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What’s being called an effort to come up with ways to protect the female category in sports competitions could change the International Olympic Committee’s policy on transgender athletes.

New IOC President Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe announced this week that a working group is being assembled to examine the issue, following a day of informal discussions about the Switzerland-based organization’s future held with some 70 members.

They “overwhelmingly” believe the IOC “should protect the female category,” Coventry told reporters at a news conference Thursday, following a week that also included a handover ceremony of the IOC presidency and Executive Board meetings.

“It was agreed by the members that the IOC should take a leading role in this and that we should be the ones to bring together the experts, bring together the international federations and ensure that we find consensus,” she said.

The IOC currently leaves transgender athlete participation up to the international federations that are over individual sports under the " Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations " adopted in 2021.

President Donald Trump has called on the IOC to bar transgender athletes as part of the “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports” executive order he signed in February. It states the U.S. will “to the extent permitted by law,” prevent transgender athletes from entering the country.

Several international federations already ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s events. Track and field’s World Athletics has approved a “pre‑clearance requirement for all elite athletes competing in the female category," likely via a cheek swab.

World Athletics leader Seb Coe, who has said Trump’s executive order is “right on the principle," was among the seven contenders in the recent race to succeed Germany’s Thomas Bach as IOC president, finishing in third place with eight votes to Coventry’s winning 49.

IOC seeking to ‘ensure fairness’

Coventry’s formation of a working group on transgender participation, expected in the next week or so, is not a surprise. After being elected in March, she told reporters the policy would be reviewed, saying she wanted “the IOC to take a little bit more of a leading role.”

Now she is launching another look at the issue by the IOC.

“We understand that there will be differences, depending on the sports, but it was fully agreed that as members and as the IOC that we should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category,” Coventry said.

The agreement included “that we should make sure this is done in consensus with all the stakeholders,” she said, promising that the working group, along with another looking at the bid process for potential Olympic hosts, would be set up hopefully within the next few weeks.

IOC members made it “very clear” that the female category must be protected “first and foremost. We have to do that to ensure fairness,” Coventry said. “But we need to do that with a scientific approach.”

The core of the work on the issue needs to be on scientific and medical research, she said, “so that we are looking at the facts and the nuances.”

The international federations “have already done a lot of work in this area. So we need to bring in the experts. That will take a little bit of time,” she said." We need to bring in the international federations so that we have full buy-in to try and come up with cohesion on this specific topic.”

It’s too soon to say whether that would lead to cheek swabbing, Coventry said. Such tests for the presence of a gene that indicates whether the athlete has a “Y” chromosome present in males had been discontinued by the sports world in the 1990s.

Role of Paris Olympics controversy over women boxers

Coventry, a world champion swimmer from Zimbabwe who made her Olympic debut at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, downplayed the influence of the controversy surrounding women’s boxing at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.

“A lot of members shared with us their own experiences from their own countries that had nothing to do with Paris or with any other specific sporting events, but just their cultural experiences,” she said.

That included “culturally what was expected from us as an Olympic movement, so that made it very clear that we had to do something,” Coventry said, also spelling out that any action taken on the issue will be focused on the future, not the past.

“We’re not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We’re going to be looking forward,” she said. “From the members that were here, it was, ‘What are we learning from the past and how are we going to leverage that and move that forward.”

Bach, who served as IOC president for 12 years, previously blamed a Russian disinformation campaign for the controversy surrounding two women boxers whose gender was questioned by some at the Paris Games.

Ahead of the 2024 Olympics, the IOC withdrew recognition of the Russian-led International Boxing Association over ethical, financial and other concerns, and also limited the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“All this is based on a fake news campaign started in Russia,” Bach said in March, after being sent a letter signed by more than two dozen Republicans in the U.S. Congress urging the IOC to “base eligibility for women’s athletic competitions on biological sex.”

His advice? “Let the dust settle,” Bach said, before looking “at the facts. Then, based on the facts and science, I guess also my successor will be happy to discuss” how to handle the transgender issue.