Slate is angry that men won’t be able to invade women’s Olympic events.
The International Olympic Committee has instituted mandatory sex testing for every single athlete who aims to compete in women’s sports, the organization announced last week. This regressive policy, which will come into play at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles and formally resumes the Olympics’ long and shameful tradition of sex testing women, is effectively a ban on transgender women. That’s ghoulish.
Ghoulish?? Someone needs a dictionary.
But more to the point – it’s not regressive to keep men out of women’s sports. If there were an Olympics for children 10 and under, it wouldn’t be regressive to keep adults out of that Olympics.
Since 2004, when trans athletes first became eligible for the Olympics, there has been just one trans woman who has competed: New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard, in the 2021 Tokyo Games.
Just one openly trans “woman” that is. Imane Khelif for instance denies being a man.
Athletes believed to be intersex or trans are often subjected to intense, hateful scrutiny by sports governing bodies and the general public. The Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won Olympic gold in 2024, was forced to endure a massive global hate campaign, stoked in part by President Donald Trump, who wrongly described her as both transgender and “male.”
How do we know he’s not male? Why, he says so.
The IOC, for its part, would like everyone to know that its policy “does not apply to any grassroots or recreational sports programmes.” That’s a nice thing to say, but it’s not true in any sense but the most literal. While this particular sex-testing policy applies only to women in Olympic settings, it has been well documented that national, state, and local policymakers—even down to youth recreational leagues—take their cues from the IOC and other groups that govern top-tier athletes.
What should they take their cues from? The trans communinny?