After a historic showing of trans athletes at the 2021 Olympics, there is a very different mood going into this year’s Summer Games in Paris. At the top of elite sports are the Olympics, which answer to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Each Olympic sport has its own governing body, or International Federation (IF), which often takes guidance from the IOC. Beneath each IF are national governing bodies, or NGBs.
In 2021, the IOC unveiled new guidelines for transgender inclusion. This looked like a positive move: The framework encouraged sports to move away from testosterone-based policies because there was no science to support them. In practice, it has created a nightmare for elite trans athletes, especially trans women. That’s because it punted responsibility for determining eligibility for trans athletes to each sport governing body, rather than asking them to align with one universal IOC policy.
“It’s [now] a patchwork of policies at the national and international levels, which makes it incredibly challenging for trans and nonbinary athletes to navigate the sporting systems and determine where they’re permitted to play,” explains Mosier. What’s more, national governing bodies will sometimes move the goalpost by changing the rules seemingly without warning.
“In the running to go to Tokyo, we had [weightlifter] Laurel Hubbard and [BMX rider] Chelsea Wolfe — actual people who we could look to say, ‘Okay, we see progress for trans athletes,’” adds Mosier. “But with that came so much pushback, and so much manufactured controversy, and so much disruption of these athletes’ lives.
Since the IOC’s new policy was announced, several IFs or NGBs have barred trans women from participating. They include cycling, swimming, track and field, climbing, chess, and angling. World Athletics, which governs track and field at the international level, put its ban in place in March 2023. This has created challenges for American hurdler CeCé Telfer, who missed the Olympic Trials in 2021 due to administrative challenges and hopes to make a run for the Paris Games this summer. Swimmer Lia Thomas just filed a legal challenge to World Aquatics’ ban in swimming.
Last July, UCI, the international federation that governs cycling, announced that any transgender women who transitioned “after (male) puberty” were banned from UCI-sanctioned events. This meant that former Olympian and Team USA BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe could no longer compete, nor could American cyclist Austin Killips, who just two months earlier had become the first openly transgender woman to win an official UCI cycling event. “My world crumbled,” Wolfe told Bicycling magazine shortly after the ban was instituted.
