The Sport & Rights Alliance has urged the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) to reconsider its new sex-testing policy, describing the measure as discriminatory and warning that it could stigmatise players on the women’s tour.
The WTA introduced the policy last month, requiring players to undergo a one-time genetic screening for the SRY gene, which is associated with biological sex determination. The test can be conducted through a cheek swab or blood sample and is required for eligibility to compete in WTA tournaments.
The move represents a major shift from the WTA’s previous policy, under which transgender women could compete after declaring their gender as female and maintaining testosterone levels below the prescribed threshold for two years. Reuters reported in July that there were no known transgender women competing at any level of professional tennis at the time.
Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport & Rights Alliance, said the WTA’s intentions could not remove the potential harm caused by sex testing.
“The WTA can claim it does not intend to cause harm, but good intentions will never erase the stigmatisation and trauma that women and girls will suffer due to sex testing,” Florence said.
SABALENKA BACKS TESTING AMID GROWING DEBATE
The policy has divided opinion among leading players. World No.1 Aryna Sabalenka has publicly backed the movearguing that biological differences make separate categories important for competitive fairness.
“I think it’s really important to keep the fairness in our tour,” Sabalenka said at the Canadian Open. “It’s obviously, biologically, men are way stronger than women, so I feel like it would be not really fair for the woman to compete against biological man.”
She added: “I believe it took them a little while to make this decision and, yeah, I support it. But for me, I’m focusing on myself, on my goals, you know, whatever it takes. If they want to test us all, I’m happy to do that; it’s pretty fair, and let’s keep it that way.”
Coco Gauff, meanwhile, said she understood the reasoning behind protecting fairness in women’s sport but was concerned the policy could create hostility towards the transgender community.
The controversy follows the International Olympic Committee’s March decision that biological female athletes must have their sex determined through a one-time test to compete in women’s events at the Olympics. The WTA has said its screening will be accompanied by confidentiality and data-privacy safeguards.
The Sport & Rights Alliance, however, believes those safeguards do not address its central concerns, putting further pressure on the WTA to reconsider a policy that has already become one of the most contentious issues in women’s tennis.
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