The new guidelines follow a two-year consultation process with more than 250 athletes and stakeholders.
Released on Tuesday, the framework is not legally binding and will place the onus on individual sports federations to determine if an athlete has a disproportionate advantage.
The 10-point document will come into force after Beijing 2022, but not all sports are prepared to find a solution for their athletes before Paris 2024.
“What we are offering all international federations is our expertise and a dialogue, rather than jumping to conclusions,” said Kaveh Mehrabi, director of the IOC’s athletics division. .
“This is a process that we have to go through with each federation on a case-by-case basis and see what is required.”
This new framework replaces the previous IOC guidelines, issued in 2015.
The previous policy allowed transgender athletes to compete as long as their testosterone levels were below a certain limit for at least 12 months prior to their first competition.
In the announcement, the IOC said the new framework would eliminate this with IOC medical director Richard Budgett saying: “You don’t have to take testosterone (to decide who can compete). But here’s the way. As a guide, it’s not an absolute rule.”
There is a debate in the scientific community about whether androgens like testosterone are a useful marker for athletic advantage.
The new guidelines also apply to athletes with differences in sex development (DSD), such as South African 800m runner Caster Semenya, whose testosterone levels were noted to be too high to competed as women in several events.
The announcement comes after the 2020 Summer Olympics, billed as the most comprehensive Games to date with Outsports reporting in July that there will be at least 180 LGBTQ+ athletes in Tokyo and at least 180 At least four athletes have come out and are transgender or non-binary.
Soccer player Quinn became the first transgender and non-binary athlete to compete in the games and the first to win a medal when the Canadian women’s team won gold in Tokyo.
Meanwhile, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was the first transgender woman to compete at the Olympic Games, where she competed in the women’s +87kg super heavyweight category but failed to register for a single lift in his event.
The IOC also said gender screening and “invasive physical exams” used to verify an athlete’s gender were “disrespectful” and “potentially harmful.”
“We really want to make sure that athletes are not pressured or forced to make decisions that are harmful to their bodies,” said Magali Martowicz, head of the IOC’s human rights department.
The framework emphasizes that athletes must be part of the decision-making process and says the guidelines will be periodically reviewed to reflect “any relevant developments in ethics, human rights, legal , science and medicine in the field.”
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