It Still Makes A Difference

(Personally, at this stage of my life, I’m thinking of tattooing DNR on my forehead and chest. There is no need to rescusitate me now. But, over the years, I’ve watched little to no progress on women’s cardiac treatment; they’re treated as if they’re hysterical, and also by using research on men’s cardiac. Frequently, women’s heart attacks don’t present the way men’s do. Even though women bother to learn about this so they know when to get help, they aren’t able to be treated properly because of lack of knowledge, and, as reported below, disbelieving the women. Anyway, here is this.)

If your heart stopped right now, would a stranger save you? It depends on your sex.

Why women are less likely to receive CPR—and less likely to survive

Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD

If you’ve been watching The Pitt Season 2, you may have caught one of the most medically important scenes on television this year. (Alert: small spoiler from last week’s episode coming!)

A woman arrives at the ER by ambulance, clutching her chest, complaining of pain. Her EKG comes back looking normal. Doctors are puzzled. Then her heart stops.

Dr. Robby, played by Noah Wyle, figures out what happened: the paramedics placed her EKG leads too low on her chest, and far too low to get an accurate reading, missing her heart attack. Later, he confronts the paramedics directly. They felt uncomfortable moving her breasts to place the leads correctly. He turns to his staff and asks: “Shall we put it to a vote? Ladies in the room—show of hands—death with modesty, or life with brief nudity?”

The vote from the women is clear: they want to live.

It’s a fictional scene (and in real life, public chastisement is certainly not the way to correct medical staff), but it highlights a very real problem we see every day.

Women are less likely to receive bystander CPR.

If someone collapsed at a restaurant, would you start CPR? It turns out that for many people, the answer depends on the sex of the person who collapsed: women are less likely than men to receive CPR from a bystander (a nonmedical professional who is nearby) in public, and they are less likely to receive defibrillation (shocks that can restart the heart).

A Duke University study of more than 309,000 cardiac arrests found that women who had a cardiac arrest in public were 14% less likely to receive bystander CPR than men. This is true around the world, too.

And women are less likely to survive. Chest compressions and shocks in those first few minutes are critical, and bystander CPR can double to triple the chance of survival.

Why are women less likely to receive CPR? The same reasons The Pitt depicted.

Researchers have asked the public why they think this happens, and the answers are striking:

Concerns about touching a woman’s chest to provide compressions.
Concerns about accusations of sexual assault.
Fear of causing injury to women, in part due to perceptions they are more frail.
Gender stereotypes that women are emotional or overreactive to symptoms.
Misperceptions that women are unlikely to experience true cardiac arrest.

While these fears may be common, actual cases of lawsuits against bystanders performing CPR are not—and Good Samaritan laws protect individuals genuinely trying to help in medical emergencies.

A 2020 review of CPR lawsuits in the U.S. found the vast majority of lawsuits were related to withholding CPR (not providing it). Lawsuits alleging harm from CPR were extremely rare (only 3 out of 170 cases), and all took place in medical facilities (not bystander CPR). The review found zero cases where a layperson was found liable for harm by providing CPR.

When should CPR be provided?

If someone is unresponsive and not breathing (or only gasping), start CPR. The basics are simple, and anyone can do it. Here’s a quick refresher:

Call 911 immediately (or have someone else call while you start CPR).
Push hard and fast in the center of the chest: press 2 inches deep to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” (or any other song with a beat of 100-120 per minute). Let the chest return to its normal position between each compression.
Don’t stop until emergency services arrive. CPR is a WORKOUT. If you get tired (which is normal), try to switch out with someone.
Use an automated external defibrillator (AED) as soon as one is available. Follow the voice prompts, it walks you through where to place the pads and when a shock is needed.

Common questions and misconceptions about CPR

(Note: this is for the general public, if you are health care provider, different guidance will apply.)

Do I need to check a pulse? Nope! It turns out most people are pretty bad at this. Instead, if someone is not responsive and not breathing (or only gasping), assume their heart has stopped and start compressions.
Do I need to provide rescue breaths (mouth-to-mouth)? If it’s a teen or adult, for most cases the answer is no. Chest compressions alone (“hands only CPR”) can be just as effective. While rescue breaths are important in cases of drowning, suspected overdose, and for children, in most other situations chest compressions alone is enough!
Do I need to remove clothing to start chest compressions? Nope! The priority is starting compressions as soon as possible. If you find something they are wearing is getting in the way, then don’t hesitate to remove it, but otherwise you can do compressions on top of clothing.
Do I need to remove clothing to use the defibrillator (AED)? Yes—the pads for a defibrillator should be placed directly on the skin. Place them where the stickers show they should go, and reposition or remove any clothing that is in the way. (This may include a bra!) Metal in bras is not an issue for shocks—you can leave it on as long as it’s not in the way of the pads.
What if we’re in public and other people might feel awkward from exposure of a woman’s chest? Do it anyway. Remember, the alternative is letting the woman die. Other people’s potential opinions or discomfort should not be weighed as more important than a woman’s life.
What if they appear frail and I might injure them? Start compressions anyway. You can’t get more injured than dead—which is what a cardiac arrest is. Broken ribs are common in CPR (for both male and female patients), but people can heal from those. They can’t heal from a heart that stops beating and isn’t restarted.
If I haven’t taken a CPR course, should I still provide CPR? Yes! Any chest compressions—even imperfect ones—are far better than no compressions. If you’d like to take a course, find one at redcross.org or heart.org.

Bottom line

Women are less likely to receive CPR, less likely to be defibrillated, and less likely to survive cardiac arrest. The first few minutes after a cardiac arrest are the most critical, and CPR from someone like you significantly improves chance of survival. If someone isn’t responding and isn’t breathing, start chest compressions. Even if it’s a woman.

Love, KP

Thank you to Dr. Sarah Perman, emergency physician and cardiac arrest researcher, for reviewing this post!

Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD, is completing a combined emergency medicine residency and research fellowship focusing on health literacy and communication. In her free time, she is a contributing writer for Your Local Epidemiologist and creator of the newsletters You Can Know Things and The Public Health Roundup. Views expressed belong to KP, not her employer.

Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife, and mom of two little girls. YLE reaches over 450,000 people in over 132 countries with one goal: “Translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. (snip)

Hrmphh. Nobody Ever Listens To Us.

Feminists began raising the alarm about the manosphere decades ago – and we were ignored

Laurie Penny

We were told we couldn’t take a joke, and that social media isn’t real life. Now the misogyny of early chatrooms and Gamergate has reached the White House

Harrison Sullivan, known as HSTikkyTokky, in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. Photograph: Netflix/PA

Why has it taken so long for us to treat misogyny as a political problem? The modern manosphere has been metastasising for many years – and for years, mainstream culture has responded with a helpless shrug. There was nothing unusual about men hurting women, even if the technology was new.

In the early aughts, angry and alienated men began indulging in recreational misogyny online, bombarding women and girls in the public eye with threats, insults, harassment, hacking, and hideous “revenge porn”. Strange as it may now sound, though, “the internet” was still seen as separate from “real life”.

That, at least, was what I was told the first time I went to the police about the death threats I was receiving as a young columnist. Nothing could be done, because what happened on social media wasn’t real and didn’t count. If I didn’t like it I should get offline, and presumably continue my work via rotary phone and fax. Those of us who were early targets of what would become the manosphere did not have the luxury of ignoring the issue. For us, it was easy to see that this was something new and serious, easy to understand how the tactics used against us might be deployed elsewhere – and how quickly matters could escalate.

Which is what happened in 2014. In May of that year, the terrorist Elliot Rodger killed six people and brought global attention to “incels” – young men radicalised by sexual resentment.

Three months later came Gamergate, a global orgy of online harassment targeting women in the video game industry. It all started when up-and-coming game creator Zoe Quinn was attacked by a bitter ex-boyfriend in a book-length tirade of sexual and professional jealousy. The non-scandal became a lightning rod for tens of thousands of gamers furious that women were intruding on a medium that was meant to be their personal power fantasy.

On anonymous forums like 4chan, men coordinated an extraordinary campaign of abuse dressed up as concern for “journalistic ethics”. Quinn and other creators were driven from their homes, but the firestorm was already out of control. Over the next few years, as “incels” continued to carry out acts of mass murder, every entertainment industry, from comics and publishing to film and TV, was besieged by obsessive trolls casting themselves as brave rebels against illiberal “social justice warriors”. The more they got away with it, the more they treated it like a game.

Gamergate brought together the disparate strands of what we now call the manosphere: the grifting pickup-artists, the Christian nationalists, the bitter “incels” and the furious fans triggered into mass social vandalism whenever they heard a story they weren’t the hero of. This slurry of half-formed fixations congealed into a coherent ideology of aggrieved entitlement, with its own language – “escaping the matrix”, “taking the red pill” – and their own logic of heroic victimhood in the face of women’s sexual power. The rage and alienation of men abandoned by post-crash capitalism was channelled towards a common cause – one ripe for co-option by the worst possible actors.

Throughout the mid-aughts, mainstream media continued to underestimate the manosphere. The fringes of the right did not make the same mistake. Gamergate was the proving ground for some of the central propagandists of the new “alt-right”. Steve Bannon, the political svengali and co-founder of Breitbart News, saw the potential in this cohort of cranks. He went on to run Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, helping to deliver that key demographic to a president who personified everything the new cult of male supremacy most admired, as he crowed about sexual violence and held the notionally free world hostage to his every emotional spasm.

In hindsight, it is startling that all of this was normalised for so long. It was apparently inconceivable that violence against women could constitute a crisis – unless, of course, the violence was blamed on immigrants or on transgender people, at which point women’s safety suddenly shot to the top of the political agenda. When feminists and others in the infected eye of the storm tried to raise the alarm, we were told we were exaggerating for attention, or that we couldn’t take a joke. Under the posturing, cartoon frogs and memespeak, these were lost young men who deserved patience and understanding, and if we didn’t offer it we were heartless, humourless killjoys.

Identical arguments were used to dismiss the rise of Maga until it was far too late. The playbook tested out on feminists and on Black, queer and female creators in the mid-aughts was replicated in far-right movements across the global north – as was the response of muted both-sidesism. Then as now, politicians, pundits and industry leaders officially disapproved of the worst excesses of the manosphere, but declined to take an explicit stand, terrified that any display of moral integrity would alienate their base.

As the 2010s turned into the 2020s and the manosphere continued to expand, funnelling its recruits towards ever more extreme, explicitly racist ideas, it became fashionable to cast “social justice warriors” as the pressing danger to human freedom. Politicians and public figures seemed far more concerned about the #MeToo movement, which seemed proof positive that feminists had gone too far – and deserved, perhaps, to be punished for it. After the third or fourth time a documentary crew came to interview me about all the death threats, I realised that they didn’t want to help – they wanted to watch.

Lots of people did. After Gamergate, bigotry became a growth industry for enterprising young lads unburdened by conscience. As a journalist, I interviewed many young far-right men who admitted that what they really wanted was to be influencers and film-makers. For clicks and views they courted controversy and flirted with the far right – but it didn’t take long for the relationship to get serious. As Kurt Vonnegut writes in his anti-fascist masterpiece Mother Night, “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”.

Today, nobody is pretending that this is a joke any more. Trump, in his deranged dotage, is openly courting the manosphere, and the young men of gen Z are veering towards the far right en masse. There’s a clear line from the social vandalism of Gamergate to the mega-grifting male supremacists, scamming their followers with the promise of a reality where women and girls are non-player characters, to be defeated, exploited or traded for tokens in a brutal marketplace of human value. Many young men have lived their entire lives in the shadow of this weaponised misogyny – and so have young women. And that sinister ideology is still gnawing at the heart of power.

A few weeks ago, in a break from encouraging his deranged president to take over Greenland, White House adviser Stephen Miller found time to post a tweet on X that appears to be mocking the new Star Trek series for being too diverse. Elon Musk emerged from his fug of racial conspiracy theories and transphobia to agree. This is embarrassing, and not just because any half-literate nerd knows that Star Trek has been woke since 1966. Because even after turning the world into their personal thunder dome, the representatives of aggrieved white male power are still unsatisfied, still demanding we cater to their every petty whim. They will continue to do so until the rest of us, at last, refuse to tolerate their nonsense.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author and screenwriter. They write the substack Force of Culture

Trump Admin Fires Top US Army General In The Middle Of A War

Ron flew to Texas on Saturday. We used Uber to take him. He is driving his sister back here. They should be here tomorrow. I need a few days of rest then I will start replying to comments and bogging again. Hugs

Heather ‘Digby’ Parton joins the program to recap the week’s news. Check out Digby’s work at Salon as well as her blog Hullabaloo. Topics include the American right-wing’s desperation to keep Victor Orban in power in Hungary, Trump firing all the women around him, Iran and more.

Pete Hegseth’s Pastors Go Full Misogynist Pigs

Kegseth our defense secretary is moving to make an all Christian white male military claiming he wants a warrior culture not a losing woke one. I don’t understand that as Russia has an all male white military and they are getting their asses handed to them in Ukraine. The idea that women are in any way inferior is wrong. Females are the same as males individually they all have different talents and abilities. This old time misogyny is rooted in keeping males in charge. Hugs

Gov. Ron DeSantis signs Florida’s version of the SAVE Act

I am unable to figure out if the Florida Real ID driver’s license that the state forced everyone to get a bunch of years ago. I remember having to go to the driver’s license place with a folder of information including utility bills in my name and with my birth certificate and my marriage license. It was touted as the “Real Id” that was the only one we would need. It was OK even for flying. When I told Ron about this he was adamant that after his surgery we get me a passport no matter the cost. I explained that we both should have them in case our same sex marriage gets invalidated. We have one out that I am sure my abusive adoptive parents did not plan to give me. They were Canadian citizens here on green cards and my birth certificate shows me as their kid, something I have always hated. Current Canadian laws let me apply to Canada for asylum or simply to immigrate with my spouse. But it clearly shows this is an attempt to restrict those who have the right to vote to do so. Hugs

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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/gov-ron-desantis-signs-floridas-version-act-rcna265112

The law’s requirements for proof of citizenship to register to vote and stricter voter ID rules won’t take effect until next year.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that is akin to President Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act at the national level.Matias J. Ocner / Miami Herald via Getty Images file

April 1, 2026, 11:08 AM EDT

By Jane C. Timm

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Wednesday that will require proof of citizenship to vote and impose stricter voter ID restrictions on Floridians.

The new law, most of which won’t take effect until after the midterm elections, is Florida’s version of the federal SAVE America Act, a bill President Donald Trump has championed. That measure is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, where it lacks the 60 votes needed to advance under current rules.

“This bill protects and expands integrity in our voter registration process,” DeSantis said. “Our Constitution in the state of Florida says only American citizens are allowed to vote in our elections, so we need to make sure that is the law.”

Democrats and voting rights advocates warn Florida’s law will disenfranchise eligible voters who lack ready access to the documents that are needed to vote.

Already, the League of Women Voters of Florida and a coalition of advocacy groups, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed a federal lawsuit to block the law.

“We are most concerned about impact as it relates to the most vulnerable Florida voters,” said Jonathan Topaz, attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “This could mean older Black voters who grew up in Jim Crow South who don’t have access to birth certificates, this could be naturalized citizens — we know naturalized citizens are flagged as noncitizens all the time.”

Voters who were born in Puerto Rico, have changed their name or have lost documents may struggle to meet the requirements of the new law, he said.

Supporters of the legislation note that millions of Floridians have already shown government officials their passports or birth certificates when obtaining a REAL ID. They also argue the law is necessary to prevent voter fraud, despite little evidence of it occurring.

More than 9% of American citizens of voting age do not have proof of citizenship documents readily available, according to a study commissioned by the Brennan Center for Justice. Based on that metric, advocates fear that more than 1 million Floridians could struggle to cast a ballot starting next year, when the law will be fully implemented.

Other states have tried to impose documentary proof of citizenship requirements in the past, but courts have ruled they violate federal law. To comply with one such ruling, Arizona now has a bifurcated election system that allows those who haven’t proved their citizenship to only vote in federal elections.

The system offers a window into the kinds of people who do not have access to the documents required by proof of citizenship laws. In Arizona, they are disproportionately voters of color and younger voters, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center. Votebeat reported that Arizonans who are only eligible to vote in federal elections often live around college campuses, suggesting they are students without their citizenship documents on hand.

Florida’s law has different requirements than Arizona’s, however. It asks election officials to verify voters’ citizenship after registration. For Floridians who have shown their passport or birth certificate to government officials when getting a driver’s license, their citizenship will be affirmed and their registration approved.

Those without this information on file will be asked to prove their citizenship within a month or they could be removed from the voter rolls.

Wendy Sartory Link, the supervisor of elections for Palm Beach County, said implementing this law will be a major challenge for election officials, particularly those in larger, more diverse counties.

Link said her office will need to roll out new rules and forms — all of which do not yet exist and will need to be written by the state — and rush to begin preparing for the proof of citizenship requirements that go into effect in January.

She said that computer systems will need to be updated — the voter file doesn’t currently include a space for citizenship proof — and that new systems will need to be created among agencies to share data. Link also said she will need to hire new staffers to handle the increased workload, though the bill didn’t give her any additional funding to pay for it. Once voters are asked for proof, she said, she’s worried long lines will form with voters bringing proof of citizenship.

She also said she has many unanswered questions: Can she accept proof of citizenship over email even if she can’t touch the raised seal to be sure it’s an original document? Does she need to ask voters to prove their citizenship every time they update their voter registration? Does she need new trainings to evaluate the proof that voters may bring her?

“If somebody brings a birth certificate and it’s an Idaho birth certificate, I don’t know what that looks like. Am I supposed to know whether or not that’s a fraudulent birth certificate, or do I just accept it because it says Idaho birth certificate?” Link said.

Florida’s new law also restricts the kind of photo IDs that voters can use to prove their identities at the poll, eliminating the use of retirement community and student IDs.

At polling sites near college campuses and retirement communities, Link said, this change could trigger long lines as more students fill out provisional ballots and need to later affirm their identities.

Out-of-state students may struggle to obtain the required ID unless they plan months ahead, too. In her community, she said, it also takes time to get an appointment for a Florida driver’s license.

Lawmakers in a dozen states have advanced legislation this year that would require residents to prove their U.S. citizenship to register to vote or bring photo ID to the polls, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that tracks election legislation. Utah and South Dakota have also sent bills imposing a proof of citizenship requirement on to their governors.

SCOTUS Strikes Down Colorado Ban On ‘Conversion Therapy’ For LGBTQ Youths

Platner Is CRUSHING Maine’s Senate Primary

I know about the ginned up outrage dragged up by the Mills campaign. The dozens of years ago old Reddit posts that Platner responded to head on, explained, and I have seen him with women around him and he doesn’t act like a misogynist. He doesn’t try to justify the comments and denounces them. He does explain the mindset at the time he wrote them. A man in a male dominated macho military infantry unit who had been in combat was letting off steam in writing, not acting physically. He doesn’t believe that stuff now but the internet is a forever machine. He has changed from that angry young man into a thoughtful adult. If I were in Maine I could clearly see what he brings to the table vrs what Mills does. I strongly support Platner. Hugs

Important Words From Rev. William Barber

Rev. William Barber: Why the Midterm Election is So Important

Rev. Barber: We have to start teaching people that when we talk about politics, there is not an aspect of your life—from your birth to your death—that is not impacted.

By Rev. William Barber II

Published March 30, 2026

When we look at the midterm elections, we have to start with the basics. We are electing every member of the United States House of Representatives and one-third of the United States Senate. In most places, we are electing their entire state general assemblies, and many are electing governors, attorney generals, and so forth. We are electing the very people who impact every aspect of our lives. These elections determine whether we will have people in office who want to ensure everyone has health care or who want to take health care away; whether we want people in office who will vote to make sure everyone is paid a living wage versus just giving more money to corporations; whether they will care about poor and low-wage voters and the resources for people to afford a basic life, or whether all they will care about is giving more wealth to the already wealthy. That is what’s on the line.

Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign speaks at the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival Rally at the US Supreme Court on October 27, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Repairers Of The Breach)

What is at stake is whether or not you have a Congress that will demand that the President, whoever that President is, cannot just act unilaterally, but must get congressional approval for war; whether or not we have a budget; whether or not TSA agents are paid; whether or not government employees are paid; whether or not we have a Congress that will stand up and not just be a rubber stamp to what an authoritarian President wants to do or will just “go along to get along.”

We have to start teaching people that when we talk about politics, there is not an aspect of your life—from your birth to your death—that is not impacted. You’re not officially recognized without a birth certificate, which is the result of a political decision. You can’t guarantee your Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security without political decisions. Even as you die, people must understand that politics is not just about personality; it’s about people being put in place and the kinds of policies and vision they will enact.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, is a Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He serves as President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign

Yeah, Another One Of Those Posts

Not about bathrooms, but about testing women. Either test everyone, or take people’s word for it, when reporting is required. And all should prepare for the consequences of this. Women will need more protection from molestation than before, and transpeople need to specifically have that protection, as well. I think the XY carriers will be fine, of course, but they should be tested, too. I mean, who knows, right? And this should not happen in US communities at all, but the door will be wide open.

Under New Olympic Sex Testing Policy, A Cis Woman Who Gives Birth Could Be Considered Male

History is set to repeat itself after the IOC announced a trans ban and mass sex testing for the 2028 Olympics.

Erin Reed

On Thursday, the International Olympic Committee announced that it would ban transgender women and many cisgender women athletes from competing in women’s events and institute mandatory genetic screening of all female athletes. The decision is significant—the Olympics has allowed transgender women to compete since 2004, yet none has ever won a medal, and only a single transgender woman has ever competed: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand, who failed to place at the 2021 Tokyo Games. The ban applies to all sports, including those where no male performance advantage exists, and will require every woman to undergo a genetic test to participate. It will also exclude many cisgender women who produce elevated testosterone due to genetic or medical conditions, such as two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya. And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished.

Under the new policy, every woman seeking to compete in a female event at the Olympics or any IOC competition must undergo a one-time SRY gene screening—a cheek swab or blood test that detects the presence of a gene on the Y chromosome associated with male sex development. The test is similar to the one the IOC abolished 27 years ago after it produced disastrous human consequences. Because the screening identifies the presence of XY genetics, it will target not only transgender women but also intersex people—including cisgender women who carry a genetic condition that some argue makes them “male” despite having been born with a vagina and uterus, raised as girls, and having lived their entire lives as women. In at least 15 documented cases, women with 46,XY karyotypes—the same genetics this test screens for—have successfully carried pregnancies to term and given birth, including women with XY karyotypes that naturally produce testosterone. Under the IOC’s new framework, a woman who has been pregnant and delivered a child could be classified as male and barred from competition for failing this test.

Genetic sex testing was introduced at the Olympics in 1992, but it existed for only a short time. In the two Summer Games it covered—Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996—over 20 female athletes who were assigned female at birth, had lived their entire lives as women, and had female anatomy were told they were genetically “male” due to conditions they had never known about. The consequences were disastrous. Dr. Myron Genel, a Yale physician who was a prominent critic of the program, reported that the testing was “highly discriminatory” and caused “emotional trauma and social stigmatization” for women with intersex conditions who had been screened out of competition. For athletes from countries where being labeled male could carry severe social or physical consequences, the disclosure was not merely humiliating—it was dangerous. Indian swimmer Pratima Gaonkar died by suicide after her failed sex verification test became public and she was subjected to blackmail attempts; Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan attempted suicide after being stripped of her Asian Games silver medal. The testing was abolished in 1999.

The ban also applies to sports where a male genetic advantage is dubious or nonexistent. In rifle shooting, ESPN reported that women are “as good as, if not fractionally better than, men” in 10m air rifle, and yet these athletes will still have to prove their femininity with a genetic test. In sailing, the competition was mixed for nearly a century at the Olympics, from 1900 to 1988. In archery, men and women shoot the same 70-meter Olympic distance and the world records are extremely close. In December 2025, women’s Olympic champion An San exactly matched the men’s indoor qualification round record of 599 in Taipei. And outside the Olympics, transgender bans have spread even further—to darts, pool, disc golf, competitive dancing, and even chess.

The scientific evidence, meanwhile, does not support the blanket ban the IOC has imposed. A 2026 meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine—the most comprehensive to date, drawing on 52 studies and nearly 6,500 participants—found that while transgender women on hormone therapy for one to three years retained higher absolute lean body mass than cisgender women, there were no statistically significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or aerobic capacity. The researchers concluded that “the convergence of transgender women’s functional performance with cisgender women, particularly in strength and aerobic capacity, challenges assumptions about inherent athletic advantages” and that the current evidence “does not justify blanket bans.” A separate review in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that after two years of hormone therapy, no advantage was observed for physical performance measured by running time, and that muscle strength corrected for lean mass, hemoglobin, and cardiovascular capacity were no different from cisgender women. No study has demonstrated that transgender women on hormone therapy for more than two years retain a measurable performance advantage in any specific sport.

Some intersex athletes who would be impacted by the decision are already speaking out. Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was assigned female at birth in South Africa and has naturally elevated testosterone levels due to a difference in sex development. On Sunday, she expressed her disappointment with IOC President Kirsty Coventry, a fellow African woman and former Olympic swimmer. “Personally, for her as a leader, she’s an African, I’m sure she understands how, you know, we as Africans, we are coming from, as a global South, you know, you cannot control genetics,” Semenya said at a press conference in Cape Town. “For me personally, for her being a woman coming from Africa, knowing how, you know, African women or women in the global South are affected by that, of course it causes harm.”

“Reintroducing sex testing brings the IOC back to policy that it had discontinued exactly thirty years ago. Back then, they rightfully concluded that sex testing was scientifically inconclusive and caused considerable harm to athletes. Then, in 2021, they approved a Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination to best support trans athletes and athletes with sex variations. Now, they are retreating from their own decisions and ignoring the recommendations of various UN bodies, the World Medical Association, and athletes worldwide. But the evidence is clear: sex testing exposes women and girls to privacy violations, public humiliation, and abuse. And it is profoundly discriminatory, too. No one is asking men and boys to undergo these tests. Women and girls shouldn’t either,” said Gurchaten Sandhu, ILGA World Director of Programmes.

The policy takes effect at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games and is not retroactive. Affected athletes are expected to bring challenges before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, as Caster Semenya has done with previous eligibility rules. Over 100 civil society organizations, including the Sport & Rights Alliance, ILGA World, and Humans of Sport, have called on the IOC to reverse the decision.

Republican National Purity Dream | David Bier | TMR

This person Same is interviewing is from the Cato Institute. Sam and David talk about the bigotry and attempt to purify the country of non-white people. tRump and his racist administration claim to want to remove 100 million from the US. There is no where near that number of undocumented people in the country. That number is almost 1/3 of the US population. Undocumented immigrants were estimated at 14 million in 2023 at the highest. So where are the rest of these people coming from? Legal documented immigrants and non-white citizens born in the US. That is why they are rounding up brown people who immigrated here legally and why they are trying so hard to end birth right citizenship. The goal has become clear and it is scary to me. To cement the white majority for as long as possible and stop the slow decline of the white majority / rize of minority demographics. Stephen Miller and the other racists in tRump administration want an apartheid state like the former South African one was. They want no rights for non-whites. They want no non-whites in positions of authority. The administration is going after businesses and higher education for not prioritizing whites over any other group. They feel no white male is less qualified than any non-white. If a non-white person scored 95 and the white person scored 75, these racists feel the white person is still more qualified because of their skin color. The racists feel the only DEI that should be allowed is the promotion of white males over everyone else. Hugs