Kirsty Coventry, the newly elected head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has promised to work alongside President Donald Trump to look at “the transgender issue”; that is, trans women competing in the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California. Trump’s executive order banning trans female athletes, which he signed in early February, promised to pressure the IOC into banning trans athletes.
“We’re going to create a task force that’s going to look at the transgender issue and the protection of the female category,” Coventry said during a press briefing this week, according to The Hill. “Once we’ve made the decision collectively as the IOC, with the international federations, that decision will be made very clear, and we won’t move from that decision.”
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Three out trans or nonbinary athletes competed in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Currently, the IOC allows trans and nonbinary athletes to compete if they’ve met the qualifying eligibility criteria established by the international federations that govern individual sports. Often, these federations require trans athletes to have certain hormone levels in their blood or to have maintained their current gender identity for years before competition.
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Trump’s order explicitly opposes the policies of numerous international sports governing bodies that allow trans women to compete alongside cis women. His order called on those bodies and foreign governments to pass their own anti-trans sports bans as well.
While signing the order, Trump falsely said that “a male boxer stole the women’s gold medal” at the Paris Olympics after “brutalizing his female opponent so viciously that she had to forfeit,” a reference to cisgender female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who was falsely rumored to be trans during the international games.
The IOC investigated Khelif’s case and found that she was eligible to compete, despite claims from the Russian-owned International Boxing Association (IBA) that she had XY chromosomes and high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone. The IBA’s claims have never been verified and the organization has since been decertified as the governing international body of boxing and is not recognized by the IOC.
When signing his executive order, Trump also directed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to deny visas to “men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes.” To this end, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has threatened to permanently ban any foreign trans athlete who tries to enter the United States under a 1952 law that punishes individuals who fraudulently misrepresent their identities in order to enter the country.
As a result, any foreign-born trans athletes who compete in the Olympics or any other international sports competition held in the U.S. will risk having their visas revoked and getting permanently banned from the United States, even if their home countries’ laws allow them to change the gender listed on their birth certificates and other government-issued identification documents.
“I think there’s a number of different challenges that we’re going to face as the Olympic movement, and we’re going to tackle those together,” Coventry said. “So, in terms of Donald Trump, again, it’s going to take communication.”
In early February, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) bowed to Trump’s order and voted to ban all transgender women from women’s sports without first consulting its own medical advisors. The NCAA’s previous policy allowed trans athletes to compete based on the criteria used by the governing bodies of individual sports. Its policy still allows trans male athletes to compete if their sports’ governing bodies allow it.
Trump’s order threatened to individually prosecute schools that allow trans women on women’s teams or in women’s restrooms and locker room facilities, so the NCAA’s policy change may have been an attempt to forestall any prosecution that he could have instigated against schools hosting trans-inclusive NCAA games.
The NCAA covers 1,100 colleges and universities with over 530,000 student-athletes, though it’s estimated that only 10 athletes in the entire association identify as trans, a number accounting for less than 0.002% of NCAA athletes nationwide.
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