March 25, 2025 - 7:00pm
It sounds so simple that you wonder if there’s something you’ve misunderstood. In order to “doggedly protect the female category”, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe has announced that his organisation will become the first to introduce cheek swabs or dry blood tests to verify an athlete’s biological sex. These are non-invasive tests that do not discriminate on the basis of appearance or identity, merely on the basis of sex. Why did no one think of this before?
The answer, of course, is that sporting institutions have been far too busy tying themselves in knots over sex and gender. Desperate to showcase their inclusive credentials, many have spent the past decade seeking to compromise on an issue where there is no wiggle room. The female sporting category exists for female people. It is neither kind nor nuanced to suggest that women and girls sacrifice their own safety, privacy and prizes for males who already have a category of their own.
Everyone knows this, or at least they used to. But misunderstandings about differences of sexual development, plus the trans activists’ insistence that trans women must be treated as women at all times, have created the false impression that things are far more complicated than they really are.
In recent years, simply stating the truth has come to be viewed as unsophisticated, if not bigoted. Even if few would dare to claim bodies do not matter at all, the “balanced” response to male demands to compete in female categories has been to call for more research. Some have also suggested that we are dealing with troublesome cases of “competing rights”.
This false impression of complexity has been made worse by the “nuanced” — that is, incoherent — positions of various sporting bodies. One assumption, embraced by the England and Wales Cricket Board, is that fairness matters at an elite level, whereas inclusion, understood in strictly male-centric terms, is more important further down the ranks. Parkrun justifies allowing males to run while registered as female on the basis that “it is a running event and not a race, has no prizes and hardly any competitive apparatus at all”.
In organisations such as the IOC, years of institutional dithering over whether testosterone levels matter, and if so, how much, have made it appear as though the reason for a female category were highly mysterious, as opposed to glaringly obvious. An equivalent situation for male people might be if fertility specialists responded to men’s inability to get pregnant by scratching their heads over whether the penis was really that different from the vagina. It has been gaslighting in the extreme to witness so many supposed experts feign ignorance as to whether female bodies are really all that different to male ones.
Thus, while IOC President-Elect Kirsty Coventry’s promise to “protect the female category and female athletes” is somewhat reassuring, her pledge to “create a task force that will look at the transgender issue” is less so. What is there to “look at”? The IOC’s continued denialism and obfuscation regarding last summer’s boxing controversy (where the issue was not transgender athletes, but those with suspected Disorders of Sex Development) indicates nothing if not an ability to ignore the differences that matter most.
We can hope, nonetheless, that the example set by World Athletics will now put other institutions on the spot. A simple, straightforward cheek swab demolishes assertions that maintaining a female-only sporting category involves “traumatic and age-inappropriate medical exams” or that it is “really” about imposing gender norms. A cheek swab can’t tell how feminine you are; it merely identifies whether or not you are female, and by doing so, it allows female athletes to compete on the same terms male athletes do.
It never had to be harder than this. Other organisations have no excuse not to follow suit.
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SubscribeI’m not at all hopeful that the IOC won’t just continue last year’s insanity of using an F on a passport as proof of eligibility into the female category.
When a simple cheek swab was available all along.
Does the human species deserve to survive?
Does the human species deserve to survive?
.
Not all of them
No and it won’t
I’m not hopeful about the IOC either.
It’s not that cheek swab is a new way of testing. It’s simply an easier way of getting body cells to test the DNA of than drawing blood. A woman need only do the genetic testing once during her career, and the test results will take several days to carry out. So it’s not the simple test that is new, it’s the requirement for genetic testing.
I think the change has come because people have realized that only a few legitimate people lie on the boundary and began to feel comfortable with excluding them. Those are people with XY chromosomes and some level of androgen insensitivity. They are an edge case that have finally been booted by track and field. Other sports will probably follow.
My congratulations! You invent your bike!
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Karyotype testing began to be used in women’s sports about 90 years ago.
Hardly. The number of chromosomes wasn’t even settled till 1956, and chromosome testing wasn’t used for sex determination in sport until 1966, when the International Amateur Athletic Federation began requiring it. That was less than 60 years ago.
True! So simple!
I’m sure they can come up with many excuses not to follow suit.
Allergy to cotton, it’s too ticklish. Too invasive. It might impinge on my right to be classified in law as a woman. Etc, etc.
Why don’t trans men compete in male sports? Maybe it has something to do with body strength, etc. Say no more!
This is unacceptable. They must be made to participate.
Unfortunately it’s not so simple as many Leftists aggressively attempted to prevent it from being so, or, at least seeming so. Of course females are females while gender expression is in the eye of the beholder but it is really about hard core activists needs for attention, validation, and control… Perhaps now the tide has turned to sanity and balance in which trans people are left alone to express themselves and female athletes are left alone to compete …
A large part of the problem is that the ‘suits’ run these massive organisations for no other reason than to receive massive salaries and freebies all around the world. The likes of the IOC and FIFA have never had the interests of the sportspeople as their first priority. The fact that Seb Coe was not voted in as the next IOC President was a travesty and means that the ‘gravy train’ will just keep rolling along.
Great straight talking article Victoria. Unfortunately I feel like this common sense approach isn’t scalable to lower level competition or sports. A man showing up as a woman for local lower division rugby will likely not have to face a cheek swab as the infrastructure to test at scale wouldn’t be present, so I feel there needs to be a second ‘yo that’s a dude’ test we can pull out that is as inarguable and, for me, that should be a birth certificate , and nobody should have the right to change their birth certificate.
Something else could be pulled out for verification…
Would sporting institutions, in their desire to be ‘inclusive’, let an able-bodied athlete participate in an event for disabled athletes on the basis of that athlete’s self-identifying as disabled?
Don’t put ideas into their heads.
Insanity reverses itself.
Whatever one thinks of Trump, or how one may despise him for various other reasons, his one unpopular-yet-seminal act of defending girls and women by declaring that men will not compete in US women’s sports was an historically significant moment for the world.
How many times have you heard the phrase, ‘Politicians are all the same’; well this one isn’t. He is a pragmatist and his appeal is that he sees what is massively unpopular with the general populous and puts it right. The voters have had enough of having loony ideas imposed on them by institutions that have been corrupted by activists. ‘Drain the swamp’ is a very apt term when you consider the real-life consequences of the actions of politicians who have stood by while children have been sterilised and mutilated, and women have been beaten up by men in the boxing ring; all in the name of ‘gender ideology’. It really shows how corrupted our organisations, including the sporting bodies, have become.
It strikes me that entering the chromosome 23 karyotype on the birth certificate would a) settle a lot of arguments and b) alert the parents to future problems if the baby is among the 0.018% with an abnormal karyotype, like Kleinfelter’s syndrome (XXY). This should be unalterable unless the child can show an error in testing.
If Parkrun claims that it is ‘not a race, has no prizes and hardly any competitive apparatus at all’, then why even have male and female categories? Why don’t they just have a single, open category? Because, strangely and quite counter-intuitively, that would be ‘non-inclusive’. This is the warped logic of gender ideology.
I saw a discussion on TV where it was asserted that this test (swab on internal cheek) was “humiliating and invasive”. I suggest they go through customs where they are subjected to a full body/ internal search by a member of the opposite sex to learn the meaning of their description.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, that irony will be lost on the zealots who are brain dead and simply spout their mantras.
I suppose they could add a trans category, why not?