How To Liberate A Captured Organization: Lessons from the IOC's masterclass
A previous post in which I chatted with held Myron Genel’s feet to the flames ended on a bit of a low note, what with the IOC honoring the insane demands of two unwell men that led, eventually, to the violation/erasure of women’s sports as a legitimate category—all sports, in all countries, at all levels, from elite to grassroots. Pretty much of a bummer.
Here, we walk it off. This time we’re going to look at the major management miracle that was announced by the IOC on March 26, 2026 —an about face, a brisk, no-nonsense, refreshing return to sanity. When I say miracle, this was nothing less than turning the behemoth IOC barge, with its bow already hanging over the falls and the current pushing hard, 180 degrees in one year’s time. More than simply deciding to follow science, the new IOC leadership had to first wrest control of the steering wheel.
IOC president Kirsty Coventry, Medical and Science Director Dr. Jane Thornton, and members of a working group are the architects of this master class in institutional deprogramming. Since this policy affects only Olympic-level sports per se, the vast number of organizations who regulate eligibility for the other 99% of female athletes must go through a similar process of policymaking, facing similar institutional challenges. It might be instructive to look at how Coventry, et al were able to break the grip of ideology at the IOC, ideological capture that had been entrenched for 23 years.
Fiona McAnena, Director of Campaigns at Sex Matters, and Jon Pike, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and ethics of sport author, provided some insights.
How To Liberate a Captured Organization
Step One: Get New Leadership
Huh. Well, okay. A couple possibilities present themselves: a bloody coup, or waiting several decades until influential ideologues retire. The daunting, somewhat depressing reality is that ideologues, people in positions of power who have staked their career on sex denialism are unlikely to change their stance by being presented with compelling facts and rational arguments. Indeed, sex denialism as a life view depends entirely on ignoring facts.
Three very powerful ideologues drove the IOC’s ever more disastrous male inclusion policy from 2012 to 2025: Thomas Bach, who was first elected IOC president in 2013; Dr. Richard Budgett, Medical and Science Director from 2012 to 2024; and Madeleine Pape, an academic sociologist who co-authored that monument to incoherence, the 2021 Framework for Fairness, Inclusion, and Non-Discrimination. Certainly there were others in that giant organization that supported male inclusion in the female category to varying degrees, as well as those who had questions or outright opposed it, but as anyone who has worked in institutions knows, an idea this comprehensively wrong can only exist through ruthless means: Go along with it completely or you’re out. In this way, even a very few fervent believers in key positions can poison an entire organization.
Kirsty Coventry joined the IOC in 2013, the same year Thomas Bach was elected president. She was there for all the public disasters their male inclusion policy wrought—the completely male podium in the women’s 800-meter race in 2016, “Laurel” Hubbard in 2021, and the coup de gras, male boxer Imane Khelif getting a gold medal for punching women—as well as the ever more absurd eligibility policies of 2015—males can keep their gonads but have to reduce their testosterone to the lower end of the healthy male range to compete in women’s sports, and 2021—males don’t have to do anything to compete in women’s sports because they have “no presumption of advantage.” Coventry’s feelings about the organization’s descent into crazyville are not known. That she still had her job in 2025 is evidence she had the political acumen to, as Jon Pike said, “keep her mouth shut and sit on her hands until she could affect a change. Kirsty is very loyal to the Olympic movement, very much a team player. Staying with your pals and choosing your moment to speak out—these are political judgments.”
There was certainly no coup. Bach was not forced out; he enjoyed the full allowable extent of his presidency—an eight-year-term followed by another four-year term. Budgett retired in 2024, having served as Medical and Science Director for 12 years. He also had served his full term and retired of his own volition. Madeleine Pape, having done all the damage she could in five years or so, also left of her own free will, having seen the writing on the wall when Coventry was elected on a protect-the-women’s-category platform.
“Getting rid of Bach was crucial. He was a block to change, and there was no convincing Madeleine Pape [of returning to female-only category]. She is an archetypical postmodern science denier. Sex is a social construct, the whole thing. She had some heft at the IOC because she had raced against and lost to Semenya in 2009, initially thought it was unfair, then had a career-ending injury, and educated herself about DSDs by reading Anne Fausto-Sterling.”
Here’s a brief but illustrative Madeleine Pape detour. Her extremely influential brand of genderism could be listed right up there with David Koresh and Jim Jones, but for reasons of space, I will restrict my assessment of her “philosophy” to this quote from the gushing linked profile article above:
“What was ultimately more important for me was to let go of the scientific dimension of this issue and to really think carefully about what the regulation of gender eligibility actually means in practice, for the women who are affected.”
The “women” who are affected were, of course, men. Remember that Pape’s towering achievement at the IOC was co-authoring (with the Director of Human Rights) the 2021 Framework featuring the novel notion that if any man was in the female category, it should be presumed he had no male advantage. Because he said so. This is what happens when a sports organization lets go of the scientific dimension of sport.
I digress.
Getting new leadership was a necessary step to returning to sanity for the IOC, BUT such a drastic and time-consuming step may not be necessary for other sports organizations. Jon Pike explained: “The IOC is not the same as other institutions. They are unique. They’re at the top of the tree, they’re accountable to no one. Other institutions might change because they see what the IOC have done and want to be in line with that, so they [other organizations] could make that change without sweeping out existing administrations.”
Pike pointed to the FAQs that the IOC subsequently published, including prepubertal sex differences, that make the IOC policy generalizable to recreational and grassroots sports. “This information will trickle down to International and National Federations and Olympic development programs. Youth programs will have to follow Olympic rules. Your local running club can still support unfair sport for women, but it will be recognized as unfair because the IOC has done that work, made the decision, and backed it up with robust science.”
There is a complementary action to Step One, above, that, in the case of the IOC, facilitated Getting New Leadership. I’ll call this…
Step 1a: Natural Consequences
A natural consequence of allowing men in women’s sports is that men will be in women’s sports. On TV. In the Olympics. With millions of people watching. It’s relatively easy to control the IOC committee members; much harder to control the views of the public. Millions of people saw three male runners with DSDs sweep the women’s 800-meter podium in 2016. Millions of people saw 43-year-old Gavin “Laurel” Hubbard compete in women’s weightlifting in 2021. Millions of people saw two boxers who had previously failed sex verification screens receive gold medals for punching women in 2024. In the NCAA, an organization that had used the IOC’s inclusion policy as a model, experienced the natural consequence of that policy when Will “Lia” Thomas was given a women’s National Championship in swimming in 2022. Attempts to shame, threaten, and silence female athletes (NCAA), and embarrassingly absurd press conferences (IOC) only added to the injustice that millions of people witnessed.
Fiona McAnena described the moment when the previous administration reached peak natural consequences: “In one memorable [press] conference, Thomas Bach, the IOC’s president, claimed that determining who was male or female was beyond the IOC, and that any scientist who could assist with this perplexing challenge would be welcome.”
“The IOC survived Semenya, but could not have survived Khelif,” Pike said. “Two things were particularly condemnatory of the IOC: the daily press conferences in Paris and the 2021 Framework document. Those were so powerful. They both said, ‘This organization isn’t professional. It’s floundering.’ It was apparent within the IOC that a change of leadership was necessary after Paris. The daily press conferences defending male boxers, saying they had to rely on ‘passport sex’—it was an obvious scandal, an embarrassment. Coventry was well positioned to clean up the mess.”
Again, it’s possible organizations lower on the totem pole may be able to use the IOC’s grim experiences to bypass both Getting New Leadership and suffering such bruising Natural Consequences.
Step Two: Information Belongs To The People, Public Debate is Key
The decision to include males in female sport has always been done secretively, with no transparency about who was consulted and what information was prioritized to arrive at those policies. The first time most people realized the IOC had breached a sex category was more than a decade after the policy had been made. Democratizing information can help liberate an institution from ideological capture, by shifting public opinion.
As Fiona McAnena pointed out that while legal victories for “trans” people in the 2010’s led the IOC to loosen requirements for men who wished to compete in women’s sports, by the time “Laurel” Hubbard revealed what inclusion really meant, public opinion had shifted to be much less supportive of the idea.
Much of the science, the actual legwork, underpinning protection of the women’s category was done very publicly by World Athletics, leading to their 2023 restoration of the women’s category. World Athletics (along with World Aquatics, which ring-fenced the women’s category in 2022) is one of the largest and most influential members of the IOC. “World Athletics played a key role [in the IOC’s decision],” Pike said. “Athletics has confronted male advantage, and particularly XY 5-ARD, for two decades. They made some false moves, but worked it through. All those experiences were reflected in Seb Coe’s [IOC presidential] candidacy. That World Athletics had already done the work, and their policy was favorably received by athletes and the public—that was extremely influential.”
“Around 2020, there was a real change,” Pike said. “Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg published their study in 2021. Ross Tucker, Cathy Devine, Miraslov Imbrisevic, Greg Brown, and others—our papers are open access. They’re out there and you can read them. And on social media. We won Twitter. Anyone could read our arguments, and they were clear and compelling, based on evidence, science, and rationality. People could read our arguments and compare them with what trans rights activists were saying. They could see that we had patiently plugged away, that it was about fair competition rather than hostility toward trans people as activists were imputing. It made a big difference.”
Ross Tucker related a similar experience with policymaking via side-by-side comparison of the arguments. When World Rugby reviewed their eligibility policy for the female category in 2020, each side, those for male inclusion and those opposed, were given time to present their arguments to the committee. By the morning coffee break on the first day, those who had been undecided remarked on the startling difference in quality of argument—those for a female-only category were evidence-based, rational, scientific while those for male inclusion relied entirely on emotion and stating repeatedly that they were right. The result? World Rugby was the first international sports body to break with Olympic “inclusion” policy and restricted women’s rugby to female-only in 2020.
Step Three: Be Right. If in question, stick with Reality
Being right is a powerful way—probably THE most powerful way—to liberate a captured organization. As Sall Grover, an Australian businesswoman who has been forced into women’s rights advocacy, said of her more-than-four-year legal battle for a women’s-only social media app, “I know we are right and I know that reality always wins - eventually. Reality is inescapable.”
Echoing that idea, Pike said, “In the end, the IOC was confronted with reality. Even as the truth will out, maintaining a lie is unsustainable. It takes too much effort to continually repeat slogans, silence female athletes voices and try to shut down compelling arguments that are out on social media for anyone to see. In the end, good work, good arguments will out. Because it’s not just another viewpoint—it’s right. Ethics are on our side.”