Athletes will probably be eligible to compete within the feminine class for world rating competitions such because the World Championships provided that they clear a one-time gene check in a bid to guard the integrity of girls’s sport, World Athletics stated on Wednesday.
The once-in-a-lifetime check for the SRY gene, which helps in figuring out organic intercourse, might be performed by way of a cheek swab or blood check.
The testing protocol will probably be overseen by member federations and the brand new rules come into impact on September 1, forward of the September 13-21 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo.
“It’s actually essential in a sport that’s completely attempting to draw extra ladies that they enter a sport believing there isn’t a organic glass ceiling,” World Athletics President Sebastian Coe stated in an announcement.
“The check to verify organic intercourse is an important step in making certain that is the case. We’re saying, at elite degree, so that you can compete within the feminine class, it’s important to be biologically feminine.
“It was at all times very clear to me and the World Athletics Council that gender can not trump biology. We significantly need to thank our member federations for his or her assist and dedication within the implementation of those new rules.”
Athletics has spent years debating eligibility standards to compete in ladies’s occasions, amid questions over organic benefits for transgender athletes and people with variations of intercourse improvement (DSD).
World Athletics bans transgender ladies who’ve gone via male puberty from competing in ladies’s occasions, whereas it requires feminine DSD athletes whose our bodies produce excessive testosterone ranges to decrease them so as to be eligible.
Earlier this 12 months, a working group discovered that these guidelines weren’t tight sufficient, with a pre-clearance check for the SRY gene being considered one of a number of suggestions the group made for revised guidelines.
The SRY gene reveals the presence of the Y chromosome, which is an indicator of organic intercourse.
The check was additionally authorised by World Boxing in Might after they launched obligatory intercourse testing for all boxers.
Earlier this month, the European Courtroom upheld a 2023 ruling that double 800-meter Olympic champion Caster Semenya’s attraction to a Swiss Federal Tribunal towards rules that barred her from competing had not been correctly heard.
Semenya was interesting towards World Athletics rules that feminine athletes with DSDs medically scale back their testosterone ranges.
—Reuters