There was a time when sporting organisations would have been proud of any initiative which protected athletes. Not any more, if those athletes happen to be women. When US Olympic officials changed the rules this week to bar trans-identified males from competing against women, they buried the news under a heading that didn’t even mention the word “transgender”.

It’s more than likely that they’re steeling themselves for a backlash from the US trans lobby and its influential allies. Announcements of this type usually attract a furious response, including false claims that trans women have been banned from taking part in competitive sport. They haven’t, of course: they’re free to compete against other biological men, or in an open category.

The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s change of heart, which was forced by an executive order signed by Donald Trump, means that governing bodies of individual sports will have to adopt the same approach. America’s fencing body has already complied, announcing a new policy that will protect female fencers from having to compete against biological males. Earlier this year, there was outrage when a female competitor was disqualified for refusing to compete against a trans woman at a tournament in Maryland.

Too many sporting bodies are still holding out, however. The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which sits above national committees, has yet to bar trans women from female categories. It has set up a task force to consider the matter, and the IOC’s new president, the former Olympic swimming champion Kirsty Coventry, is on record as saying that the protection of female sport is “paramount”. Of course, last summer’s Paris Olympics were overshadowed by controversy when two boxers, who had been banned from the World Championships for failing sex eligibility tests, were permitted to compete in the female category.

In the UK, we are witnessing an agonising process in which individual sporting bodies drag their heels before coming down on the side of protecting women. After a UK Supreme Court judgment earlier this year established that the word “woman” refers to biological sex, the Football Association barred trans women from the female game. The decision was accompanied by the usual genuflection to trans activists, in the shape of an offer of free counselling to people who can no longer “play the game they love in the gender by which they identify”. The English Cricket Board followed suit a day later, banning trans women from all levels of the female game.

Even so, there are still more governing bodies in this country which allow males to play in female categories than those which ban them. According to the Women’s Rights Network, only 21 sporting bodies restrict involvement in women’s sport by biological sex, while 38 do not. This latter camp includes rounders, taekwondo and wrestling.

Almost every sporting body has been reluctant to bar even the most physically imposing men from the female category. They’ve repeatedly placed the feelings of a small number of trans-identified males above the safety of every woman who has ever dreamt of winning a medal. It’s to the eternal shame of these governing bodies that males were ever allowed to muscle their way into female sport.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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