Between 50 and 60 athletes who went through male puberty have been finalists in the female category in global and continental track and field championships since 2000, according to a senior World Athletics official. World Athletics has introduced SRY screening, a gene test that uses a cheek swab to assess if someone is biologically male or female, for the world championships in Tokyo. In a presentation to a scientific panel in the Japanese capital on Friday, Dr Stéphane Bermon, head of health and science at World Athletics, outlined why the sport’s governing body believes such screens are necessary as he presented data collected over the past 25 years. He said it showed that athletes with differences of sex development (DSD), who have a 46 XY karyotype with male testes but were reported female at birth, were significantly “over-represented” in major finals and that it “compromises the integrity of the female competitions”. “Everyone is watching World Athletics and we are leading in this area,” Bermon said before telling his audience that there were “approximately 50-60 cases of DSD in athletics”. In total between 2000 and 2023, Bermon said there had been 135 DSD finalists in elite international events, given some of the 50 to 60 athletes competed in more than one final. He also showed a slide that said that DSD cases are 151.9 times more likely than would be expected given the number of DSD individuals in the general population. The numbers, which were derived by anti-doping tests that revealed high testosterone levels – and arguably therefore may not capture every case – are ignificantly higher than many in the sport had expected…Read more