The Women\u2019s Tennis Association (WTA) has taken a step beyond most other women\u2019s sports leagues by requiring genetic sex testing for female athletes.<\/p>\n
Despite being targeted at transgender women, this policy has the greatest potential to impact intersex cisgender women \u2014 especially because many of them don\u2019t know they are intersex. There are no known trans women playing<\/a> on the WTA Tour. But there are plenty of cis women who will now have to go through medical tests to prove their eligibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n Starting this year, women seeking to compete in WTA tournaments must be screened for the SRY gene, which is normally found on the Y chromosome. The result is meant to determine if someone is a \u201cbiological male,\u201d but it doesn\u2019t show the full picture.<\/p>\n For example, women with Swyer syndrome or Complete Androgen Insensitivity syndrome would fail the SRY gene test because they have XY chromosomes, despite being born with a vagina and living their entire life as a woman. These are only two out of many known intersex variations<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are exceptions in the tennis league\u2019s new policy<\/a> for intersex people. But those exceptions require further tests. They would still have to submit to more testing, provide medical records or possibly involve their physician \u2014\u00a0all in order to prove their identity.\u00a0<\/p>\n When prominent women athletes fail these kinds of tests, or are even suspected of failing them, their identities are routinely publicized and scrutinized on a massive scale. It happened with Caster Semenya<\/a>, the South African middle-distance runner and two-time Olympic champion, and Imane Khelif<\/a>, who won Olympic gold in women\u2019s boxing in 2024. Some of the most powerful people in the world hurled anti-trans rhetoric<\/a> at Khelif, despite the fact that she is not transgender.\u00a0<\/p>\n Barbra Banda, an accomplished striker for the Orlando Pride, Florida\u2019s team in the National Women\u2019s Soccer League, has also experienced this kind of harassment \u2014 based not on any sex tests, but on how she looks. The soccer league has issued multiple statements<\/a> supporting her.\u00a0<\/p>\n The tennis league\u2019s new policy follows shifting stances from the International Olympic Committee<\/a> (IOC) and World Athletics<\/a>, the international governing body for track and field. Both organizations now requiregenetic sex testing for women athletes in the form of an SRY gene screening.\u00a0<\/p>\n Andrew Sinclair, the scientist who discovered the SRY gene, wishes they wouldn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cUsing SRY to establish biological sex is wrong because all it tells you is whether or not the gene is present. It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced and, if so, whether it can be used by the body,\u201d he wrote in a 2025 article for the Murdoch Children\u2019s Research Institute<\/a>, where he works.\u00a0<\/p>\n Related | Caster Semenya\u2019s sex eligibility battle has confounded sports for 16 years\u2014and still isn\u2019t over<\/a><\/p>\n Regardless, to compete in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, all women athletes will be required to pass a SRY gene screening. This impacts sport governing bodies like USA Swimming and USA Track & Field \u2014\u00a0and all\u00a0 the other sports governing bodies<\/a> that are beholden to IOC rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pressure from the White House is another factor. President Donald Trump signed an executive order<\/a> last year to keep trans women out of women\u2019s sports, including at the Olympics. Specifically, the State Department was ordered to use all means possible to get the IOC to amend its standards for women athletes.<\/p>\n But leagues like the Women\u2019s Tennis Association are not governed by the IOC or World Athletics. They are privately owned and operated. And at this point, most of them\u00a0do not have any genetic sex testing requirements.<\/p>\n \n(function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})();\n<\/p>\n The 19th reached out to nine women\u2019s leagues for more information. None except for the WTA responded.Based on publicly available information, none of these leagues \u2014\u00a0except for the WTA \u2014\u00a0require gene screening for women athletes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Most leagues also do not have any public gender eligibility criteria. Although theNational Women\u2019s Soccer League (NWSL) adopted a policy in 2021<\/a> that allowed transgender women to compete if they maintained low testosterone levels, that policy has not been in effect since 2022, The Guardian<\/a> reported last year. As of last summer, there were no known trans athletes in the NWSL.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n As the WTA takes this new step to enforce women players\u2019 identities, advocacy groups say that gender testing is bad news for everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSex testing invades all women\u2019s privacy, forcing them to surrender their personal medical and genetic information,\u201d the intersex advocacy group interACT said in a statement. \u201cAll women, including trans and intersex women, deserve the chance to pursue their athletic dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n \tWe’ll get straight to the point: The financial hardships that Daily Kos is facing this year are tough.<\/p>\n We continue to be paywall-free. We continue to be supported by our readers, not billionaires or corporations. But we need to bring in more revenue. We are leaning on our community more than ever to help make ends meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This policy impacts all women; most other women\u2019s leagues aren\u2019t taking the plunge. By Orion Rummler for The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":825995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,569,29050,82,593],"class_list":["post-825994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-culture","tag-intersex","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/825995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/AP25190300185165.jpg\")
South Africa\u2019s Caster Semenya celebrates after winning the gold medal in the final of the Women\u2019s 800m during the World Athletics Championships in Berlin in Aug. 2009.AP<\/p>\n