This is so disappointing. The anti-trans moral panic is ABSURD. This is not a problem. It has never been a problem. And Navratilova's descent into TERF radicalism is destroying her legacy. (At least in my eyes.)
It's not a "moral panic". The IOC recognised that having males beating up females in boxing was simply untenable (Khelif has admitted being XY; no betting required to know Khelif has 5-ARD), and multiple WORLD SPORTS organisations are taking up SRY screening.
Martina wants to protect the female category. That doesn't stop trans people competing; just means they need to remember sports is categorised by sex, not identity.
Two things. First, this makes sense in the light of the IOC decision to adopt SRY screening (as it is correctly called: because the check for SRY is a first step, and CAIS and Swyer syndrome are exceptions which allow participation in the female category). The IOC adopted it because it couldn’t ignore the effects of not doing SRY screening - as it had in 1992 and 1996 - when Imane Khelif, who is an XY male with 5-ARD (see the Wikipedia page), same as Caster Semenya, won in the female category in boxing. that put female opponents at serious risk because males can punch much harder for the same weight than women; it is due to testosterone and other birth advantages.
Khelif is emphatically not trans, but is male; wrongly thought to be female at birth.
Second, you write: “because biological sex is not as purely binary as many assume”. This is wrong. Biological sex is absolutely binary: male and female. Phenotypes (the bodily appearance) vary a lot but even with DSDs (eg Khelif, Semenya) one can determine a sex, and that sex is only male or female, based on whether they have a body organised for making sperm or ova (even if they don’t produce any). In wrong what you did, you’re straying into a field that is frequently misreported. Please don’t.
In doing this, the WTA is joining athletics, boxing, cycling, swimming and winter sports (under the FIS), triathlon, rowing and some others I may have forgotten. This is not an outlier; it’s a return to a technology that was understood and used in 1992, but whose use was stopped *gainst the wishes of female athletes* in 1999 by the IOC on advice which, in retrospect, was unscientific.
It’s a cheek swab, in case anyone was wondering. Quick, fast, only needs to be done once and gives everyone confidence about their opponent. A lot less intrusive than dope testing.
Thank you for using actual science to debunk Ben’s disingenuous framing of this issue. While this may seem like it’s a fringe concern in the scheme of things, it’s completely understandable why the WTA, along with other sport governing agencies, would implement these policies. As long as activists insist we adjudicate this issue using a maximalist definition of “trans” and advocate for gender self-identification as a governing principle, then every aspect of society that’s organized around the biological reality of being female is at risk. Her stridency may be off-putting to some, but Martina Navratilova has been absolutely correct on this issue as it pertains to sport.
It’s honestly a topic on which very few sports journalists are well informed. Sean Ingle at The Guardian is an exception; his stuff is well worth reading on this topic as being balanced and informative.
Tennis is an Olympic sport, and the IOC has adopted SRY screening. Makes sense. But equally, are you saying that one should only fix problems in order from most intractable to easiest? Is that how you do things at your job? Or do you do lots of things in parallel, some easy, some hard?
One would think having steady revenue or finding multi year contracts for their main annual event (the finals) are more important than a "problem" affecting 0.000% of their players. And as Ben says, the WTA is independent of the IOC, they don't have to do it.
So I ask again: is it possible to do multiple things in parallel? Maybe not every single person at the WTA is involved in finding the multi-year contract for the finals and has some spare capacity to organise this? It can probably be rolled into the drug testing protocols. And if it builds confidence and averts the possibility of a Caster Semenya/Imane Khelif scenario, that's a minimal cost ($100 per person roughly) well worth it.
It's not worth it because it represents no risk whatsoever to the sport. It's just blatant transphobia and policing women’s bodies in a WOMEN'S organization.
The real risk is to the reputation of the WTA from males with DSDs (specifically 5-ARD), in the way that Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif (both male, neither trans) had serious negative effects on the reputations of athletics and boxing. That's a real risk - those two (and other males with 46XY 5-ARD in athletics and in football) show that it's a possibility, and you wouldn't want questions around eligibility. So much simpler to not have to deal with that, which would be a real and lingering PR crisis, by using an increasingly widely used method for guaranteeing the female category.
Imane Khelif being male has been widely disproven. The IOC cleared *her* to compete, that's why she won a medal. And it's apples and oranges man. You're masking transphobia with a supposed PR crisis prevention stunt. And of a *non-existent* problem.
Ben, you've missed the key reason why these organisations are bringing in SRY screening. The concern is not really about trans women athletes. It's about male athletes with DSDs, specifically 5-ARD. That is a recessive condition which means male embryos don't develop external genitalia, and so are recorded as female at birth; but they do have internal testes which give them normal male puberty. That's the case for Caster Semenya and multiple other athletes; their records in the female category were effectively those of mediocre males competing against elite females. The Imane Khelif episode at the 2024 Olympics was a key factor in the IOC's and World Boxing's decisions. (Khelif admitted in an interview in February with L'Equipe to having XY chromosomes, and has not competed since SRY screening was introduced by World Boxing.)
By introducing SRY screening, the WTA effectively prevents the problem of males with DSDs competing in the female category arising. Athletics, boxing and football probably would have been glad to have had it in place 20+ years ago.
I know everyone loses their minds over the trans issue, and this does deal with that too. But the DSD element is actually the bigger risk in PR terms.
Martina Navratilova is right. Participation of biological males who benefitted from male pattern of musculo-skeletal developement would be unfair and would destroy the sport.
This is the most successful and highest paid women’s sport protecting itself. You don’t have to wait for a trans woman to compete for a title to decide the rule.
You're creating a problem that is no problem at all. It's not even that they're no trans athletes right now, it's that there's been virtually none in the entire history of the WTA. How is that relevant enough to make policy.
There is not and has never been a problem in the NCAA (despite what one fifth-place finisher may tell you). Probably it was more of a problem that that fifth place swimmer's coach was assaulting her teammates, but no one started a national crusade about that.
Each sport had its policy that worked fine for nearly one hundred years, until the bigots in the American and UK rights found a wedge they could use to get well meaning sports parents to start down the road to banning abortion, birth control, and women's sports entirely.
Don't believe me? Just after the latest US Supreme Court ruling, its champions at the Heritage Foundation said that eliminating Title IX was next, stating that instead of NCAA sports there should be a focus on "cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals, and other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.”
And beyond sports, the people funding that fifth place swimmer (the 'Independent Council on Women's Sports') state that the goal is "they can't be [trans] *anywhere*".
So if you're saying this is a problem, your allies in that are the people that want to eliminate women's sports entirely, and also quite literally eliminate a chunk of the population just trying to live their lives.
The WTA has no problem letting Russian and Belarusian players give Putin/Lukashenko sportswashing propaganda and they have no problem betraying Peng Shuai (anyone seen or heard from her lately?) to restart tournaments in China, but this issue that affects 0.0000000005% of the population is suddenly something that needs to be addressed. Values!
Unfortunately, in the UK, the LTA banned trans women from competing at any level a couple of years ago along with many other organisations following some wizard funded legal challenges.
As a tennis club administrator I asked the LTA how they expected me to enforce this new rule when selecting teams from our 200 members. I have yet to receive a reply 18 months later - maybe SRY testing will become mandatory at amateur level as well.
That's not accurate. The LTA requires trans women to compete in the male category, because they're male; it hasn't "banned" them. (It would be great if people could stop saying "ban".) If you really don't know your members that well, then OK; cheap SRY screening might be the solution. (I've always thought there should be a challenge system; person/group that challenges the person's eligibility has to pay for the test.)
This is extremely disingenuous. Someone who has fully transitioned, who lives her entire life as a woman is expected to go and play men’s tennis? It’s a ban.
It's not a ban. People are welcome - encouraged even - to compete in their own sex category. (NB sex is immutable, as the SRY screen will attest.) Notice in the piece that Renee Richards now supports sex categorisation. How one "lives" isn't the question. It's what sex one is, and those advantages are not removed by any amount of surgery or hormones. (Studies have demonstrated this, but it shouldn't be necessary to point out that women are not just weakened men.) Also, if you say "well they're fully transitioned" - where's the line? How fully is "fully"? How many years is enough "living as"? If I put on a skirt and say I'm a woman now, is that enough? If I do the same and swear on a Bible, is that enough now? There's no line (and it's illegal under human rights law to require surgery) which means the line has to remain where it always has realistically been - in our DNA.
I don’t think it’s needed because there’s no trans athletes for it to be an issue. But I don’t think they want to be in the position with Olympics/IOC in 2 years when they’ll require genetic testing. Yes Olympics are under ITF’s jurisdiction but I can see ITF/world tennis will default to this is WTA’s responsibility to deal with. They’re getting in front of it as much as I don’t like it.
This is so disappointing. The anti-trans moral panic is ABSURD. This is not a problem. It has never been a problem. And Navratilova's descent into TERF radicalism is destroying her legacy. (At least in my eyes.)
It's not a "moral panic". The IOC recognised that having males beating up females in boxing was simply untenable (Khelif has admitted being XY; no betting required to know Khelif has 5-ARD), and multiple WORLD SPORTS organisations are taking up SRY screening.
Martina wants to protect the female category. That doesn't stop trans people competing; just means they need to remember sports is categorised by sex, not identity.
I agree with Keira!
Two things. First, this makes sense in the light of the IOC decision to adopt SRY screening (as it is correctly called: because the check for SRY is a first step, and CAIS and Swyer syndrome are exceptions which allow participation in the female category). The IOC adopted it because it couldn’t ignore the effects of not doing SRY screening - as it had in 1992 and 1996 - when Imane Khelif, who is an XY male with 5-ARD (see the Wikipedia page), same as Caster Semenya, won in the female category in boxing. that put female opponents at serious risk because males can punch much harder for the same weight than women; it is due to testosterone and other birth advantages.
Khelif is emphatically not trans, but is male; wrongly thought to be female at birth.
Second, you write: “because biological sex is not as purely binary as many assume”. This is wrong. Biological sex is absolutely binary: male and female. Phenotypes (the bodily appearance) vary a lot but even with DSDs (eg Khelif, Semenya) one can determine a sex, and that sex is only male or female, based on whether they have a body organised for making sperm or ova (even if they don’t produce any). In wrong what you did, you’re straying into a field that is frequently misreported. Please don’t.
In doing this, the WTA is joining athletics, boxing, cycling, swimming and winter sports (under the FIS), triathlon, rowing and some others I may have forgotten. This is not an outlier; it’s a return to a technology that was understood and used in 1992, but whose use was stopped *gainst the wishes of female athletes* in 1999 by the IOC on advice which, in retrospect, was unscientific.
It’s a cheek swab, in case anyone was wondering. Quick, fast, only needs to be done once and gives everyone confidence about their opponent. A lot less intrusive than dope testing.
Thank you for using actual science to debunk Ben’s disingenuous framing of this issue. While this may seem like it’s a fringe concern in the scheme of things, it’s completely understandable why the WTA, along with other sport governing agencies, would implement these policies. As long as activists insist we adjudicate this issue using a maximalist definition of “trans” and advocate for gender self-identification as a governing principle, then every aspect of society that’s organized around the biological reality of being female is at risk. Her stridency may be off-putting to some, but Martina Navratilova has been absolutely correct on this issue as it pertains to sport.
It’s honestly a topic on which very few sports journalists are well informed. Sean Ingle at The Guardian is an exception; his stuff is well worth reading on this topic as being balanced and informative.
The WTA has SO many issues, and *this* is what's high on their agenda. Of course. 🤦🏻♀️
Tennis is an Olympic sport, and the IOC has adopted SRY screening. Makes sense. But equally, are you saying that one should only fix problems in order from most intractable to easiest? Is that how you do things at your job? Or do you do lots of things in parallel, some easy, some hard?
One would think having steady revenue or finding multi year contracts for their main annual event (the finals) are more important than a "problem" affecting 0.000% of their players. And as Ben says, the WTA is independent of the IOC, they don't have to do it.
So I ask again: is it possible to do multiple things in parallel? Maybe not every single person at the WTA is involved in finding the multi-year contract for the finals and has some spare capacity to organise this? It can probably be rolled into the drug testing protocols. And if it builds confidence and averts the possibility of a Caster Semenya/Imane Khelif scenario, that's a minimal cost ($100 per person roughly) well worth it.
It's not worth it because it represents no risk whatsoever to the sport. It's just blatant transphobia and policing women’s bodies in a WOMEN'S organization.
The real risk is to the reputation of the WTA from males with DSDs (specifically 5-ARD), in the way that Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif (both male, neither trans) had serious negative effects on the reputations of athletics and boxing. That's a real risk - those two (and other males with 46XY 5-ARD in athletics and in football) show that it's a possibility, and you wouldn't want questions around eligibility. So much simpler to not have to deal with that, which would be a real and lingering PR crisis, by using an increasingly widely used method for guaranteeing the female category.
Imane Khelif being male has been widely disproven. The IOC cleared *her* to compete, that's why she won a medal. And it's apples and oranges man. You're masking transphobia with a supposed PR crisis prevention stunt. And of a *non-existent* problem.
Ben, you've missed the key reason why these organisations are bringing in SRY screening. The concern is not really about trans women athletes. It's about male athletes with DSDs, specifically 5-ARD. That is a recessive condition which means male embryos don't develop external genitalia, and so are recorded as female at birth; but they do have internal testes which give them normal male puberty. That's the case for Caster Semenya and multiple other athletes; their records in the female category were effectively those of mediocre males competing against elite females. The Imane Khelif episode at the 2024 Olympics was a key factor in the IOC's and World Boxing's decisions. (Khelif admitted in an interview in February with L'Equipe to having XY chromosomes, and has not competed since SRY screening was introduced by World Boxing.)
By introducing SRY screening, the WTA effectively prevents the problem of males with DSDs competing in the female category arising. Athletics, boxing and football probably would have been glad to have had it in place 20+ years ago.
I know everyone loses their minds over the trans issue, and this does deal with that too. But the DSD element is actually the bigger risk in PR terms.
Martina Navratilova is right. Participation of biological males who benefitted from male pattern of musculo-skeletal developement would be unfair and would destroy the sport.
You do realize that there are literally no trans athletes on the WTA right? How could something that doesn't exist "destroy the sport"?
This is the most successful and highest paid women’s sport protecting itself. You don’t have to wait for a trans woman to compete for a title to decide the rule.
You're creating a problem that is no problem at all. It's not even that they're no trans athletes right now, it's that there's been virtually none in the entire history of the WTA. How is that relevant enough to make policy.
There are none because there’s a ban. There is no ban in the NCAA, where there is a problem. Proactive solutions!
There is not and has never been a problem in the NCAA (despite what one fifth-place finisher may tell you). Probably it was more of a problem that that fifth place swimmer's coach was assaulting her teammates, but no one started a national crusade about that.
Each sport had its policy that worked fine for nearly one hundred years, until the bigots in the American and UK rights found a wedge they could use to get well meaning sports parents to start down the road to banning abortion, birth control, and women's sports entirely.
Don't believe me? Just after the latest US Supreme Court ruling, its champions at the Heritage Foundation said that eliminating Title IX was next, stating that instead of NCAA sports there should be a focus on "cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals, and other athletic opportunities more aligned with average female interests and tendencies.”
And beyond sports, the people funding that fifth place swimmer (the 'Independent Council on Women's Sports') state that the goal is "they can't be [trans] *anywhere*".
So if you're saying this is a problem, your allies in that are the people that want to eliminate women's sports entirely, and also quite literally eliminate a chunk of the population just trying to live their lives.
Probably not, but we must act with caution
The WTA has no problem letting Russian and Belarusian players give Putin/Lukashenko sportswashing propaganda and they have no problem betraying Peng Shuai (anyone seen or heard from her lately?) to restart tournaments in China, but this issue that affects 0.0000000005% of the population is suddenly something that needs to be addressed. Values!
Disgraceful. I am so disappointed that they have bought into this BS
How does one block content from... overzealous *ahem* commenters... on this site?
Unfortunately, in the UK, the LTA banned trans women from competing at any level a couple of years ago along with many other organisations following some wizard funded legal challenges.
As a tennis club administrator I asked the LTA how they expected me to enforce this new rule when selecting teams from our 200 members. I have yet to receive a reply 18 months later - maybe SRY testing will become mandatory at amateur level as well.
That's not accurate. The LTA requires trans women to compete in the male category, because they're male; it hasn't "banned" them. (It would be great if people could stop saying "ban".) If you really don't know your members that well, then OK; cheap SRY screening might be the solution. (I've always thought there should be a challenge system; person/group that challenges the person's eligibility has to pay for the test.)
This is extremely disingenuous. Someone who has fully transitioned, who lives her entire life as a woman is expected to go and play men’s tennis? It’s a ban.
It's not a ban. People are welcome - encouraged even - to compete in their own sex category. (NB sex is immutable, as the SRY screen will attest.) Notice in the piece that Renee Richards now supports sex categorisation. How one "lives" isn't the question. It's what sex one is, and those advantages are not removed by any amount of surgery or hormones. (Studies have demonstrated this, but it shouldn't be necessary to point out that women are not just weakened men.) Also, if you say "well they're fully transitioned" - where's the line? How fully is "fully"? How many years is enough "living as"? If I put on a skirt and say I'm a woman now, is that enough? If I do the same and swear on a Bible, is that enough now? There's no line (and it's illegal under human rights law to require surgery) which means the line has to remain where it always has realistically been - in our DNA.
Have you ever actually met a trans woman? Do you have any idea how humiliating it would be to have to complete with men? It’s a ban.
1: yes, quite a few. 2: no idea. Didn't ask. It's not a ban, apart from a self-imposed one. But life is full of choices, isn't it.
On the upside, the Slams could have an entirely new trans category for trans athletes to compete against each other.
I guess if you really tried you could find 128 trans women, who play competitive tennis, globally to make up a slam draw.
I don’t think it’s needed because there’s no trans athletes for it to be an issue. But I don’t think they want to be in the position with Olympics/IOC in 2 years when they’ll require genetic testing. Yes Olympics are under ITF’s jurisdiction but I can see ITF/world tennis will default to this is WTA’s responsibility to deal with. They’re getting in front of it as much as I don’t like it.