World Boxing must keep its fighters safe, but its gene test was discredited 30 years ago

Everything old is new again. In the 1960s, the International Olympic Committee introduced “sex testing”, to weed out the pretend women from the female athletes. One method was the nude parade, in front of “expert” physicians.

The 1972 edition of the Olympic Charter speaks of women athletes being subjected to medical proof. The IOC administered sex tests as recently as the 1996 Games in Atlanta. Those tests weren’t foolproof, and the practice was spiked before Sydney 2000.

But more than a quarter-century later, the spectre of sex testing is on the agenda once again.

For a long time, boxing’s place on the Olympic program for LA 2028 was uncertain. The four Olympics up to 2016 were infected by corrupt refereeing and judging and in mid-2023, the IOC excommunicated the International Boxing Association – which had previously overseen the sport at the Games – due to its non-compliance with the Olympic Charter.

Consequently, the boxing competition in Paris – as with the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 – took place without the involvement of the IBA and instead under the direct control of the IOC – which lost control, assuming it ever held it. Calamitous is a euphemistic description.

Only a small minority could tell you the name of any male boxer who won gold in Paris. But I’ll bet any money that most with even a passing interest could identify the Algerian women’s welterweight gold medallist, Imane Khelif, in a line-up. Such was the maelstrom of controversy that enveloped her triumph.

Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting also won gold, in the women’s featherweight division. The treatment of each fighter in Paris was dreadful. Try to comprehend dealing with the gaze of billions being told you’re a man infiltrating the women’s competition.

Earlier this year, the IOC conferred provisional recognition on World Boxing, the new body intended to fill the void left by the IBA. Newly minted as an IOC-recognised governing body, WB’s 2025 World Championships kick off next week in Liverpool, England.

Last week – merely a fortnight out from the day the first punches are thrown – WB dropped the mic: effective immediately, all athletes aged 18 years and older must prove the truth of their claimed sex. Just like the IOC required in the 1960s and through to the 1990s; just as the IOC abandoned 25 years ago.

The rules require every over-age fighter stepping into the squared circle to undergo genetic testing to determine their sex at birth. Only athletes determined to have been female at birth shall be permitted to compete in female-gender competitions, and vice versa.

By next Thursday, every over-age athlete wishing to compete in the female competitions must undergo this “once-in-a-lifetime” sex testing. Wherever there is a challenge to an athlete’s sex certification, the athlete is determined ineligible for all competition until the dispute is resolved through WB’s “judicial process”.

As to the question of timing and immediacy, World Athletics introduced similar rules in July, and its world championships begin in Tokyo the week after next. But WA’s rules incorporate a six-week notice period and a far more sophisticated set of regulations.

It can’t be argued that WB, as the recognised international federation for boxing as far as the IOC is concerned, must develop and implement comprehensive, intelligible and fit-for-purpose rules concerning gender identification, differences of sex development (DSD) athletes, and their participation in the sport.

Boxing is one of those sports where combatants can, and do, die. It is through that prism that the sport’s rules must be developed. Governing bodies must ensure that lackadaisical approaches to safety don’t manifest in the deconstruction of the sport.

But WB has gone the easy path. Its rules require athletes wanting to compete in the female competition to undergo a cheek-swab gene test to identify the presence of the SRY gene, which is the marker for identifying whether the male Y chromosome is present. Where the Y chromosome is detected, the athlete is prohibited from competing in the female category.

It’s recognised that for elite sport, merely determining whether a person has XX or XY chromosomes – the bedrock of World Boxing’s testing methodology – isn’t the best measure for eligibility to compete in female competitions.

People way smarter than me will tell you that a person can carry XY chromosomes and be biologically female. Under World Boxing’s rules, those athletes would fail the test for entry to female competition. Introduced with apparent haste, it’s difficult to decipher whether – and if so, then how – an athlete caught in that vice might launch an appeal. Appeal to whom? On what grounds?

More than 3,000 female athletes underwent the SRY gene test under the IOC’s rules at the 1996 Olympics. Eight failed, after the presence of the male Y chromosome was detected due to various medical conditions. The tests are inherently discriminatory against some women with sexual development disorders.

Additionally, World Boxing’s rules don’t ensure chain-of-custody and scientific standards. Responsibility for testing is imposed onto the national federations. That may be reasonable in many countries, but what about those with scant laboratory access and limited testing expertise? What are the athletes from those countries meant to do by next Thursday?

Any test result is only ever as reliable as a sample’s chain of custody. Contamination of evidence kills doping cases. Even an infinitesimally small contaminant from a male lab technician would ruin the reliability of a sample extracted for testing, and an athlete’s career where there is no time for an appeal, let alone an appeals system.

The IOC junked SRY gene sex testing before the Sydney Olympics because of its unreliability. Yet, 25 years on, here we are again. World Boxing has published no scientific or laboratory standards for testing. There’s no list of accredited labs or particular types of testing which are deemed admissible or not.

These problems aren’t hypothetical – the Olympic champion Lin Yu-ting will be in Liverpool. In July 2024, the IBA – the same body the IOC chucked out – released a statement saying it had disqualified the athlete from its 2023 world championships for her “… failure to meet the eligibility criteria for participating in the women’s competition, as set and laid out in the IBA Regulations …”.

Complex? You bet. Which only heaps pressure on World Boxing to get it right.

Darren Kane is a Sydney sports lawyer and the chairman of the Combat Sports Authority of NSW.