WNBA Star Brianna Turner Condemns IOC Gender Testing Rules

WNBA player Brianna Turner has criticised the International Olympic Committee’s new gender testing rules, arguing that women athletes like herself should not be used to police who gets to take part in women’s sport.

In an opinion piece published by USA Today, Turner said the IOC’s updated policy is invasive and exclusionary, and that “the final hurdle to represent your country should not be proving to a panel of strangers that you are the woman you say you are”. That quotation is reported in secondary coverage, as the original article was not directly accessible.

Turner’s intervention comes after the IOC announced in March that female-category events at the Olympics from Los Angeles 2028 would be limited to “biological females”, determined through a one-time gene test. Reporting on the policy says athletes competing in the female category will undergo testing for the SRY gene, with further scrutiny possible for those who test positive. The IOC says the measure is intended to protect fairness, safety and integrity in women’s sport.

In her article, Turner rejected the idea that these rules protect women athletes. “Do not use the names of women athletes to target, shame or exclude transgender women. Transgender women are women. Women with intersex variations are women. I welcome these women – and all women – onto my teams,” she wrote, according to secondary reporting on the piece.

She also argued that debates over who is allowed to call themselves a woman distract from the deeper inequalities that continue to shape women’s sport. Turner wrote that policies aimed at trans women and athletes with intersex variations “manufacture a scapegoat” while leaving real issues untouched, including unequal funding, limited access to training and facilities, pay disparities, male-dominated leadership, and gender-based violence and harassment.

Turner further said that sex testing in women’s sport has a long and harmful history, and accused the IOC of abandoning the more inclusive framework it released in 2021, which said there should be no presumption of advantage based solely on sex variations, appearance or transgender status. Reuters reported that critics of the new policy say it lacks a sound scientific basis and risks stigmatising athletes, especially young women and those with differences of sex development.

Caster Semenya has been one of the highest-profile critics of the IOC’s move. Reuters reported that the two-time Olympic champion said the policy “undermines women’s rights”, violates women’s dignity, and revives testing systems that have historically failed athletes. She also criticised the IOC for not properly consulting women with differences of sex development before introducing the rules.

Turner is not alone among prominent US athletes in pushing back. Secondary reporting says Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird also criticised the IOC’s updated approach, arguing that it relies on fearmongering and contested assumptions about advantage rather than solving a real problem in women’s sport. I could not directly verify those remarks from a primary source in this session, so that part should be treated as reported rather than fully confirmed here.

Turner’s broader point was that sport should not become a mechanism for humiliating or screening women whose bodies do not fit narrow expectations. Drawing on her own experience, she wrote that in more than 15 years of organised basketball, she had played with and against transgender athletes and, she believes, athletes with intersex variations, and had never experienced any unfair advantage from them. For her, the issue is not about protecting women from one another, but about deciding whether sport will treat all women with dignity.

Last Updated on Apr 15, 2026