Washington (AFP) – American transgender women will no longer be able to compete in women’s events at the Olympics and Paralympics after a recent policy change by the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).
A new note on the USOPC website regarding the participation of transgender athletes in sports says: “As of July 21, 2025, please refer to the USOPC athlete safety policy.”
The policy update, following US President Donald Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, was added to the USOPC Athlete Safety Policy on its website as a new subsection entitled “Additional Requirements.”
“The USOPC is committed to protecting opportunities for athletes participating in sport,” the addition reads.
“The USOPC will continue to collaborate with various stakeholders with oversight responsibilities… to ensure that women have a fair and safe competition environment consistent with Executive Order 14201 (Trump’s order) and the Ted Stevens Olympic & Amateur Sports Act.”
The Stevens Act, adopted in 1988, provides a means of handling eligibility disputes for Olympic sports and other amateur events.
A memo to Team USA from USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland and president Gene Sykes on Tuesday obtained by ABC News and ESPN made reference to Trump’s February executive order, saying: “As a federally chartered organization, we have an obligation to comply with federal expectations.”
Trump’s executive order threatens to remove federal funds from any school or institution allowing transgender girls to play on girls’ teams, claiming that would violate Title IX rules giving US women equal sport opportunities.
The order requires immediate enforcement against institutions that deny women single-sex sports and single-sex locker rooms.
“Our revised policy emphasizes the importance of ensuring fair and safe competition environments for women,” ESPN quoted the USOPC letter to governing bodies as saying.
“All National Governing Bodies are required to update their applicable policies in alignment.”
ESPN also said the officials noted the USOPC “has engaged in a series of respectful and constructive conversations with federal officials” in the wake of Trump’s executive order.
The move comes as Los Angeles awaits a host role for the 2028 Summer Olympics.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) also altered its policy for transgender athlete participation to limit women’s sports competitors to athletes assigned female at birth after Trump’s executive order.
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But, I think you don’t want sports segregated by sex assigned at birth, either. If you did, you would have trans men competing against women. And again, trans men still compete and win at sports while competing against other men just like any other masc athlete, and if your argument is that men, as a category, are better than women at sports, then you won’t accept trans men competing against women, either.
The thing is, there’s not much point debating you. It feels like you would probably be okay with excluding trans people from sports, and that feels more and more like the point with these types of debates. And if you are okay with trans men competing against men, then is it not kinda bigoted to not also be okay with trans women competing against women? Why exclude them for doing everything they can to make it fair? Even the Olympics had a plan for trans athletes that was statistically shown to be fair for competitors based on medical experts.
Like, in a perfect world, there would be better sports categorization, but until that point, we see trans women perform like women and trans men perform like men, so that is where we should allow them to compete. And if there is some sort of issue where someone (male or female, trans or cis) dramatically over performs, that would be a better time to deal with that particular one-off.
Anyway, feel free to look into long- and ultra-distance running for instances of women getting closer to men’s times, but, heck, women are closing the gap in shorter running competitions as well, even if at a slower rate. As for the 7% to -13% advantage, trans athletes were compared against cis athletes in a variety of activities, testing things from jump height to grip strength to wingspan, and the advantages in most categories ranged from a 7% advantage to a 13% disadvantage for the trans athlete on average. The biggest issue is that there just aren’t enough trans athletes to know how much of an advantage or disadvantage being trans gives you, but, on average, it is likely to be pretty minimal if there even is one.
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