Opinion: IOC improves approach to trans athletes, but repeats mistakes and avoids actions

Last month, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) released new eligibility guidelines for trans and intersex athletes. Much was celebrated in the LGBTQIA+ community, no wonder, after all some important steps have been taken since the document published in 2015.

To some extent, the new text is well-intentioned, aims to repair abusive treatment of the not-so-distant past and restore the right to privacy, recommends actions —although it does not say which ones — that prevent discrimination, harassment and abuse, and is concerned with safety and respect for the lives mentioned. There remains, however, the reproduction of certain historical discourses that harmed many athletic careers and formed an undervalued female category.

The concern expressed by Olympic managers in the 1930s to “protect” the female category under the arguments of balance and justice for cis women is still constant. Certainly, the first impositions and prohibitions were placed on cis women, in an Olympic sport that originated and was organized for cis men.

For more than 30 years, the female category has been subject to gender verification tests, sometimes highly invasive, sometimes subtle. During this period, intersex athletes experienced the most varied types of hostilities, such as expulsion, withdrawal of awards, public humiliation, etc.

But even with the announcement of the end of these tests in 1999, some bodies still bothered the international sports organizations. Thereafter, a series of regulations aimed at trans and intersex bodies began to be produced. What was implicit became a debatable and regulatory agenda, and so far the IOC has produced three documents on eligibility.

The first, known as the Stockholm Consensus, was released in 2003 and was addressed exclusively to trans athletes. To become eligible for competition, both trans women and men must: obtain legal recognition of their gender identity and undergo sex reassignment surgery and hormone therapy. These determinations were drawn up by seven specialists in the biological field — all men from countries like France, Sweden and the United States.

The first criticisms emerged: the document not only reduced trans people to a number of surgical interventions, but also disregarded some human rights topics by making the surgical procedure mandatory. At that moment there was a generalization, as if every trans body worked in the same grammar. Even acknowledging the failure of the new regulations, the president of the IOC at the time, Jacques Rogge, kept them unchanged until his succession.

In 2015, under the chairmanship of Thomas Bach, the IOC included the topic of intersexuality in the discussions and launched the document IOC Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism.

The range of specialists who advised on this production increased from 7 to 20. Once again, the most requested field of action was that of the biological sciences. The meeting was attended by trans physician Joanna Harper and Spanish athlete Maria José Martínez-Patiño, who challenged the mandatory nature of gender verification tests in the 1980s.

In this document, the IOC began to recognize the concept of gender identity, which was previously disregarded. Sex reassignment surgery was removed from the mandatory package and control was basically isolated in the blood levels of testosterone in trans women: the recommendation was 10 nmol/l, stable in the last 12 months.

Trans men were allowed to compete in the male category without restrictions. For intersex athletes with hyperandrogenia (high testosterone levels, in medical parlance), regulation based on hormone levels would be suspended until sports authorities proved testosterone’s effectiveness—contested by athlete Dutee Chand in a lawsuit against the International Athletics Federation (World Athletics) at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Finally, let’s go to the document published in the last few weeks. In comparison with the others, its institutionalization is noteworthy. We no longer have the names of contributors. It is only mentioned that the document was developed after consulting interested parties: athletes, federations and experts in human, legal and medical rights.

I think the most important thing would be to discuss the recurrence of some hierarchies and discriminations. At first, one must question —as in all previous publications— the domain of biological determinism and the absence of specialists dedicated to gender theories, which allow us to think about how bodies, in addition to being shaped by sociocultural rules, are morphologically diverse (therefore, they present unique performances).

Despite the IOC’s effort to avoid deliberate exclusions, which includes the development of a topic titled “no presumption of advantage”, the idea of ​​the existence of a disproportionate advantage remains in the document end-to-end.

With this, loopholes are opened so that trans and intersex athletes continue to have their bodies watched, accused and investigated. Disagreement with the application of new gender verification tests is explicit in the document, but the possibility of investigating performance and physical capacity appears. How this will happen is not specified.

I understand that the current publication is much more suggestive than imposing, but the IOC demonstrates a lack of position when distributing the task of organizing anti-discrimination and inclusive actions to the responsible federations for each modality —since some of them have made little or no movement in this direction . Finally, it is unclear whether there will be an inspection to monitor the creation and execution of new proposals.

Waleska Vigo Francisco is a PhD student at the School of Physical Education and Sport at USP