90 Human Rights and Sports Groups Call for Olympics to Drop "Sex Testing" Planshttps://www.them.us/story/90-human-rights-and-sports-groups-call-for-olympics-to-drop-sex-testing-plans 🔗Samantha Riedel (18 March 2026)
A coalition of ninety sports and human rights advocacy groups are calling on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to halt a reported effort to revive "sex testing" at the Olympics.
In a joint statement released Tuesday, representatives for the Sport & Rights Alliance, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), Humans of Sport, and 87 other organizations warned that bringing back chromosomal and hormonal testing at the 2028 Olympics would "set women's sports back 30 years." The IOC halted such tests in the 1990s, after they were found to be inaccurate and harmful to athletes, but IOC president Kirsty Coventry signaled as recently as November that she may soon bring back the practice in order to bar transgender women from competition.
Coventry has not publicly commented on the process herself, but said broadly that "uncomfortable" and "difficult" changes were on the way for the Olympics during a speech last month.
Reinstituting those tests — which can include cheek swabs, blood tests, and physical examinations — would represent "a catastrophic erosion of women's rights and safety," Sport & Rights Alliance executive director Andrea Florence wrote in the joint statement this week.
"Gender policing and exclusion harms all women and girls, and undermines the very dignity and fairness the IOC claims to uphold," Florence wrote. "Our concerns are compounded by the fact that the IOC also seems to be, at the same time, divesting from the safe sport infrastructure that actually provides protection for women and girls."
