Restrictions on trans athletes focus on exclusion, when participation should be the goal

The International Boxing Association announced this week that it's seeking a showdown in courtrooms in the U.S., France and Switzerland, where it plans to file criminal charges against the International Olympic Committee.

The alleged offence?

Letting Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan compete in Paris last summer. The IBA said the two women's boxers had failed gender eligibility tests at last year's IBA world championships. But the IBA didn't facilitate last summer's Olympic boxing tournament because the IOC had banished the organization over deep-seated corruption, and its dependence on sponsorship money from Russia's state-run energy corporation. 

And the impetus for acting right now? An executive order from U.S. president Donald Trump banning trans women from women's sports.

But neither does the IBA's flip-flopping on Khelif. She was eligible to compete in IBA tournaments until, suddenly, she wasn't. Her presence in Paris last summer triggered a meltdown from IBA president Umar Kremlev, who referred to the IOC as "sodomites" for letting Khelif box.

Yet there she was in December, a spectator at an IBA event in the Bahamas, credentialed like a VIP, moving freely among athletes and decision-makers alike.

And now the IBA is using her as an excuse to take the IOC to court.

WATCH | Former IOC medical adviser weighs in on women's Olympic boxing discussion:

This latest campaign is less about Khelif than it is about this particular moment in U.S. history and politics, and using the idea of safeguarding women's sports to stride through an anti-inclusion door that Trump's executive orders have opened. It's about staying aligned with the administration that'll be in charge when the Olympics return to the U.S. in 2028. And it's about scapegoating vulnerable people while actively working against gender equity in sport.

And it's not just boxing.

Last week World Athletics announced its proposed new gender guidelines, all of them, predictably, policing the boundaries of the women's category. Through 2024, athletes assigned female at birth but who had elevated testosterone levels weren't eligible to compete unless they took medication that brought their testosterone below the threshold World Athletics had set. The proposed new rule would treat those athletes the same way world athletics does female athletes born biologically male – ineligible regardless of whether they've taken testosterone-suppressing meds.

In reality, there's room for a productive, good faith discussion on how to categorize elite male athletes who transition, and then compete as women. If a man who runs 9.95 in the 100 metres completes his transition as a woman who runs 10.4, the other women's competitors would have a right to side-eye, especially with prize money on the line.

Except we rarely see those conversations. Instead we get new rules designed to exclude athletes who don't fit neatly into the men's or women's categories.

Or we get bad faith arguments using trans athletes the way a boxer deploys a blinding jab, obscuring an opponent's vision so you can hit them with something big. In the ring it might be a right cross or an uppercut; in these "saving women's sports" conversations it's a crackdown participation that's almost impossible to justify if you actually value sport.