that initial Super Bowl in 1967, set a $10,000 minimum annual salary for veteran players, the equivalent of some $90,000 today. In 2024, NFL players averaged $3.2 million, with a median base pay of $860,000.
Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.”
But pro football players these days pay a steep price for their paychecks. The average player career now lasts only a little over three years. But the much longer careers of players in positions that don’t face much physical contact distort that average. Running backs regularly last no more than two years.
Pro football player lives, more significantly, often run markedly shorter than the lives of their generational peers. Those shorter lifespans reflect both the violence of the collisions between today’s much bigger and stronger players and the much longer length of today’s NFL season. Players participating in that first 1967 Super Bowl only competed in 16 games. Players on the 2025 Super Bowl’s Philadelphia Eagles squad will have competed in 21 games once this season’s competition ends.
The contrast between the dawn of the Super Bowl era and today for NFL team owners rates as even starker.
We need a little history here for context. A century ago, in the NFL’s earliest days, ownership of NFL franchises came at a price that even the modestly affluent could easily afford. Tim Mara, a horse-racing bookkeeper, bought the New York Giants in 1925 for $500, the equivalent of less than $9,000 today. In 1933, Art Rooney bought a Pittsburgh NFL franchise for $2,500, about $60,000 today.
By the 1960s, those early owners were sitting pretty, and much richer Americans, like the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, wanted in on the pro football action. These rich ended up establishing their own pro circuit, the American Football League, and then, in 1966, cut a deal with NFL owners to merge their two leagues. The first fruit of that merger would be the inaugural “Super Bowl” in 1967.
Back in those mid-20th-century years, the United States overall rated as a much equal place than the nation had been during the NFL’s early years in the 1920s. One key reason: The tax rate on income in the top federal tax bracket had jumped from 25% in 1925 to 91%.
Only a relatively few of America’s deep pockets—like the oilmen H.L. Hunt and Bud Adams, another of the AFL’s original franchise owners—could manage to end run those stiff top rates, thanks to generous tax loopholes like the infamous oil-depletion allowance.
But by the early 1980s, with the Reagan Revolution’s onset, the distribution of America’s income and wealth was sliding rapidly back to the top-heavy levels of the 1920s. Tax rates on top-bracket income would bottom out at a mere 28% by Reagan’s last full White House year in 1988, and the United States would soon be experiencing an explosive growth in billionaire fortunes.
The number of U.S. billionaires—only 13 in the first Forbes 400 count in 1982—jumped to 66 in 1990 and 298 in 2000 and then all the way up to 404 in 2010 and 614 in 2020.
All these billionaires desperately needed new high-profile playthings. Many found them in NFL franchises. In quick order, teams that had been selling in the tens of millions began going for hundreds of millions and then billions. In 2018, the hedge funder David Tepper spent $2.2 of those billions buying the Carolina Panthers. Four years later, Robson Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, led an ownership group that shelled out $4.65 billion to take possession of the Denver Broncos.
Do these sorts of outlays amount to just an innocent deep-pocket hobby? Not given the impact on average taxpayers.
Billions of average taxpayer dollars, a CNN analysis has shown, are “subsidizing the wildly profitable National Football League.” Between 1997 and 2015, NFL owners opened up 20 new stadiums “with the help of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds.” Owners have saved billions more by financing stadium construction with tax-free municipal bonds, a tax-runaround “originally created by Congress to help fund roads and schools.”
U.S. corporate executives, meanwhile, get to write off the billions they shell out for NFL game luxury suites as legitimate business entertainment expenses.
Average taxpayers don’t get to sit in those suites. They essentially don’t get to sit anywhere in NFL stadiums. In the 2024 season, the average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game ran $808.
At Super Bowl time, ticket costs soar considerably higher. The face-value price on a single Super Bowl ticket for this year’s game ranges from $950 to $7,500. But no face-value tickets ever go on sale to the general public. The only way for anyone in that public to see the Super Bowl in person? Buy a seat on the secondary market. For Super Bowl LIX, secondary-market tickets are averaging $8,000 each.
Our Super Bowl may now stand, in effect, as our nation’s most visible symbol of plutocratic excess, or, as the sportswriter Sally Jenkins once put it, a “divorced-from-reality debauch.” We still don’t know, Jenkins added, where the “pain threshold of the average NFL fan” sits.
“Thirty-two owners digging relentlessly in our pockets,” she observed some years back, “haven’t found the bottom yet.”
Those billionaire owners still haven’t—and their upside remains enormous. Just between 2020 and 2023 alone, MarketWatchnoted last month, the NFL’s cumulative franchise values rose 1,108%.
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NCAA 'Cravenly Caves' to Trump, Banning Trans Women From Female Sports
"Great fucking job, NCAA. You're now a part of Donald Trump's anti-trans hate machine seeking to push trans people out of public life and make their lives as difficult as possible," said one critic.
Feb 06, 2025
The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Thursday that its board of governors voted to update the NCAA's participation policy for transgender student-athletes in response to Republican U.S. President Donald Trump signing an executive order intended to ban trans girls and women from competing on female sports teams
The NCAA is a nonprofit that regulates sports for 1,100 colleges and universities that collectively enroll more than 530,000 student-athletes. Its new policy says that "regardless of sex assigned at birth or gender identity, a student-athlete may participate (practice and compete) with a men's team, assuming they meet all other NCAA eligibility requirements."
However, the policy says, student-athletes who were assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth and have begun hormone therapy such as testosterone can continue to practice with women's teams but cannot compete with them.
According to The Hill, "Previously, the NCAA policy said transgender participation in each sport depended on guidelines set by the sport’s national or international governing body." NCAA president Charlie Baker, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts, recently told Congress that fewer than 10 trans athletes competed across the organization's three divisions.
Baker claimed in a Thursday statement that "President Trump's order provides a clear, national standard," and the organization's new policy "follows through on the NCAA's constitutional commitment to deliver intercollegiate athletics competition and to protect, support, and enhance the mental and physical health of student-athletes."
While Trump celebrated the policy update on social media Thursday, advocates for LGBTQ+ rights have forcefully criticized both the NCAA and the Republican president.
Responding to the NCAA's decision on the social media site Bluesky, Law Dork's Chris Geidner decried the "unbelievable depths of spinelessness with such cruel, unnecessary ramifications."
"Great fucking job, NCAA. You're now a part of Donald Trump's anti-trans hate machine seeking to push trans people out of public life and make their lives as difficult as possible," he added. "Charlie Baker, this is on you."
Jack Turban said on Bluesky that he was resigning from the NCAA Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports. The doctor told The Hill that he and other panel members were not notified of the board's vote before the public statement.
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— Jack Turban MD ( @turban.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 4:31 PM
"Trump and Republicans are picking out a tiny portion of the population, vilifying them, and stoking fear. That's dangerous and has real consequences,"
said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on social media Thursday afternoon. "I want to be clear: Americans do have concerns about fairness in sports, and it's important that we have those conversations and educate people about the facts. But actions like Trump's are not the answer."
"We should be focusing on the real obstacles that female athletes face, like a lack of financial resources and vulnerability to abuse. Instead, Republicans are attacking a group that represents less than a fraction of 1% of student-athletes," said Jayapal, who has a
trans daughter. "This is a manufactured crisis—one that serves to distract you from the fact that Trump and Republicans ran on raising wages and lowering costs, but have no real solutions to help you build a better life."
"They are trying to get you to look the other way. Don't," she added. "And to the trans community—I know this is all incredibly difficult. I'm so sorry that you have to go through this, but please know that I see you, I stand with you, and I will NEVER stop fighting for you. That's a promise."
The NCAA cravenly caves.
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— Nathan Kalman-Lamb ( @nkalamb.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 7:42 PM
The president's order is already having an impact beyond the NCAA policy change. As The Washington Postreported Thursday:
Trump's executive order directs the Department of Education to inform schools they will be violating Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, if they allow transgender athletes to compete in girls' or women's sports. Under the law, schools that discriminate based on sex are not eligible for federal funding.
In response, the Department of Education earlier Thursday announced investigations into the University of Pennsylvania, San José State University, and a Massachusetts high school athletic association over reported Title IX violations. Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association are targeted for allowing transgender students to play on a women's swimming team and girls' high school basketball team, respectively. Several opponents of the San José State women's volleyball team forfeited games this fall because the Spartans purportedly had a transgender athlete on its roster.
The newspaper noted that the NCAA's decision came two days after former teammates of swimmer Lia Thomas filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court claiming Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Ivy League, and the NCAA violated Title IX by allowing Thomas to compete in 2022 championships.
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