By BRUCE LOWITT
The International Olympic Committee has run into a gender-bending roadblock of sorts in its goal to ban transgender athletes from future competition in women’s events, namely how to determine who’s in and who’s out, starting with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
“At the Olympic Games, even the smallest margins can be the difference between victory and defeat, and if it’s a penis that reaches the finish line barely ahead of a vagina, that’s just unfair,” said Kirsty Coventry, elected in 2025 as the first woman president of the IOC.
“But when we decided that our ruling should be applicable to former men who had become women … I mean women who had been men … I mean – wait. Shit! You know what I mean, right?” Coventry said. “The thing is, we had no idea how many variables there are.”
The problem arose when an athlete, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they didn’t want their parents “getting all bent out of shape over something they just don’t understand,” described themselves as “agender” and filed suit preemptively to avoid being banned from both male and female events. “Being a gendervoid person should not disqualify me from anything, much less everything.”
Then a second “gender-fluid” competitor, also speaking anonymously “because I don’t want to kill half my relationships, never mind all of them,” said their applications to compete in both pommel horse and balance beam had been rejected.
When news leaked of the gender-fluid athlete’s rejections, a wave of lawsuits against the IOC followed from competitors who identified themselves as omnigender, gender-expansive, queer, bigender, or polygender, and a number of other identities.
The IOC’ committee’s decision to ban transgender athletes was not unanimous.
“Holy fucking crap,” said Mikaela Antonia de los Reyes Cojuangco-Jaworski, IOC Executive Board member and gold medalist in equestrian at the 2002 Asian Games, who objected to the IOC’s decision. “Nobody asked me if my horse was a filly or a mare or a stallion or a colt – or a gelding, for that matter. And I’m damned sure nobody gave a shit what was between my legs … other than a horse.”
The lawsuits, whether dealt with individually or as a class action, will likely be heard in Switzerland, where the IOC is headquartered
“I think we’ve got a very good chance to beat the IOC,” said Electra Zacharias, head of Legal Advice at Transgender Network Switzerland.
“First of all, only one one-thousandth of Olympic athletes have ever identified themselves as transgender – pretty amusing when you think of these important and influential IOC executives wasting their time making up rules that expose them as bigots and change nothing.
“And, second,” Zacharias added, “we’ll be in Switzerland. Switzerland! Have you ever seen a Swiss Army Knife? There’s like thirty–three choices going on in that one thing.”
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