“It’s Just Really Hateful,” Former USWNT World Cup Winner Megan Rapinoe Blasts IOC’s New Women’s-Sport Policy

It has been days since the International Olympic Committee announced that only athletes deemed eligible through a one-time SRY gene screening would be allowed to compete in the female category at the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Megan Rapino used her podcast with Sue Bird, A Touch More, to denounce the move as invasive, unscientific and, in her words, “really hateful.”

Rapinoe is a former Ballon d’Or winner, a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist and one of the defining public voices of the modern U.S. women’s national team (USWNT). She retired at the end of the 2023 season after a career with the USWNT and OL Reign, now again known as Seattle Reign FC, but she has continued to shape the women’s-sports conversation through media and advocacy.

The immediate trigger for Rapinoe’s remarks was the IOC’s new “Protection of the Female (Women’s) Category” policy, announced on March 26. Under the new framework, athletes seeking to compete in the female category at the Olympic Games, Youth Olympics and qualifying events must undergo a one-time SRY gene screening. The IOC says the policy is meant to create a uniform standard after years in which different international federations set different thresholds and rules.

The IOC described the SRY gene as highly accurate evidence of male sex development and said the screening could be done through saliva, cheek swab or blood sample. The rule is expected to apply from LA 2028 onward and does not operate retroactively and does not affect grassroots or amateur sport.

1. IOC’s Controversial ‘Sex Testing’ Rule for LA 2028 is Dividing World Sports

IOC president Kirsty Coventry framed the policy in the language of fairness and safety, saying that at the Olympic level even tiny margins matter and that it would not be fair for biological males to compete in the female category. That signaled a notable departure from the IOC’s 2021 posture, when the organization largely left transgender and sex-eligibility rules to individual federations rather than imposing a universal Olympic standard. The policy also contains exceptions for rare differences of sex development, including Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a detail that has become one of the most contested pieces of the framework. Supporters argue the broader rule finally restores clarity to women’s sport. Critics argue the exceptions reveal how medically and ethically complicated sex classification can become once sport tries to convert human biology into a single administrative gate. That complexity is part of what made the IOC announcement such a flashpoint. It was not just another federation memo. It was the Olympic movement reasserting central control over one of the most divisive issues in global sport, in a way that almost guaranteed resistance from athletes, advocates and legal campaigners who view sex testing as a harmful return to older policing regimes in women’s competition. Women’s sport has never had more visibility, more investment or more mainstream cultural momentum than it has right now. Yet one of its most persistent arguments remains existential. Who gets to belong, who gets to define fairness, and whether the institutions now claiming to defend women’s competition are doing so in ways women athletes themselves trust.

2. Olympic Legend Slams ‘Hateful’ SRY Policy and ‘Invasive Testing’ on Women Athletes

Rapinoe said the IOC decision was an attack disguised as protection and objected to the name of the policy itself, i.e., “the Protection of the Female [Women’s] Category.” She argued that the label misrepresents what the rule is doing and said she and Sue Bird, both former elite athletes, never viewed this as the kind of issue the IOC now claims it is. She said, “We already know that biology, as much as we want it to be just nice and clean and tight and perfectly in one category and another, it’s not. We know that. So, now what we’re doing is subjecting everybody, all women and all people who are identifying as women to this really invasive testing…” Her core objection was not only about transgender inclusion, but also about what she sees as a wider policing of women’s bodies through eligibility screening. She said the campaign was “to just hate trans people.” She continued, “This committee is framing it as based in science, which it’s not… It’s just really hateful… It’s just horrible and I’m just sickened by it, really.”

3. Caster Semenya Joins the Fight as Public Opinion and SCOTUS Hearings Harden the Sport Split

This is not primarily a Rapinoe-versus-IOC story. It is that other high-profile athletes have pushed back on the same policy from different angles. Caster Semenya, whose career has long been shaped by sex-eligibility rules, vowed to fight the new framework and said meaningful consultation had not occurred. Semenya said the policy did not “smell of science” but of stigma and political pressure. Semenya’s case has become one of the defining precedents in this field. World Athletics already tightened its rules in 2023 for transgender women and for some DSD athletes in certain track events, making the IOC’s move feel less like an isolated innovation and more like the latest escalation in a trend toward firmer sex-based eligibility rules across international sport. At the same time, supporters of the new Olympic policy argue that firmer lines were overdue. Reuters quoted advocates who said the female category cannot function fairly without a protected sex-based standard and that the IOC’s previous decentralized approach left federations to improvise on one of the toughest questions in sports governance. That side of the argument has been strengthened by a public climate that has moved noticeably toward restriction. Gallup found in June 2025 that 69% of U.S. adults believed transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on teams matching their birth sex, while Pew found 66% support for that position in its February 2025 research. The legal environment has shifted, too. In January 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court heard challenges to state laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s school sports, and the court’s conservative majority appeared inclined to uphold those bans. That places Olympic policy inside a broader realignment that extends from youth and school sports to the highest level of international competition.

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