World Athletics claims dozens of women’s finalists would’ve failed new sex test

World Athletics has said that up to 60 athletes who have been in the finals of women’s elite track and field events since 2000 would have failed its sex test.

Dr Stéphane Bermon, the governing body’s health and science department director, delivered the findings to a scientific panel in Tokyo where this year’s World Athletics Championships have just ended.

Between the years 2000 and 2023, there were 135 finalists with differences of sex development, who competed in elite events, with 50 to 60 of them having competed in more than one final, he said. These athletes were “over-represented” in major finals which “compromises the integrity of female competitions”.

World Athletics introduced mandatory sex testing earlier this year, compelling athletes wishing to compete in the female category to undergo a “once-in-a-lifetime” test for the SRY gene, which they said was a “reliable proxy for determining biological sex”.

By identifying the presence or absence of the Y gene, test is used to verify if a competitor has undergone male puberty or has a difference in sex development which provided “testosterone advantages”.

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said that a “philosophy that we hold dear… is the protection and promotion of the integrity of women’s sport”, adding: “It is really important in a sport that is permanently trying to attract more women, that they enter believing there is no biological glass ceiling. The test to confirm biological sex is a very important step in ensuring this is the case.

“We are saying, at elite level, for you to compete in the female category, you have to be biologically female. It was always very clear to me and the World Athletics council that gender cannot trump biology.”

But concerns have been raised about athletes’ privacy and the vilification of trans competitors, in the wake of sex testing.

In March, interACT, an organisation that works to empower intersex youth, labelled sex verification “discriminatory” and claimed it violated equal access to sport.

“When women are subjected to invasive genetic testing, they are forced to give up privacy about their personal genetic information, while governing bodies dictate if they are ‘woman enough’ to play women’s sports,” a spokesperson for the group said. “Sex verification is not about fairness but instead attempts to control women’s bodies while imposing limited and unscientific views of who counts as a woman.”

Sex tests invited “harassment, questioning and privacy violations towards all women, especially, but not exclusively, women who are transgender, gender-non-conforming or intersex”, the spokesperson claimed.

Many women do not know they are intersex until the test takes place, and forced testing “may subject women to finding out deeply personal medical information in a stigmatising context and publicly ‘outing’ them”.

The spokesperson went on to say: “Throughout the history of sports, many women who are intersex, or suspected to be, have been subjected to… invasive exams, forced medical interventions and public humiliation. Women of colour and from the Global South have been disproportionately targeted.

“Suspicion of a cisgender woman due to her appearance and competence in her sport can result in global harassment, like Imane Khelif experienced during the 2024 summer Olympics.

“Women in sports with variations in their sex traits have been forced to alter their bodies to be allowed to play, such as [middle-distance runner] Caster Semenya, who publicly ‘went through hell’ as her health declined when she was forced to alter her body’s hormones.”

Professor Andrew Sinclair, who discovered the SRY gene in 1990, said: “Science does not support [the governing body’s] overly simplistic assertion [that] the SRY gene is a reliable proxy for determining biological sex.

“Biological sex is much more complex, with chromosomal, gonadal (testis/ovary), hormonal and secondary sex characteristics all playing a role. Using SRY to establish biological sex is wrong because all it tells you is whether or not the gene is present.

“It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced and, if so, whether it can be used by the body.”

SRY tests were “sensitive”, he added, so a male lab technician could “inadvertently contaminate it with a single skin cell”, resulting in a false positive.

“No guidance is given on how to conduct the test to reduce the risk of false results. Nor does World Athletics recognise the impacts a positive test result would have on a person, which can be more profound than exclusion from sport alone.”

Sinclair helped persuade the International Olympic Committee to drop the use of SRY for sex testing for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and “it is therefore very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this back”, he said.

“Given all the problems outlined, the SRY gene should not be used to exclude women athletes from competition.”

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