Olympics: IOC accused of 'buck passing' after new transgender guidelines leave each sport to decide eligibility rules

New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard made history by becoming the first individual transgender athlete to compete at the Olympics earlier this year. Photo / Photosport

The International Olympic Committee have been accused of "buck passing" after new guidelines removed testosterone limits for transgender or intersex athletes and left each sport to decide its own eligibility rules.

Most sports currently follow guidelines which were drawn up by the IOC in 2015, which allowed trans women to compete in female sport if their testosterone levels are below 10 nmol/L per litre, but that advice has now been scrapped.

In what some campaigners have called a "victory", the IOC are now guiding against testing and emphasised the potentially "serious adverse" health impacts of requiring women to modify their hormone levels.

The IOC have instead advised sports to individually consider "disproportionate advantage, which needs therefore to be mitigated" and suggested that there could be different rules even within different disciplines of the same sport. They have, however, set no timeline on when sports should implement new policies.

The lawyer Katherine Deves, who formed the Save Women's Sports Australasia group, immediately accused the IOC of "muddled logic" and said that it had "failed to take a strong position to protect women".

Sharron Davies, an Olympic swimming medalist at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, said that the IOC had made a "cowardly" move by passing decision-making to individual sports but expressed hope that the use of "peer reviewed science" would create fairness and safety.

Joanna Harper, a visiting fellow for transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University, stressed the importance of the IOC advocating for the "inclusion of trans and intersex athletes" but said that parts of the new framework were problematic. "Transgender women are on average, taller, bigger and stronger than cis women and these are advantges in many sports," she said. "It is also unreasonable to ask the sports federations to have robust and peer reviewed research before placing restrictions on trans athletes in elite sport. Such research will take years if not decades."

Richard Budgett, the medical and scientific director at the IOC, said that it was impossible to maintain a one-size-fits-all approach. "The framework moves us on from just considering testosterone - what we are interested in is outcome," he said.

What the new framework might mean for the double Olympic 800m women's champion Caster Semenya is currently unclear. Semenya, who is cisgender but would need testosterone supresssants to compete under current rules, has taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights. While the IOC do now guide against testosterone limits, World Athletics can continue to set their own rules.

The IOC's new guidance follows a landmark report by the Sports Councils Equality Group in the United Kingdom, which suggested adding new "open" or "universal" categories in some sports to balance competing priorities of inclusion, fair competition and safety. The report concluded that trans women do have physical advantages, even allowing for the testosterone limits, but urged national governing bodies to find "innovative and creative ways to ensure nobody is left out" such as new formats and non-contact versions of team sports.