The new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Thursday that there is “overwhelming support” among members to protect the female category, in what appears to be a shocking turnaround from the organization’s previous unabashed embrace of gender ideology.
Kirsty Coventry addressed the topic of transgender-identifying athletes in women’s sports at her first official news conference since becoming president of the IOC, Fox News reported.
“We understand that there’ll be differences depending on the sport… but it was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost to ensure fairness,” Coventry said.
“But we need to do that with a scientific approach and the inclusion of the international federations who have already done a lot of work in this area.”
Coventry said there is “unanimous support” for agreeing to amend the organization’s transgender athletes policy; she said the IOC may follow in the footsteps of the World Athletics policy, which restricts transgender-identifying males from competing in women’s sports if they have gone through puberty.
“It was very clear from the membership the discussion around this has to be done with medical and scientific research at the core, so we are looking at the facts and the nuances and the inclusion of the international federations that have done so much of this work… having a seat at the table and sharing with us because every sport is different,” she said.
“But it was pretty much unanimously felt that the IOC should take a leading role in bringing everyone together to try and find a broad consensus,” she added.
Coventry said any new policy most likely would not include changing the results of past competitions that allowed transgender-identifying males. In the 2024 Paris Olympics, two boxers notably won gold in women’s competitions, even though they failed gender-eligibility tests for international competitions.
“We’re not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We’re going to be looking forward. From the members [it] was, ‘What are we learning from the past, and how are we going to leverage that and move that forward to the future?’” Coventry said.
The announcement comes after the United Nations last year released a study finding that female athletes have lost out on nearly 900 medals because they have been beaten by transgender-identifying male athletes, according to the report.
The study, called “Violence against women and girls in sports,” found that more than 600 female athletes did not medal in more than 400 competitions in 29 different sports because they were beaten by transgender-identifying males.
“The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males,” the report said.
