Dear President Thomas Bach and the IOC Executive Committee:
The International Consortium on Female Sport (ICFS) calls upon “you” - the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - to restore safety and fairness for female athletes.
Since 1999 when female sex verification was abandoned, you have undertaken a series of policy changes that have rendered Olympic competitions progressively more problematic for female athletes. At no point along this progression of decisions did you adequately consult with women, despite them being the only athletes negatively impacted by your decisions.
In 2003 there was the “Stockholm Consensus” opening the door to male transexuals who had undergone genital surgery, flippantly assuming that there would be so few castrated males that it would not pose a problem to include them in the women’s category. Your expert colleague of that time, Dr. Louis Gooren, said: “Depending on the levels of arbitrariness one wants to accept, it is justifiable that re-assigned males can compete with other women.” It was an illogical, unscientific, and completely arbitrary decision that you made, driven by politics (demands made by a miniscule sector of society) rather than by science or common sense.
But that wasn’t good enough for men who wanted to side-step the surgical requirement. So, focusing exclusively on men’s needs and desires, you came up with the 2015 “Transgender Consensus,” whereby a man merely had to self-identify as a woman, “live as a woman” for a year and lower his Testosterone (to a level still many times higher than that allowed for female athletes!) to compete in the female category. Predictably, this backfired on you in Tokyo 2020, when Laurel Hubbard came along and embarrassed you by displacing worthy female athletes in women’s weightlifting.
Hubbard created such a media distraction you decided that the way to resolve the situation would be to tweak the female eligibility policy further, undertaking a quick consultation with activist “stakeholders” in late summer of 2021; once again, without making any effort whatsoever with female stakeholders. Indeed, when one of our colleagues from Australia (lawyer Katherine Deves) sent you a letter in August 2021 requesting women’s participation in the consultation you shut that door without hesitation, explaining that “consultations are now closed.”
What emerged from that round of (non-inclusive) consultation was your latest policy position: the November 2021 “IOC framework on fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations.” Instead of making an effort to protect the female category from unsafe and unfair inclusion of male advantage, you simply left the issue of protection up to each individual sports federation and hid behind beautiful-sounding words: No athlete should be precluded from competing or excluded from the competition on the exclusive ground of an unverified, alleged or perceived unfair competitive advantage due to their sex variations, physical appearance and/or transgender status.
Hence, in the year 2021, you introduced a new principle into the pantheon of Olympic ideals: No presumption of competitive advantage. After more than a century of Olympic record-keeping proving otherwise, female Olympians would heretofore be compelled to accept the idea that male athletes have no competitive advantage over them and that it would be up to the female athletes to prove that they do. The onus would be on female participants to prove unfairness and lack of safety on a case-by-case basis.
It is heartbreaking for us to contemplate the level of bad faith gaslighting involved in this position. Not only did you (the IOC) absolve yourselves of any duty to set a clear boundary around the women’s sports category, in so doing, you established an ideological “framework” that would make it virtually impossible for any female athlete to either protest or prove that a violation of any sort had occurred in her competition on the basis of biological sex.
This contemptible sequence of steps that began in 1999 of relinquishing female athletes’ rights to safe and fair sport is clear a violation of the Olympic Charter. Item 6 of the Fundamental Principles of Olympism asserts that athletes are entitled to participate in Olympic sports without discrimination based on sex (listed amongst other characteristics). There can be no greater example of sex discrimination than allowing a male athlete to compete against women and seize from them a medal, a placing or even a chance to compete at all – which, for example, happened to 18-year-old Roviel Detenamo from the island of Nauru, who was excluded from the Tokyo 2020 Games because of the “inclusion” of male-born Hubbard.
The one thing worse than exclusion or loss of a medal is heightened exposure to physical harm that will result (inevitably!) when a male athlete is included in a female contact sport. And here is where we arrive at the Imane Khelif controversy in the sport of boxing at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. On November 4, 2024, the online magazine Reduxx exposed a leak of an Algerian medical report that mentions Imane Khelif has XY chromosomes and testicles.
This information means that Khelif was born male and developed enhanced male sport performance advantages by experiencing normal male puberty. As reported by Oliver Brown in the Telegraph newspaper (November 6, 2024) the medical test has been verified by International Boxing Association (IBA) officials, who go on to assert that a second Olympic boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, was similarly diagnosed and permitted to box in the women’s category in Paris 2024.
We know that the advantage in punching power of a man compared to a woman (162%) is the most extreme disparity of all sex-based biomotor inequalities to be found in sports. This difference in power between male and female opponents of the same weight category is actually far greater than the difference in punching power between heavyweight and lightweight boxers within the men’s category.
It is, therefore, not surprising that both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting took home women’s gold medals in their respective weight categories. What is most disappointing to us is that the IBA officials have offered clear evidence that both male boxers had been disqualified from women’s boxing a year earlier (2023) based on these tests and that you (IOC leaders) were aware of the medical justification for excluding them.
We struggle to understand how and why you would reinstate these male boxers into the female category in Paris 2024 knowing full well that extreme biological disparities existed. You would have known that including these two athletes would be putting female Olympic boxers at extreme risk of injury and, certainly, at risk of unfairly losing out on podium positions. It goes against everything that Olympism stands for.
We can only conclude that when the truth about these two male boxers was exposed during Paris 2024, you were caught at the confluence of two disparate ethical constraints: (1) adherence to the Olympic Charter or (2) adherence to a new set of “principles” that celebrate a certain kind of “inclusion” at the expense of safety and fairness. Clearly, you chose to go with the latter, once again at the expense of female athletes.
Allow us to recommend that after twenty-five years of systematically undermining the female category in Olympic sports and, subsequently, spending increasing amounts of energy dealing with negative publicity, it is time to make a course correction. You can salvage the integrity of the Games by prioritizing safety and fairness of female athletes regarding eligibility to compete in the women’s category at the Olympic Games. And you have the perfect mechanism to achieve it: the sex-verification cheek swab screen.
In her recent report on “Violence against women and girls in sports,” (August 27, 2024) UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem agrees, recommending that when it comes to female competitions officials should: Ensure that female categories in organized sport are exclusively accessible to persons whose biological sex is female. In cases where the sex of an athlete is unknown or uncertain, a dignified, swift, non-invasive and accurate sex screening method (such as a cheek swab) or, where necessary for exceptional reasons, genetic testing should be applied to confirm the athlete’s sex.
We urge you to reconvene a global consultation about this matter and we offer our support. We urge you to re-establish sex-based eligibility guidelines in a manner that brings IOC policy back into alignment with the original principles of the Olympic Charter.
Yours in Sport,
Dr. Linda Blade on behalf of the ICFS Founding Members
Email: hello@ICFSport.org
Open Letter to President Thomas Bach and the IOC Executive Committee
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