World Athletics approves cheek swabs to determine if athlete is biologically female

World Athletics has approved the introduction of mandatory cheek swabbing to determine an athlete’s gender, with the organization’s president Sebastian Coe saying the decision was taken to “doggedly” protect the female category.

It is understood World Athletics’ intention is to have the testing in place for athletes wanting to compete in the female category at the World Championships in Tokyo from 13-21 September.

Coe said on Tuesday: “It’s important to do it because it maintains everything that we’ve been talking about, and particularly recently about not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport but actually guaranteeing it.

“We feel this is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.

“Overwhelmingly the view has come back that this is absolutely the way to go, within the caveats raised (on testing not being too intrusive),” added Coe, after World Athletics conducted consultation on the proposal earlier this year.

Coe will do ‘whatever is necessary’ to safeguard female category

The consultation document stated: “The childhood or pre-pubertal performance gap in the sport of athletics specifically is three to five per cent in running events and higher in throwing and jumping events.”

Coe added the consultation was “widely held” and “exhaustive” and had received feedback from over 70 individual groups.

Asked whether he felt the policy would stand up to legal challenge, he said: “Yes I am, but you accept the fact that that is the world we live in.

“I would never have set off down this path to protect the female category in sport if I’d been anything other than prepared to take the challenge head on.

“We’ve been to the Court of Arbitration on our DSD (difference of sexual development) regulations. They have been upheld and they have again been upheld after appeal.

“So we will doggedly protect the female category and we’ll do whatever is necessary to do it.”

What will the test entail?

A World Athletics working group said in February that the required test will be for the SRY gene and, if required, testosterone levels.

This will be taken via cheek swab with any necessary follow-up via dry blood spot analysis.

The SRY gene is almost always on the Y chromosome, which plays a crucial role in determining male sex characteristics.

The working group said there was now evidence that testosterone suppression in DSD and transgender athletes could only ever partly mitigate the overall male advantage in the sport of athletics.

IOC president-elect Coventry not ruling out sex testing

Newly-elected International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry, who beat Coe to that role last week, told Sky News after her appointment that she was not ruling out sex testing, saying: “This is a conversation that’s happened and the international federations have taken a far greater lead in this conversation.

“We know in equestrian sex is really not an issue, but in other sports it is.

“So what I’d like to do again is bring the international federations together and sit down and try and come up with a collective way forward for all of us to move.”

The IOC introduced “certificates of femininity” at the 1968 Mexico Olympics but those chromosome-based tests were deemed unscientific and unethical and dropped ahead of the Sydney Games in 2000.

Reem Alsalem, the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, last year called on the IOC to reintroduce sex testing for female athletes to protect them from injuries amid concerns about eligibility.

Sex testing would have had no impact on the boxing controversary during the Paris 2024 Olympics.