WORLD Athletics’s reintroduction of sex testing at the World Championships 2025 is "a threat to all women", an expert has said.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said the test was being brought back as a means to attract more women into sport and ensure there is "no biological glass ceiling".
"The test to confirm biological sex is a very important step in ensuring this is the case," he added.
But Dr Sheree Bekker, associate professor at the University of Bath, who wrote a book on gender-inclusive sport and sex testing, said the recently reinstated SRY gene test was "patriarchal".
The chromosome testing, originally abandoned by the IAAF, then World Athletics, in 1992 for being inaccurate and humiliating, requires female athletes to submit a cheek swab or blood-spot test for a gene that indicates a Y chromosome to determine their “biological sex”.
The track and field governing body claims the policy, which came into force on September 1, 2025, is to protect and promote the integrity of women’s sport.
“It assumes that women are always going to be smaller, less capable than men and need protection,” Bekker told The National.
“These policies are a form of policing of all women that keep them small. Every woman who participates in athletics will, consciously or unconsciously, feel the need to perform her femininity more.
“It puts the idea in the back of women’s heads that ‘if we’re too good, we’re going to get flagged as not being woman enough to participate in sport’.”
World Athletics said it consulted stakeholders “extensively” earlier this year on what type of test would be implemented.
“Overwhelmingly, the view has come back that [the SRY gene cheek swab test] is absolutely the way to go, within the caveats raised (on testing not being too intrusive),” said Coe.
Despite this, Bekker questioned the process this was done by.
“You can’t be asking the majority their opinions on the human rights of minority.," she said.
"That hasn’t worked out well in history in the past. So, when they say this is about the protection of women’s sport, I always ask, protection of who? The answer is often white women from the global north.”
Bekker asked what had changed about the test's flaws since it was discontinued more than 30 years ago.
The test’s inaccuracy, due to false positives, and the information it reveals, has no bearing, in most circumstances, on how women live their lives.
While World Athletics says the test is a “non-invasive”, “easy” and “one-off”, Bekker is concerned for the wellbeing of athletes who “‘fail’” the test and are told they are no longer considered women for sport purposes, and having such private, medical information shared with sports organisations.
Those athletes may also face “further medical assessment if informed consent is obtained”, according to World Athletics, however, what that entails is unclear.
“In the past, this has been very invasive gynaecological testing. Checking to see the size of people’s clitorises, and they have arbitrary regulations around how a woman’s genitalia is supposed to look,” Bekker explained.
“We know from women who’ve been through this, that it is extremely traumatising and is violence towards women, because you’re being made to undergo testing that you’ve never asked for in your job and wouldn’t be allowed for any other job.”
Previously, World Athletics’s targeted approach of sex testing saw it accused of systemic and scientific racism due to the disproportionate impact on women from the global south.
Bekker speculates that the body’s move to “sex screening” for all athletes is to circumvent such accusations, though is unconvinced this will be enough.
“It can still be a racist policy if the outcomes are that it is going to affect black and brown women from the global south more, precisely because those women don’t look like what World Athletics and these kinds of organisations think a woman should look like, which is often based on the body of a white woman from the global north,” she says.
One of the most “insidious” effects of this policy is yet to come, Bekker warned.
Previously sex testing was reactive, taking place on athletes after they had competed on the world stage, such as Caster Semenya (above).
Now the “screening” is part of the eligibility criteria to compete at world ranking competitions, and could start at earlier levels of the talent pathway in future.
“World Athletics will never have the pushback or huge outcry, because the athletes will have disappeared before they’ve even got there,” Bekker said.
World Athletics has been contacted for comment.
