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Sharron Davies has called on the International Olympic Committee to ensure plans to ban transgender athletes extend to the ‘more important’ issue around competitors with differences in sexual development (DSD).
Davies, who on Tuesday launched the Women’s Sports Union to ‘promote and protect’ female sport alongside sailing pioneer Tracy Edwards, believes it is essential that the DSD aspect is not lost in the political skirmishes to come.
It is understood the IOC are edging closer towards imposing a blanket ban on trans athletes next year, preventing the kind of scenario that saw Laurel Hubbard contest the weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
But it remains unclear how they will navigate the greater prevalence of athletes who have male chromosomes but were raised as female. Under the existing structure, the IOC’s eligibility for the Games rests on the gender listed in an athlete’s passport.
That scenario led to immense controversy at Paris 2024, where Algeria's Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan won boxing gold medals despite being disqualified from the World Championships in 2023 for reportedly failing gender eligibility tests. It followed the long-running legal saga between World Athletics and Caster Semenya, the two-time Olympic 800m champion.
New IOC president Kirsty Coventry campaigned on a remit to protect the female category, but it is understood that changes to the policy around DSD athletes will face more internal opposition than any rules shift on the trans debate.
Sharron Davies has called on the IOC to ensure plans to ban transgender athletes extend to the ‘more important’ issue around competitors with differences in sexual development (DSD)
Algeria's Imane Khelif (above) and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan won boxing gold medals despite being disqualified from the World Championships in 2023 for reportedly failing gender tests
Pointing to a study from World Athletics, which found 50-60 DSD athletes had occupied 135 spaces in elite international finals between 2000 and 2023, Davies told Daily Mail Sport: ‘It is almost more important, really.
‘They had 135 examples since 2000 in athletics alone, which is why Seb (Coe, the World Athletics president) bought in sex screening. Their biggest problem was DSD athletes, it wasn't trans athletes. And they are deliberately taking advantage of this situation.
‘This is a very lucrative thing, winning a gold medal. I was even told that East German doctors were recruited by nations to go and find DSD athletes, and that's well known inside the sporting world.’
Davies, who wants the IOC to resume sex testing via cheek swabs after they stopped the screening programme in 1999, added: ‘Women's sport has been under assault for a very long time, for lots of different reasons, which is why it's absolutely imperative we go back to sex screening.
‘The sensible thing is to create an open category where everyone can be whoever they want to be and a female category.’
The new union, driven and run by Davies and Edwards, intends to support female athletes from the grassroots and up in legal cases. Citing the April ruling at the Supreme Court, which ascribed ‘sex’ to biology at birth rather than gender identity, Edwards said: ‘There are still 30 plus sports in the in England that are not adhering to the definition of sex as biological. We need to make sure that everyone is adhering to the Supreme Court ruling and at the moment they're not.
‘The tide may be turning, but there is a long, long way to go.’
