The world comes to Paris this week to open the 2024 Summer Olympics. Within the mix of over 10,000 athletes are at least 150 out LGBTQ athletes, the second largest contingent ever.
Tokyo’s Olympics were a touchstone with 186 out LGBTQ athletes competing and 33 medals won. Team LGBTQ finished seventh overall in the medal count.
Tokyo saw the first out trans and nonbinary Olympians ever: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, USA skateboarder Alana Smith and Canadian soccer midfield Quinn. Quinn ended up anchoring a defensive effort that won a Cinderella gold medal for Canada.
I look back at Tokyo and smile. I look forward to seeing Quinn, along with Team USA middle distance runner and national champ Nikki Hiltz and Filipino boxer/first trans man Olympian Hergie Bacyadan, and feel that same excitement.
Get off the sidelines and into the game
Our weekly newsletter is packed with everything from locker room chatter to pressing LGBTQ sports issues.
I also wince for American BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe and British track/road cyclist Emily Bridges. If they were allowed to compete for a spot, they could be in Paris right now feeling the excitement of marching in the opening ceremonies Friday. Both should have had the chance to be eyeing a BMX course or a velodrome in Paris as competitors, instead of watching on TV.
Both were sidelined from even attempting a run at the Paris Olympics because of the retrenchment of their sport’s world governing body against transgender women.
It’s been a trend in a number of sports since Tokyo.
Trans athletes denied Olympic opportunities
As we light the Olympic flame this week, bans on transgender women in women’s competition have been enacted by Union Cycliste Internationale, World Aquatics, World Athletics and World Rugby. World Triathlon enacted a policy that is not a ban, but which is severely restrictive. World Sailing announced restrictions that will go into effect at the start of 2025.
The opportunities denied transgender hopefuls in sports, including the hopes of the two athletes I’ve named above, is a cruel cut amid the progress being made.
“The rage that I rightly feel having my life stolen from me is huge,” Wolfe commented to Bicycling Magazine last year, not long after the UCI ban was announced. “We’ve never had the true right to compete, because there was always this unspoken notion that if you win, this privilege is going to be taken away from you. You’re not allowed to succeed, you’re just allowed to show up.”
Her anger is justified. Wolfe was an alternate for USA BMX in Tokyo and was making a strong case for 2024 when the UCI set their new policy.
During the Tokyo Olympics, a number of sports and medical experts met to reevaluate the International Olympic Committee policy on transgender inclusion. The consensus coming out of that meeting was that regulations in place since 2003 and amended in 2015 were “not fit for purpose.”
There was also the statement IOC Medical Director Richard Budgett made at a press conference after the meeting.
“Everyone agrees that transgender women are women, but it is a matter of eligibility for sport,” Budgett said. “It is up to each sport and each discipline even as to exaction what the rules for eligibility and participation are.”
That statement was the impetus for the IOC Framework for Fairness. It centers around the idea that any regulation must be grounded in science and not based on alleged advantage that is not proven by said science and competition results.
It was a worthy goal but lacked regulatory teeth. That led to Bridges being ruled eligible, then ineligible and ultimately barred from competition even when she provided performance data proving her case.
World Aquatics’ rule was created after a college swimmer in the United States — Lia Thomas — won a collegiate national championship. The UCI saw a trans woman — Austin Killips — win a lower level pro race in New Mexico, and they almost immediately enacted their ban.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe tightened the screws on the “Caster Semenya Rule”, which affects cisgender women. Semenya is widely assumed to be intersex and is a two-time Olympic champion.
Semenya, the South African two-time Olympic Champion at 800 meters, as well as Tokyo 200-meter medalist Christine Mboma of Namibia, will not be in Paris competing due to hormonal restrictions that seem to disproportionately affect African women.
There are many upcoming unknowns in this issue, particularly how elite sport will consider nonbinary athletes in future regulations.
Nonbinary marathoner Cal Calamia sparked a regulatory conversation for USA Track and Field and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency last year. What will the rules in this regard look like for Los Angeles in 2028 or Brisbane in 2032?
Should Bacayan punch his way to a podium in women’s boxing — he is allowed to compete because he has not start masculinizing hormone replacement therapy — what will be the outcome and the likely backlash? Hiltz and Quinn face their share of ignorance, hearsay and misgendering just for being who they are and competing where they compete.
Such things will be discussed as these Olympics play out and after they end. While we’ve made marked progress for LGBTQ inclusion in sport as a whole, trans inclusion faces further retrogression and that dampens my enthusiasm for the Olympics ahead.
