Tighter Rules Proposed Governing Female Athletes
February 18, 2025
World Athletics has proposed new rules that would effectively prohibit athletes assigned female at birth, but whose natural testosterone levels exceed those of most other female athletes, from participating in the “female category” in elite track and field competitions. But in Issues, Roger Pielke Jr. and Madeleine Pape argue against such restrictions, and they offer an alternative approach for determining female eligibility. “Our approach maintains female-male competition categories,” they write, but “in a form that reflects the actual biological complexity of sex and the heterogeneity among female athletes while also respecting their biological sex as assigned and maintained since birth.”