After two years of consultations with more than 250 people, the Olympic body made a finding on Tuesday: the impossibility of defining uniform directives, as it had been doing since 2003, as the issue is complex and confronts respect for human rights and maintenance of sporting equity.
"It should be up to" each international federation "to determine how an athlete can be disproportionately favored over his peers, taking into account the nature of each sport," the IOC said in a statement.
Faced with debates raised in particular by hyperandrogenic sportswomen like the South African athlete Caster Semenya, or by transgender women like the New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the organization has already modified its policy twice.
In 2003, the IOC conditioned the admission to competition of transgender women on the fact of having undergone a gender reassignment operation, a criterion strongly criticized because it amounted to imposing a very intrusive intervention without medical justification.
From 2015, the Olympic body therefore focused on determining testosterone thresholds, but "there is no scientific consensus on how testosterone affects athletic performance," the official explained on Tuesday. of human rights within the IOC, Magali Martowicz.
It remains to be seen how each sport will seize the ten potentially contradictory principles established by the IOC, ranging from "inclusiveness" to the absence of "unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage", including the "primacy of health". and the "right to privacy".
To help international federations, with very variable legal and scientific resources, the Olympic body is planning a "deployment phase" from March 2022, with "webinars" and the provision of a research fund.
© 2021 AFP