With transgender future of women sports is fragile-Coe
President of World Athletics Sebastian Coe has said that the integrity and future of women’s sport is “very fragile” if federations do not get it right when creating regulations around the participation of transgender women.
Coe said that “gender cannot trump biology” when deciding whether trans athletes should compete alongside those who were biologically female at birth.
Coe, who has been head of the sport’s federation since 2015, was speaking at the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Belgrade, two days after Lia Thomas became the first known transgender athlete to win a NCAA swimming title in the United States, with victory in the women’s 500-yard freestyle. Thomas, 22, who is understood to have begun hormone replacement therapy in 2019, came fifth and eighth in her other two races.
“The integrity of women’s sport — if we don’t get this right — and, actually, the future of women’s sport, is very fragile,” Coe said.
“These are sensitive issues, they are societal issues — they go way, way beyond sport. I don’t have the luxury to get into endless discussions or the school of moral philosophy.”
Coe pointed to the federation’s history of regulating the participation of athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), including the middle-distance runner Caster Semenya. Under World Athletics rules, athletes with DSD must show testosterone levels below 5nmol/L3 for six months before competing, while trans women have to show they are below this level for 12 months — but Coe thinks that should be extended.
“We are asking for a greater length of period before competition because the residual impact of transitioning like that is more profound,” Coe said. “There is no question that testosterone is the key determinant in performance.”
There were protests against Thomas’s inclusion in the women's 200 freestyle final at the NCAA swimming and diving championships
There were protests against Thomas’s inclusion in the women's 200 freestyle final at the NCAA swimming and diving championships
Coe said that he would feel happier if a trans woman won a race at an athletics competition, as long as she had met the requirements around testosterone levels stated by the World Athletics regulations. “If I feel that we’ve got the right processes in place and what we’re doing is, in large part, evidence-and science-based, I will feel a whole heap more comfortable,” he said. “It’s really difficult to keep the emotion out of this and subjectivity, so we do have to really stick as closely as we can to the science — and that’s what we’ve always tried to do when it’s been uncomfortable.
“You can’t be oblivious to public sentiment . . . but science is important. If I wasn’t satisfied with the science that we have and the experts that we have used and the in-house teams that have been working on this for a long time . . . if I wasn’t comfortable about that, this would be a very different landscape.”
Hungary’s Reka Gyorgy has accused the National Collegiate Athletic Association of denying her a “spot in the final” of its swimming championships by allowing Thomas to compete.
