What happens when the dog catches the car does it just stop and wag its tail and everyone pats it on the head saying good job?

Ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea the IOC held a series of roundtables with journalists on a number of topics. This was a standard thing that their media relations team would organize. Bring in outlets that cover the IOC regularly, let them have access for an hour with staff that are involved in areas of the day-to-day of running and preparing for the Olympics in areas that public doesn't normally see and let the questions flow.

These sessions don't always offer newsworthy stories, but they do provide context that is important for beat reporters to draw on in the future. I attended about three or four of these roundtables ahead of PyeongChang 2018, but the one that only started to stick out years later was the one on gender identity.

Two years earlier the IOC released a consensus statement that offered transgender and gender nonconforming athletes a chance to compete in elite sports without undergoing gender confirmation surgery. It was truly a landmark decision at the time, and brought a lot of controversy over its blanket recommendations for all sports. The IOC said it was only the beginning of working to design a framework that federations could draw from to ensure that fairness and inclusion were balanced, and to expect a new guideline before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

This roundtable touched on the progress that the IOC was making, but more was showing just how sensitive it was treating the work to improve on and adopt a new guideline to protect and serve all athletes. The goal was that federations could take these guidelines and implement them at all levels of the sporting system, and adopt their own unique frameworks to tailor it to their specific sports. I tried to go back into some of the notebooks I've saved from this era to find my notes from the meeting, but unfortunately I think that specific notebook was lost in a move we took last year (always save your notebooks kids).

As a deeply closeted trans woman in that meeting, I remember it being a thoughtful discussion, even if some media were keen to steer the discussion towards the inherent unfairness that trans feminine athletes brought to the debate about their inclusion. At the time there had been no out transgender athletes competing at an Olympics in a sport that matched their gender identity. Yet, fears of the future of transgender domination in sport were prevalent in some corners of the globe.

It would be another three years after that roundtable before the IOC released its 2021 policy framework on gender identity. Since then, the number of federations which have taken harsh bans on trans feminine athletes has only grown. The tide towards the IOC's past line of "balancing fairness and inclusion" has shifted.

With the election of a new president this year, the IOC in September convened a working group on the "protection of the female category" in sport. According to a report in The Times there is an increase likelihood that the IOC could take reports presented to this working group and push to ban trans feminine, intersex and difference of sexual development (DSD) athletes from women's sports as soon as the next IOC Session ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan/Cortina, Italy. That would be a six month turnaround from September 2025 to February 2026.

An IOC spokesperson when asked about the reports said in an email that "an update was given by the IOC’s Director of Health, Medicine and Science to the IOC Members last week during the IOC commission meetings. The working group is continuing its discussions on this topic and no decisions have been taken yet. Further information will be provided in due course."

I think about that roundtable discussion a lot these days. The fact in the previous president's IOC working groups were slow, methodical and largely lagged behind public sentiment when doing their work. It felt deliberative, if not bogged down in process, which is frustrating in its own right. It took a long time for Russia to be barred from competing in the Olympics under its own flag and country name, for example.

Now, this working group seems to be wrapping up a highly contentious policy point, rather quickly despite evidence that seems to present a complex situation with no true indicator of whether or not there is an inherent advantage or disadvantage to transgender athletes - specifically trans feminine athletes. In some areas hormone therapy does not bridge the gap between the difference between male and female athletic performance, while others trans feminine athletes are actually a severe disadvantage to their cisgender peers. More study is needed, but based on what has been made public nothing shows that there should be a blanket ban on athletes that do not fit the narrow political definitions of "male" and "female."

Last month, a 21 year old transgender athlete named Lia Smith was found dead in the United States, and authorities have categorized her death as a suicide.

Smith was a member of her collegiate swimming and diving team, which competed at the Division III level of collegiate athletics. Division III is the lowest level of collegiate athletes, but is by no means accessible to the general population of sports practitioners. Coaches recruit at this level, even if scholarships are not offered. Its a chance for athletes who were not at the level of elite Division I athletes to continue competing at a high level and growing their athletic career, even if it is likely to not continue after university is complete.

“It’s really hard putting on the suit every day if you are obviously an outlier,” Smith said in a panel about transgender healthcare and athletics at her college earlier this year. “It’s also really hard going in a locker room where you’re not welcome, and there’s really not a clear space that I should be going to.”

Smith also detailed how the body which oversees collegiate sports originally deemed her testosterone blocker - necessary to keep her hormones in a regulated level - a banned substance, making her ineligible to compete her freshmen year.

In an oped in Teen Vogue writer Katelyn Burns expertly detailed just the pain that transgender people face as areas for them to engage in public life are slowly stripped away from them, centering the life of Smith in this struggle.

All of that was taken away from Smith. What was once a reliable, repeatable pillar of her life was ripped away from her, first because she felt like an outlier among her peers, and then because the powers that be took away her right to be on the team. As we look at how the Trump government and conservatives at large have pursued their anti-trans agenda, they've consistently targeted the fundamental social pillars upholding trans lives.

I asked Burns about her oped and what she felt writing about the topic. Like me, Burns has been following the "debate" over transgender athletes for over a decade and has written extensively on the topic. What crushed me is how she called writing that article "inevitable." I can't help but agree, no matter how much it hurts.

"All of the writing I've done on trans athletes has been trying to prevent having to write about a dead trans athlete, and I failed her. If it wasn't Lia, it would be someone else and the next one is coming, it's only a matter of time."

Athlete mental health has only been seriously taken as a consideration in the last decade. Now, it is a topic that has broad acceptance and appeal in marketing. The money wants to help athletes not just perform but thrive. Yet, I can't help but wonder if there will ever be a similar conversation about transgender athletes. I am not hopeful.

Burns described her piece as "breaching containment" meaning that it moved beyond her traditional social media circles to the general public. That inevitably means death threats came her way over defending the dignity of a trans athlete who's life was lost way too soon. Every trans journalist I know have received these kind of messages.

Smith's death may be a watershed moment in the fight for trans rights in sports, which feels like a real bleak think to claim when we are talking about the suicide of a young woman who hadn't even entered the prime of her life. She was a person first, and I am making sure I remember that with every word I am writing here. But, if this is a sign of things to come, things are not going to be great for trans people just trying to reap the benefits of team sports by participating.

"I don't have much hope for the future of organized sports for trans people for at least the rest of my lifetime," Burns said to me. "It will be next to impossible but I think we need to start thinking seriously about creating our own sporting spaces, teams, and leagues. I just don't see a way to do this at the local level, there just aren't enough trans people to even form a single team in some states. But I find hope in things like Team Trans hockey, which I covered several years back."

The question that I keep coming back to, now it seems these bans are finally going to hit a global stage is this: now what?

Campaigners have worked tirelessly across multiple continents to work to ban athletes outside their narrow political definition of “woman” from competing in “women’s sports.” They’ve successfully done this at levels far below the Olympics in countries and have turned global sentiment towards athletes who just want to compete as themselves into a cesspit of toxicity and disrespect. Trans feminine athletes, unsurprisingly, have bore the biggest brunt of hatred, as it is easiest to imagine us as men invading and conquering spaces to broaden our hypothetical power we still have over real women that the patriarchy has bestowed on us. It’s a common misogynistic trope that gets used in so many facets of society casting trans women into predators in order to prevent them from being visible in society, with the goal of making it so that we cannot live in society. It’s through this blatant transmisogyny that many of these campaigns took hold and we’re able to broaden their power base of support. 

But it’s not just trans feminine athletes caught up here. Athletes who are born intersex and those with “differences of sex development” (DSD) have to bear the brunt of sport administrators’ hyper specific analysis of their bodies to ensure an even field of play. Many of these athletes hail from the global south, in countries where winning prize money and sponsorships from sports is drawn from a much smaller pool than those he larger, more-funded global north. What is going to happen to athletes now stripped from the chance to compete in categories they’ve been defined by society their entire life?

What will make up from the loss of income these athletes will face? There certainly will not be an equal amount of opportunity to compete in proposed open divisions let alone with equal prestige and prize money available. Moving beyond the financial aspect, what happens in society when a person is defined by a certain label until a sport administrator assigns another label for the purpose of “fair” competition? Suddenly your place in the world is thrown into disarray and with that abnormality comes virulent hostility. These athletes will be thrown to the wolves of the whims of society which seems to be moving towards cracking down on gender nonconformity. Will sport bodies be there to even pretend to care about these athletes thrust into a public debate about their identity that they have no say in? How will these administrators make sure these athletes are treated with respect when for many their existence is now criminalized when they had no agency in the decisions that led to this? 

This is the type of thinking is often ignored completely even when debating the merit of inclusion and fairness. That’s because billions are invested in the perceived fairness of the spectacle sold by marketers and very little is invested in the lives of athletes caught up in it. 

As is their traditional policy, the IOC said it has "nothing further to add at this time," when I sent a list of questions asking if the working group for the "protection of the female category" was going to include work on protecting the athletes affected by the potential restrictions to the female category. Campaigners who have been attacking trans feminine athletes certainly have not thought of a solution besides "have your own events," it seems, even ones that claim to be well meaning and not against transgender acceptance in public life. Who is going to fund these events? Organize them? Administrate the behind the scenes work to ensure fair competition and access to progression up the elite sport ladder? What about health and safety of athletes?

Those questions all apply to the "female" category of sports as well. Marketing money has been pouring into increased popularity of women's sports, which is starting to earn equal billing to men's sports in many parts of the world. But, major disparities still remain. It is one thing for the IOC to commit to equal quotas for male and female athletes at the Olympics, but it is another for the protection of the female category to adopt wholesale changes to implement worldwide that promotes women's sports and all athletes that may fall outside the gender binary that will be rigidly enforced.

A political solution to a political debate will be wrapped up, and the sporting world will move on. However, the issue with political decisions is now it comes the actual governance and enforcement of these decisions and the ramifications of what was taken. Nothing gets done in a vacuum, and its clear from The Times report that a potential vote on new policy will only move forward until its "legally watertight." Meanwhile, in the United States the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on two cases involving the banning of transgender athletes from different levels of school sports next January. Legal counsel have already begun organizing in Great Britain against transgender athlete bans put into practice by the British Olympic Association.

The dog has caught the car. But its hard to tell a class of athlete for over two decades that they are welcome in sport, only to reverse that decision after a very long public pressure campaign. Any updated policy over who is eligible on the field of play will inevitably involve lawsuits challenging how it can be enforced. Where this goes from here will remain messy, but will it matter if those who were the loudest claim victory and go home ignoring the knock-on effects in their wake? Who cleans up the mess that is left behind? Will anyone care?