TWIBS: Begun, the Chromosome Wars Have
President Sebastian Coe of World Athletics, the international organizing body for multiple sports’ championships and at the Olympics, has promised to introduce chromosome testing for their female athletes.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Here we go, folks… the chromosome wars are upon us.
World Athletics (the governing body for the sport of… athletics? I guess that covers track and field and several variations of walking and jumping) has announced that soon any women hoping to compete in a WA sanctioned event or, indeed, the freaking Olympics will have to submit to genetic testing to determine their chromosomal makeup.
How very normal and cool!
“The process is very straightforward, frankly very clear, and it’s an important one. We will look for a testing provider, we will work on the timelines, and the tests will only need to be done once in the career life of an athlete,” said WA president Sebastian Coe. Since the WA hosts all athletics championships and acts as the world governing body for sports that fall under this category, they’ll be systemically denying transgender women from competing in those Olympic sports. This is a result of the International Olympic Committee passing the buck to world governing bodies for establishing standards for trans competitors back in 2021.
Thanks to the IOC’s cowardice, transgender women have been banned from competition in World Athletics events, World Sailing events, and World Aquatics events (in case you’re curious, Lia Thomas lost her appeal with CAS because they suck). We’ve even been banned from less prestigious sports for our natural XY advantages in the rigorously athletic fields of golf and chess.
You may also recall that the International Boxing Association’s president last year declared two Olympic boxers to have XY chromosomes without providing an ounce of proof, kicking off a bout of mass hysteria among transphobes like JK Rowling. Fortunately after years of doubt regarding the integrity of IBA matches they were denied the right to act as the world governing body for boxing and just last month replaced by World Boxing, who hopefully won’t fix fights for cash prizes like their predecessors are alleged to have done.
This news comes as no surprise, mind you: Last November, while gearing up to run for president of the IOC, Coe made it very clear that he believes transgender women should not be allowed to compete in sports against cisgender women. He reaffirmed his intent in December by stating that, should he be elected president of the Olympics governing body, he would introduce “science-based policies.”
Coe lost his bid for presidency because he dresses funny and nobody likes him, but that doesn’t matter because Kirsty Coventry, former Olympic swimmer and shockingly white, blonde, blue-eyed Zimbabwean woman won the election and she hates transgender women just as much as that old sponge Lord Coe.
So hey! What does science say, since we’re all so concerned about science-based fairness or whatever?
For a start, a 2024 study titled “Strength, power and aerobic capacity of transgender athletes: a cross-sectional study” suggests that transgender athletes may be less athletically capable post-transition than their cisgender counterparts. So that’s the “biological reality” ship sunk right away, I guess! While we’re here, though, I could also point out that one in 400 “male” and one in 650 “female” babies demonstrate some form of chromosomal abnormality, such as Klinefelter syndrome, trisomy X, and 47,XYY syndrome.
Most people walking around have no idea what their chromosomes look like… and don’t get me started on large gametes. The truth is that you may be androgen insensitive or carry an extra chromosome and never know it, unless your body happens to develop in somewhat atypical ways and you get yourself tested and diagnosed.
There is no rational basis for these bans. I know it, you know it, and these chuds know it too, but they’re cowards who need to dress up their fear and disgust and prejudice in pseudoscience and appeals to emotion.
Don’t ever let them pull the wool over your eyes on this one.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
