By Irene Wang and Joseph Campbell
TOKYO (Reuters) -International Olympic Committee chief Kirsty Coventry says she is hoping for consensus among sports about protecting the female category, with fairness of competition the foremost consideration.
Coventry said after her election as leader of the Olympic movement in June that the IOC would spearhead discussions on gender eligibility criteria in sports, four years after the body urged federations to handle the issue independently.
Earlier this month, the IOC set up a “Protection of the Female Category Working Group”, including experts and representatives of international sports federations, to discuss the issue.
“What I would like for the IOC to do is to bring everyone together to try and find a consensus amongst all of us that we can all get behind and that we can implement,” the IOC President told reporters in Tokyo on Saturday.
“And above anything and everything else, it’s fair and protects the female category. So they met last week, and I’m looking forward to debriefing with them in the next few weeks.”
The IOC’s 2021 guidelines on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination suggested that federations prioritised the inclusion of gender non-conforming athletes in the category of their choice, while making no presumptions of unfair advantage.
Despite this, several Olympic sports have over the last few years banned anyone who has gone through male puberty from competing in the female category at an elite level.
Boxing and athletics have this year introduced mandatory tests for athletes in the female class to detect the SRY gene, which is on the Y chromosome and triggers the development of male characteristics in mammals.
These moves are aimed at athletes with Differences of Sexual Development (DSD), who have been raised as female but sometimes carry some of the physical advantages of males.
Coventry, who said the working group had met for the first time last week, suggested there still might not be a one-size-fits-all solution to the issue.
“The idea behind the working group is for us as the IOC to try and bring together the sporting world and to find some consensus in how we are going to protect the female category and what that means,” she added.
“It’s different for each sport because in some sports, like equestrian, men and women already compete against each other. So maybe it’s not as big of a topic.
“But in a lot of the other sports, it’s been a very big topic for a long time.”
(Reporting by Irene Wang and Joseph Campbell, writing by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Clare Fallon)
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