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The Olympics Is Repeating One of Its Worst Mistakes

The IOC’s new anti-trans testing regime revives some of the most discredited and discriminatory policies in the history of the games.

IOC president Kirsty Coventry speaks during the Olympic opening ceremony at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on February 6, 2026.

In 1967, a Polish sprinter named Ewa Kłobukowska sat for a mandatory DNA test. Kłobukowska, a rising track star, had won a gold and a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. Now, a new policy required all women track-and-field athletes to be screened for the presence of X chromosomes. Kłobukowska was probably shocked to learn that the test had placed her on the wrong side of the gender binary. Exactly what happened is hazy—news reports claimed that Kłobukowska was discovered to have “one chromosome too many,” without further explanation—but the consequences were immediate. Kłobukowska was banned from the Olympics. Her sporting career was over.

Track-and-field officials framed this as an unmitigated triumph, proof that DNA testing had weeded out an athlete who was “not truly female.” But even at the time, some onlookers could see that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was going down a dark road of gender policing, weeding out women who had always understood themselves as female based on some arbitrary biological marker. The head of the Polish Olympic Committee, perhaps radicalized by the dismissal of one of his top athletes, called DNA testing a “form of discrimination” as well as something of a gender delusion: How could the IOC hope to split up athletes into biological binaries when “there are no generally accepted criteria of sex for woman athletes”? Sex, after all, is a spectrum.

These critiques did not stop the IOC from expanding its testing requirements. From 1968 on, all women athletes had to sit for chromosome exams ahead of the Olympics. Only at the end of the 1990s, when the chorus of critical voices became unavoidable, did the IOC ditch this sex testing regime.

Now, though, amid a rising global tide of transphobia, the Olympics is retreating into the past. Last week, the IOC announced it was banning trans women from competing in women’s events and embracing—what else?—chromosome testing. In her statement, IOC head Kirsty Coventry insisted that she wanted to “ensure the fairness, safety, and integrity of all competitions within the Games.” What she did not mention was her organization’s sordid history with DNA testing—or the widespread condemnation that this experiment had once drawn.

It would be simply inconvenient to admit that, two and a half decades ago, a coalition that included the American Medical Association, the government of Norway, and then–first lady Hillary Clinton helped to unravel these very same policies, or that the IOC’s chosen DNA test, the SRY test, has failed before. The SRY test detects the presence of Y chromosomal material, but many people who are not men, including a number of cis women, have Y chromosomal material. The IOC knows this firsthand; when it rolled out the SRY test in 1996, at the Atlanta Olympics, the test famously backfired: Eight women tested positive and risked getting kicked out of sports, until they were eventually reinstated after further review. (These women were never publicly identified.)

The test has not changed in the 30 years since. Neither has the science around human biology. But the Olympics is forging ahead regardless.

Just as it did in 1968, the IOC is insisting that the new regime is about preventing men from breaching the barriers of women’s sports, saying........

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