World Athletics approves test to determine gender

• AFP and AP, PARIS and NANJING, China

World Athletics on Tuesday said it had approved the introduction of a cheek swab test to determine if an athlete is biologically female.

The planned changes include reinstating a version of chromosome testing that was discontinued in the 1990s, requiring athletes who compete in the female category to submit to a cheek swab or dry blood-spot test for the presence of a gene that indicates whether the athlete has a “Y” chromosome present in males.

Sebastian Coe, the president of the international track and field federation, said athletes would have to take the test just once during their career.

Photo: Reuters

“It’s important to do it because it maintains everything that we’ve been talking about, and particularly recently, about not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport, but actually guaranteeing it,” Coe told a news conference after the World Athletics Council met over two days in Nanjing, China, following the World Athletics Indoor Championships.

“We feel this is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition,” he added.

World Athletics has not set a date for the introduction of the test, but it is expected to be in place for the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September.

Coe, the two-time Olympic champion who was unsuccessful last week in his bid to become International Olympic Committee president, has been vocal about “protecting the female category” in track and field. He has said the International Olympic Committee needs to take a leadership role in the transgender debate instead of letting each individual sport decide it own regulations.

Asked whether World Athletics believed the policy would withstand legal challenges, Coe said he was confident after an exhaustive review, adding that “you accept the fact that that is the world we live in.”

“I would never have set off down this path in 2016-2017 to protect the female category in sport” without being “prepared to take the challenge head on,” Coe said. “We’ve been to the Court of Arbitration on our DSD [differences in sex development] regulations. They have been upheld, and they have again been upheld after appeal. So we will doggedly protect the female category, and we’ll do whatever is necessary to do it.”

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