The International Olympic Committee announced that it has changed its rules to introduce cheek-swab chromosome tests, effectively disqualifying (with limited exceptions) anyone with a (male) Y chromosome from female competitions. I think this is a sensible and thoughtful decision, which gives athletes in training much-needed clarity a full two years before the next Olympic games.
I do feel sympathy for M2F and DSD athletes who are rather the losers with this decision and who now have quite limited options to compete fairly with their peers; nonetheless I support having a clear decision by the IOC from a Utilitarian perspective.
On a related point, the Taiwanese boxer, Lin Yu-ting, one of two boxers at the centre of controversy in the 2024 Olympics in female boxing has been recently approved by the World Boxing Medical Committee to continue to compete in female categories, a punch in the face to a long-ago controversial and purportedly biased decision by the long-discredited International Boxing Association and supporting the International Olympic Committee’s decision to allow her to compete in 2024 at the Olympics.
The second person involved in the 2024 controversy, Imane Khelif, an Algerian female boxer will likely also take the new World Boxing Medical Committee tests but there are no new publicly available results on her yet.
I wonder if the social media hate mobs who harassed and bullied these two boxers during the 2024 Olympics will now publicly apologise. I very much doubt it but I do hope so.
We need less division, prejudice and hatred in the world. At least the IOC is making sensible decisions with appropriate timing. Unfortunately click-bait sells more products than common sense and science-based decision making.