Rio 2016: Olympic body changes transgender guidelines

The issue of transgender athletes recently gained wider global attention when Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, announced he had undergone gender reassignment surgery and was now living as a woman, Caitlyn Jenner. According to The Associated Press, the changes are created to guide rulemaking for global sports federations, which are responsible for making the final decisions on which athletes will be eligible to compete in Rio de Janeiro this summer.

While the IOC’s new guidelines are suggestions rather than hard rules, the body believes that its announcement is the first step toward making the games more modern and accessible to a wider variety of athletes.

Trans women will still need to undergo a one-year waiting period after starting hormone replacement therapy.

New guidelines have been put in place to ensure trans people are not excluded from competing in the worldwide sporting competition.

Recently, the guidelines were being challenged by Chris Mosier, an American triathlete and duathlete who has qualified for the World Championships this June. Van Gogh and Dumaresq have both undergone gender reassignment surgery; Mosier has not.

Per Olympic.org, the revised policy will now allow those who transition from female to male to compete under any and all circumstances. The guidelines stem from an unpublicized “Consensus Meeting on Sex Reassignment and Hyperandrogenism” the International Olympic Committee held last November.

Athletes transitioning from male to female would have to declare their gender identity as female, which will last for athletic purposes for at least four years.

In 1966, the International Association of Athletics Federation began requiring gender tests under the suspicion that the Soviet Union was trying to have men compete in women’s categories.

Following Chand’s high-profile case, the Court of Arbitration for Sport suspended the IAAF’s ban on hyperandrogenism, after having tasking the body with providing concrete evidence that the condition gave female athletes a marked advantage over their competition.

Providence Portland Medical Center’s chief medical physicist of radiation oncology Joanna Harper had this to say about the new guidelines for transgender athletes. “This matches up with the NCAA rules and is as good as anything”.

Former IOC medical commission chairman Arne Ljungqvist, who was among the experts involved in drafting the new guidelines, said the consensus was driven by social and political changes. “The waiting period was perhaps the most contentious item among our group and one year is a reasonable compromise”.