Politicians who lose elections find “we were wrong” the hardest thing to say out loud. So gender ideology remains a hill to die on for most congressional Democrats. U.S. President Donald Trump, who read the national room accurately on this file long ago, effectively front-loading it as a campaign issue, thus attracted support from many normally strange political bedfellows.
One of Trump’s first executive orders (EO) was the “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” act. But EOs are only tenure-long. Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill (51 to 45) that would have enshrined lasting protection for the female sport category, but needed 60 votes to pass. Taking heart from this failure, influential pro-trans sport associations like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) regard the EO as a temporary setback to work around.
The International Consortium on Female Sport, a global organization devoted to fairness in sport for women, founded by Canada’s Linda Blade, warned President Trump in an open letter that while the NCAA “may seem to have aligned” with his EO, closer inspection reveals “word play” designed to evade enforcement. The EO calls for participation in women’s sporting events to be “determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction.” But, they note, the NCAA “continues to use ‘gender identity’ in its framing of what constitutes ‘fairness’ and ‘gatekeeping’ in the female category.”
Only the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has the power to move the dial universally on this pivotal issue. Even President Trump, in his gender EO, deferred to the IOC as the court of last resort, calling on them to “change everything … having to do with this absolutely ridiculous subject” in anticipation of Los Angeles’ 2028 Summer Games.
This could well happen, but it won’t be because of Trump’s invocation. On March 20, the IOC’s 109-strong international membership will, in a likely multiple round of voting, install a rare change at the top. The new session will commence at an opening ceremony in Olympia, Greece, the spiritual home of the Games.
All seven presidential candidates have published their manifestos, delivered to IOC members on Jan. 30, which have been handily unpacked on X by the England-based Women’s Rights Network. Unless you follow IOC politics closely, many of these names may be unfamiliar to you. According to Blade, “gender ideologues are deeply embedded within the IOC.” The salient point is that most of the candidates trail a few leaders, and so their stance on the trans issue — some mute, some waffling — will turn out to be irrelevant.
Fortunately, the top seed in the presidential stakes, former Olympic champion Sebastian Coe, is the only contender who has proved his mettle on the issue. Under Coe’s leadership, transwomen who had experienced male puberty were banned from World Athletics in 2023. In his manifesto, Coe says he will “advocate for clear, science-based policies that safeguard the female category,” adding that women’s sport “is at a critical juncture.”
A plethora of reliable scientific proof attesting to the male advantage has been in the public domain for years, so Coe would have no problem on that score. Furthermore, unlike more embarrassing sex-identification tests in the past that gender activists objected to on privacy grounds, today a simple cheek swab screening reveals unrebuttable, chromosomal evidence of sex. (Doping tests involve observed urination — quite embarrassing, but the need for certainty requires this privacy intrusion, just as public health needs demanded uncomfortable nasal swabbing that disclosed our COVID status. So the “privacy” objection is a complete red herring).
U Sports, Canada’s closest approximation to the NCAA, is Canada’s governing body for university sports. Interestingly, one has to do a rather deep dive on its present website to find wordage on, let alone a policy regarding transgender athletes. Its apparently still-working policy, formulated in 2018, allows for males to self-identify their way into female competitions, locker rooms and team housing. All female Canadian U-sport athletes therefore still remain vulnerable to unfairness in elite competition.
The good news is that if the IOC finally breaks up the gender-ideology logjam they did so much to create, NCAA and Canada’s U Sport will have a hard time justifying time and money spent on nurturing trans athletes’ careers, knowing they are ineligible for sport’s glittering prize: a shot at the Olympics.
Although Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has vigorously defended women’s sex-based rights in all their contested spaces, including sport, Blade predicts that in our current political limbo, all federal leaders will carefully sidestep the issue. If Coe wins the IOC presidency, though, Poilievre will gain public approval by default, while newly installed Prime Minister Mark Carney will find himself boxed into an increasingly unpopular ideological position that Justin Trudeau and his party embraced with unconditional gusto.
Canadians support protection for the female category in sport by wide margins, because fairness ranks high as a value amongst Canadians as a whole. This IOC election may well be sport’s last chance to survive with honour.
National Post
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