Where's the IOC's reckoning for one of the most egregious violations of athletes in sports history?

If you read between the lines, we may already have gotten it

It was certainly good news to hear IOC President Kirsty Coventry announce that that organization has defined the female category for females only at the elite level, and will use SRY screening to defend that category. I don’t want to take anything away from the hallelujah moment, for women, for the IOC, for sport, for science. And I’m not. This announcement should be celebrated as a triumph of truth and reality and rightness on every level. This is what I’ve been yipping about for more than a decade and now it’s here—yes, for the love of god, women’s sports for women! Amen!

But that announcement is incomplete. I am not the only one who feels neither satisfied, nor sane, in 2026, hurrahing for women’s sports for women. Really? The big news in 2026 is that men will no longer be allowed in women’s sports? Women’s sports for women—was that not the IOC’s stance for 80 years or so up until 2003? Are we supposed to not know that? Or be so overjoyed and grateful at being recognized as the other sex class of humans that we can pretend the last 23 years or so did not happen?

We have to talk about that nearly quarter century during which the IOC, the largest and most influential sports organization in the world, made a way for men to compete in women’s sports, a category specifically designed to exclude them. We need a reckoning, an admission of harm done. Without it, this crime/injustice/violation—none of those words are adequate for what is still happening in women’s sports—will happen again.

In her announcement, Kirsty Coventry said the decision to protect the female category is “foundationally based on science, and led by medical experts, with the best interests of athletes right at the heart.” Here’s the thing: There was no new science. All of the science on sex differences in sport existed 23 years ago. Men were not women in 2003. It was not fair for men to compete in women’s sports in 2003, and the IOC knew it. In fact, the only scientific evidence the IOC had in 2003 was that allowing “male transsexuals” into women’s sports would be “unfair, potentially dangerous in some sports, and would undermine women’s sports.” That’s a quote from Dr. Richard Budgett, who would become the medical director of the IOC, and personally preside over the very first inclusion of men in women’s competition. All of the science, medical expertise, and female athletes’ voices that Coventry said informed their decision to limit women’s sports to females were present in 2003 when they first obliterated the female category. They simply ignored this information and prioritized the desires of a handful of men who demanded to compete in the women’s category.

They sold this as “inclusion,” a human right for some men to be included in a category designed to exclude them. Think about that insanity. The utter disconnection from reality, the sudden veering into flat earth territory by the largest, most influential sports organization in the world. And for the next 23 years, they continued to make it easier for men to compete in women’s sports, and continued to lie to women and the public about the unfairness, and even the fact that “trans women” were really men, as the science, medical experts, female athletes’ voices, and reality itself continued to reveal the wrongness of their insane policy.

It’s important to understand the enormity of that betrayal of women and their own charter as a sports organization. First, this was not your local football club that made a rogue bad policy. It was the freaking IOC. They have a duty to be extra cautious, extra conservative, meticulous about due diligence with even the slightest policy change. The more radical the change, the more transparent the process and rigorous the evidence should be. They did none of that. The most prestigious sports organization in the world went absolutely bonkers, adopting an anti-reality.made-up ideology that claims men are women because they say so.

Second, allowing men in women’s sports is as radical as it gets. It was not a nuanced shift in policy; it was a reckless leap into the void, knowing only that it would harm women. The IOC wiped out one of two sex categories, the most fundamental, uncontroversial fairness measure in sports, something that had never even been posited, much less executed, with regard to any sports category. In the history of sport. “Inclusion” for weight categories? For age, or ability? Absurd, unthinkable. Redefining the eligibility standards for a category such that it includes those it was designed to exclude, introducing unfairness and safety risks—violation, injustice, crime—words fall short of describing the extremity of that action.

The IOC also knew that their policy would trickle down to every sport in every country at every level. They all did it because the IOC did it. The IOC led what is unquestionably the most devastating assault on women’s and girls sports ever launched, and the majority of female athletes are still suffering from their 2003 decision. And women are supposed to forget that?

Sadly, it was not a realization that they were visiting unspeakable harm on women and women’s sports that prompted the IOC’s eventual return to protecting the female category, but rather the untenable damage to their reputation the policy had wrought. From the all-male DSD podium in the 2016 women’s 800-meter race to 43-year-old Gavin (Laurel) Hubbard at the 2021 Olympics to male boxer Imane Khelif being awarded a gold medal for punching women, and then-President Thomas Bach insisting on worldwide TV that Khelif was a woman, the IOC had publicly sacrificed their reputation on the altar of gender ideology.

Regarding my (idealistic? naive?) call for a reckoning and admission of harm done, Olympian and women’s sports advocate Sharron Davies brought me back to planet Earth: “It would open them up to legal challenge for compensation.” Plain truth from a businesswoman and athlete who has spent decades seeking justice for female athletes cheated by the East German doping program of the 1970s and 1980s. Admitting culpability in the global undermining of women’s sports would be financially ruinous to the IOC (see also: Catholic Church). Whether or not they should suffer that consequence is irrelevant: A reckoning won’t happen.

Nonetheless, the IOC seems to realize, if not the harm done to women, then at least the harm done to their reputation, and have gone about this policy change in a markedly different way than they have over the last 23 years. To save their reputation, and possibly, as a fringe benefit, women’s sports.

For one thing, they were transparent about who they consulted in developing this policy—endocrinologists, sport scientists, ethics people, female athletes, legal, human rights (that’s code for trans advocates). This is a change. Transparency has not, to this point, been in the IOC skill set. No one knew who they consulted or how they “developed” the 2003 policy to allow men into women’s sports, but based on the results, it’s certain endocrinologists, sport scientists, and female athletes were not consulted, and trans advocates were. In 2003, transpeak was used in all communications—no biological terms were used, a marked lack of science in any form. Instead, “inclusion,” “human rights,” “sports for all,” “trans women,” “no presumption of advantage,” was the new and confusing language used.

In sharp contrast, at about 14:10 in the 2026 press conference, Jane Thornton, the IOC science and medical director, said the Working Group agreed on a number of definitions: sex as male and female, and unchanging, and gender and gender identity as a changeable sense of self, and that sex differences from birth made it necessary to restrict the female category to females. That to do otherwise is unfair to women. That we all know the definitions they agreed on, and the process by which they came to the decision to recognize the reality of sex is money in the bank. It would be difficult to walk back those publicly made and scientifically based statements. Transparent, understandable, scientific, reflecting a reality we all recognize—what Thornton was communicating without saying it is that this is a sharp 180 from the previous 23 years. What she actually voiced is that, by following science, the IOC realizes sex matters, women’s sports must be female only, and that SRY screening is the best method for ensuring that. But what she inferred is that this is a change—the IOC had NOT, for the past 23 years, been following science, and certainly had not listened to female athletes.

That’s as close as we’re going to get to a reckoning. What the IOC did do is present the truth of women’s sex-based rights, publicly, locked and loaded, and user friendly. Let the trickle down begin! And can we please start with the BBC?