The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics will put increased restrictions on transgender athletes amid controversy over their advantages over women.
The new restrictions will require transgender to have assumed their new gender identity before the age of 12, thereby excluding other transgender athletes who may have hoped to compete in this year’s games. In 2021, for instance, Laurel Hubbard from New Zealand competed in the women’s games for weightlifting at the age of 43 – the oldest competitor that year.
Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand reacts during the women’s +90kg weightlifting final at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast on April 9, 2018, (WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images)
Per Inside the Games:
Previously, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had issued guidelines that allowed any transgender athlete to compete as a woman as long as their testosterone levels were below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months before their first competition. However, the current requirements have been changed to avoid disadvantaging cisgender women.
In March, the World Athletics Council, the governing body of athletics, banned those who passed puberty before transitioning from high-level female competition. This decision was followed in 2022 by FINA (now World Aquatics), the International Swimming Federation, which will only allow trans swimmers who transitioned before the age of 12 to compete.
The World Athletics Council expressed the “overriding need to protect the female category,” according to its president Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympic champion (1980 and 1984).
The Olympics have been under increased pressure in recent years to reform its rules regarding transgender athletes, with multiple women rallying to the cause of fairness due to the biological male advantage.
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