The rumored IOC ban on trans women athletes ahead of the 2028 Olympics is not about fairness, integrity, or protecting women's sports. It is about fear, politics, and the refusal to accept that trans women are women. The "level playing field" language is a fig leaf for people who cannot quite say out loud that they simply do not want us there.
The IOC is preparing to give Donald Trump exactly what he asked for: a blanket ban on trans women, backed up by sex testing and gene swabs, sold as "protecting women's sport." It is the exact opposite of what an Olympic movement with any moral memory should be doing.
When the Olympics Exposed Bigotry Instead of Enforcing ItWe have seen this dynamic before in a different form. In 1936, the Nazi regime tried to use the Berlin Olympics as a stage for "Aryan superiority." A Black American man, Jesse Owens, stepped onto that track and made a lie of it in front of the whole world.
He was not forced to change himself to appease fascists. He was not told to blunt his body, lower his performance, or "compromise" so bigots would feel safer. He showed up as who he was, ran as who he was, and shattered their ideology simply by winning.
That is what sport at its best can do: tell the truth about human ability, and in doing so, expose hateful myths as empty.
What the IOC is doing now is the exact opposite. Instead of trusting sport to reveal the lie, they are moving to make sure there is never a trans woman in the blocks, on the mat, or in the pool to contradict the story being told about us. Rather than risk a moment where a trans woman's success would expose today's bigotry the way Owens exposed Hitler's, they are trying to bar us from even stepping onto the track.
The Myth of "Permanent Male Advantage"The entire justification for this ban rests on a story: that going through male puberty creates an immutable, permanent advantage that no amount of hormone therapy can meaningfully change. That story falls apart as soon as you compare it with both the record books and current science.
Start with women's sports as they actually exist. The women in my images — two charts showing cisgender women athletes — are not outliers; they're the norm for elite sport. Women at the highest levels range from under five feet tall to well over six feet, from under a hundred pounds to nearly three hundred. They have radically different limb lengths, bone structures, lung capacities, and muscle distributions.
We celebrate that variation when it comes in a cisgender package. We call it "talent" when a cis woman has unusually long legs, huge lungs, or dense powerful muscle. Yet the moment a trans woman appears anywhere inside that same spectrum of human diversity, those same traits are relabeled as "male advantage."
If height, strength, or frame are enough to disqualify a woman from the women's category, then half the cis women in those photos would be banned too. No one seriously suggests that, because everyone instinctively knows this is not really about protecting fairness. It is about controlling which women are allowed to count as women.
There is no right or wrong body for a woman. Women cannot be too tall or too short, too strong or too weak, too light or too heavy. Trans women's bodies are women's bodies, and all of these athletes have women's bodies as well. Every woman in those images is a woman, and so are the trans women they are trying to erase.
The Competition Record Is Not on Their SideTrans women have been eligible to compete at the Olympics since 2004. Across multiple Games and tens of thousands of athletes, only one openly trans woman has ever even competed in a women's Olympic category, and she did not medal.
If there were a massive, game-breaking performance advantage that survived years of hormone suppression, it would have shown up by now in the one place no one can spin: the podium. It has not. We do not have a trans Jesse Owens under current rules. We have twenty years of quiet participation and zero Olympic dominance.
Even when you zoom down from the Olympics to national, collegiate, and high school levels, the pattern is the same. There are a few highly publicized standouts — a college swimmer here, a couple of high school sprinters there — precisely because they are so rare that each one becomes national news solely because it helps fuel the anti-trans moral panic. They are the exception, not the rule.
Even in those "headline" cases, we are not seeing the record books fall. Lia Thomas, the favorite punching bag of anti-trans pundits, won a single NCAA women's championship, did not break the NCAA record, did not break American records, and placed mid-pack or last in other finals. She finished over nine seconds slower than Katie Ledecky's NCAA record in the 500-yard freestyle.
So when people scream that trans women are "taking over" women's sports or "stealing all the records," they are simply not describing the real world.
What Hormones Actually Do — and What the Research Really SaysOn top of the competition data, we know what hormone therapy actually does to a trans woman's body — and what the so-called "science" behind these bans conveniently leaves out.
Under IOC-style rules, a trans woman who wants to compete must live for years on feminizing hormone therapy: suppressed testosterone plus estrogen. That is not cosmetic. It is a complete biological rebalancing. Muscle mass falls. Hemoglobin and red-blood-cell counts drop into the typical female range, directly reducing oxygen delivery and endurance. Strength, speed, and explosive power decline. Fat redistributes. Recovery slows. VO₂ max and other fitness markers shift downward. There is no world in which a body undergoes that kind of hormonal overhaul and comes out unchanged.
And yet, nearly every "study" cited to argue that trans women have an immutable advantage completely ignores this reality.
Most of them are not even studying trans women. They're measuring the performance of cisgender men — untransitioned, unmedicated, testosterone-dominant males — and then comparing those numbers to cisgender women. That is not a test of trans inclusion; it is a test of the obvious. It tells us what we already know: untransitioned men outperform women on average. What it does *not* tell us is how trans women who meet IOC standards actually perform.
When studies *do* examine transitioned women who have maintained female-range hormone levels for a year or more, the "advantage" evaporates. Their strength and endurance settle into the broad range seen in cis women. That's why, in real-world competition, trans women aren't breaking records or sweeping titles.
Making matters worse, some of the most frequently cited "gender difference" papers come from researchers who openly identify with gender-critical or anti-trans movements. They start with the conclusion they want — that trans women can never be equal — and then design studies to reach it. The result is cherry-picked data, misused comparisons, and an avalanche of papers that test cis men against cis women, then pretend they've proven something about trans athletes.
These biased studies are then given outsized importance by policymakers who either don't know or don't care that the underlying research doesn't meet the standards of honest science. They ignore decades of endocrinological and athletic research showing that after sustained hormone therapy, trans women's physiology converges toward that of cis women. The result is policy based not on evidence but on ideology pretending to be data.
The new *Nature Medicine* proteomics study from October 2025 makes the biology even clearer. Researchers tracked over 5,000 blood proteins in trans women over six months of standard hormone therapy and compared them to data from 55,000 people in the UK Biobank. Seven of the ten key sex-specific protein groups shifted toward the female pattern after just six months, including those related to fat distribution, breast development, immune function, and heart health. Hormones don't just change appearance — they rewrite the body's molecular code. That's not metaphor; it's measurable biology.
So when policymakers claim "male puberty confers a permanent advantage," they're not citing evidence. They're citing *studies of people who were never trans women to begin with*, amplified by activists posing as scientists to reach a predetermined conclusion. It's a bait-and-switch — one that collapses under even the slightest scientific scrutiny.
The Community's Outrage Is About the PatternSo when the IOC and its political allies cling to "permanent male advantage," they are not just making an honest mistake. They are choosing to ignore both the evidence and twenty years of lived reality because acknowledging either would undercut the ban they want.
The outrage from trans people and our allies is not about a single eligibility rule. It is about seeing the same pattern we have seen in healthcare bans, bathroom bans, book bans, and school sports bans. Every time we fight our way into one more corner of public life, someone in power decides that our existence is a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be respected.
And it will not stop with trans women. A rule that bans anyone who has "experienced male puberty" inevitably drags every woman in sport back toward sex testing and bodily inspection. Women of color, intersex women, and any woman whose body does not fit a narrow, white, Western ideal will be the first ones told to prove they belong there. We have already seen how much damage that did to women like Caster Semenya and others with differences in sex development.
The Real Threats to Women's SportThe real threats to women's sport have never been a tiny, heavily regulated group of trans women trying to compete under strict medical rules.
The real threats are sexual and emotional abuse from coaches and officials. Chronic pay and resource disparities. Token media coverage. Federations that treat women's programs as an afterthought. None of that is fixed by banning us. None of that is solved by gene swabs and hormone police.
This ban does not protect women. It uses women as an excuse.
The Core TruthJesse Owens was not forced to change himself to appease fascists. He walked into their stadium as himself and proved their story about the world was a lie.
Trans women, by contrast, are required to change ourselves — hormonally, physically, medically — just to be considered for participation under the rules that already exist. We do what is demanded of us. We reshape our bodies at enormous personal cost. And now, even after we have done all of that, the IOC is preparing to move the goalposts again and lock the door entirely.
That is not fairness. That is bigotry trying very hard not to look itself in the mirror.
Sport is supposed to honor dedication, discipline, and human possibility, not obedience to a political definition of sex dictated from a podium. The IOC is standing at a crossroads. One path follows the spirit of Jesse Owens and lets sport expose hateful ideologies as lies. The other path uses sport as a tool to enforce those ideologies.
If they choose this ban, they are not defending women's sports. They are helping bigotry win without ever having to face us on the field.
Trans women are women. Stop the ban. Inclusion is fairness.
