INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee (IOC) officials admitted at a roundtable with reporters yesterday that the guidelines governing the participation of transgender women in Olympic sports are outdated.

They also confirmed that the IOC will announce a new policy soon after the Tokyo Games.

The IOC made the admission as New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard prepared to become the first openly transgender athlete to compete at the Olympics. Hubbard, who lifts in the 87+kg division yesterday, is allowed to compete alongside women under guidelines established in 2015 by the IOC and adopted by the International Weightlifting Federation.

But in recent years, many medical experts and policymakers have come to the conclusion that those rules were no longer fully supported by science. Experts who spoke with Yahoo Sports, some of whom have consulted with the IOC, identified two main shortcomings: That testosterone-related rules were too lenient, and that one set of guidelines should not apply to dozens of different sports.

The current guidelines require a transgender woman to undergo hormone therapy and suppress her testosterone “below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months prior to her first competition.” Two scientists who’ve consulted with the IOC said that, based on recent evidence, they believed the 10-nanomole-per-liter threshold to be too high. It was set “based on old data, and not on the most sophisticated ways of measuring testosterone,” said Myron Genel, a Yale endocrinologist who has studied the topic and consulted with the IOC for two decades.

Genel and Joanna Harper, a transgender runner-turned-scientist who is actively studying retained physical advantages in trans athletes, and who has also consulted with the IOC, both said they believed 5 nanomoles per liter to be a reasonable threshold.

Richard Budgett, the IOC’s medical and scientific director, acknowledged at the roundtable that “agreeing on another number is almost impossible and possibly irrelevant. You can debate that endlessly.”

The other point several experts made was that a one-size-fits-all policy on trans inclusion fails to consider that the advantages retained by women who’ve gone through male puberty are far more impactful in some sports than others. “The difference between male and female performance varies from sport to sport,” Genel said.

(SD-Agencies)