The organization that governs track and field at the Olympic level will begin carrying out DNA tests to ensure female athletes are biologically female before they can compete, World Athletics’s President announced this week. “They are necessary,” Sebastian Coe said at this week’s World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, defending a decision taken by the World Athletics Council. The announcement comes almost exactly two years to the day after World Athletics banned transgender women from competing in women’s events. “It’s important to do it because it maintains everything that we’ve been talking about particularly recently, about not just talking about the integrity of female women’s sport but actually guaranteeing it,” Coe added. “This we feel is a really important way of providing confidence and maintaining that absolute focus on the integrity of competition.” Sebastian Coe, President of World Athletics, has announced that female competitors will have to ... More undergo mandatory DNA sex testing in order to compete in international events. (Photo by George Mattock/Getty Images) Getty Images The measure, which aims to ring fence women’s track and field, goes a step further than any other Olympic governing body when it comes to defining who can compete as female. Sports administrators have spent years pondering what, if anything, can and should be done to ensure fairness for all. The question also arose during last summer’s Olympic Games when boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Chinese Taipei were accused of having biological makeups that gave them a competitive advantage. (The International Olympic Committee intervened on behalf of both athletes in an attempt to put the issue to rest.) MORE FOR YOU ‘Buckle Up’—Bitcoin Price Suddenly Braced For A ‘Cambrian Explosion’ Ukraine Unleashes Nikola Tesla’s Weapon In The Black Sea Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Wednesday, March 26th World Athletics is the first Olympic governing body to institute DNA sex testing, which will be carried out through cheek swabs or dry blood tests, both non-invasive methods of collecting samples. The test need only be carried out “once literally in the career life of an athlete,” Coe said, but will be necessary for athletes to be declared eligible to compete in certain middle distance running events. World Athletics could institute the tests as early as this autumn, when the World Championships in track and field are scheduled to take place in Tokyo. Coe, who came third in a field of seven candidates in the IOC Presidential elections last week, made his stance on the issue clear during the campaign. “I will advocate for clear, science-based policies that safeguard the female category,” he wrote in his candidate manifesto. Several other candidates more or less agreed with him, though eventual winner Kirsty Coventry — the only woman among them — has not expressed a firm opinion on the issue. Coventry has indicated that she will call international federations together for further discussion, noting that sex differences impact some sports far more than others. “We know in equestrian, sex is really not an issue, but in other sports it is,” Coventry told Sky News after her election in Costa Navarino, Greece. “So what I'd like to do again is bring the international federations together and sit down and try and come up with a collective way forward for all of us to move." “As a female athlete, you want to be able to walk onto a level playing field, always,” Coventry, a two-time Olympic champion in swimming, remarked during the campaign. “It’s our job as the IOC to make sure we are going to create that environment and that we are going to not just create a level playing field but we are going to create an environment that allows for every athlete to feel safe.” What constitutes female in track and field? What to do about athletes who demonstrate differences in sex development, also known as being intersex, has been a raging issue in track and field for more than a decade. Several prominent women in the sport — including an entire Olympic podium at the 2016 Olympics — compete with naturally elevated levels of testosterone, which contributes to increased muscle-building and oxygen-carrying capacity and according to some sources can give them an unfair advantage over women who do not have the same traits. Some athletes may not even know they possess the genetic advantage before being tested for it. The face of the topic has been Caster Semenya, the South African middle distance runner who won two Olympic titles in the 800 meters in the 2010s. Semenya’s muscular appearance led to questions about her gender, and tests confirmed that she had elevated levels of testosterone. Double Olympic champion Caster Semenya of South Africa has been fiercely opposed to female athletes ... More lowering their natural testosterone levels. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images) Getty Images When World Athletics began requiring women with DSD to take hormones to decrease their levels of testosterone in order to compete at events including the Olympics in 2018, Semenya led the opposition. She and other intersex athletes have opposed measures implemented by World Athletics, arguing that they were born the way they are and should be allowed to race as such. But the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest legal authority in international sports, ruled against her the next year, upholding World Athletics’s right to mandate intersex athletes take testosterone suppressants to bring the level of hormone down to a certain level and maintain it for months before an Olympic Games. Are such measures discriminatory to athletes whose testosterone levels are naturally higher than most women? Yes, acknowledged the Switzerland-based court in its ruling, but also a “necessary, reasonable, and proportionate means” of making sure races are fair. For intersex women, there is not much recourse: they could potentially race in men’s categories, or not at all. The new World Athletics rules are likely to please President Donald Trump, who has indicated that he will not allow visas for transgender athletes intending to come to the U.S. to participate in sports events, including the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. In Fenruary, Trump signed an executive order that prohibited transgender women from taking part in women’s sports. The order includes a clause intended to pressure the IOC not to categorize women who have to lower their testosterone as female. The debate over what constitutes a woman in sport is not new. Ahead of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the IOC began issuing “certificates of femininity” based on sex testing. Ironically, it was the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) an earlier iteration of World Athletics, that led the way in getting the IOC to rescind the policy before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades