Regulating advantage or determining belonging? The violence of excluding transgender women from sport

In March 2026 the International Olympic Committee restricted eligibility for the female category to those identified as biological females by a one-time SRY gene screening, effective from the Los Angeles 2028 Games. The policy replaces a framework built on testosterone thresholds and thereby changes the nature of the criterion rather than its stringency. SRY presence indicates neither gonadal development, nor testosterone production, nor androgen responsiveness, and carries no information about performance. Such a criterion does not measure advantage; it determines belonging. Yet the justification accompanying it continues to invoke competitive fairness, a claim resting on an empirical hypothesis the best available synthesis does not corroborate. This paper argues that the resulting dissociation between justification offered and criterion applied is not a communication failure but the structure of the decision, that the same structure recurs in recent restrictions on gender-affirming healthcare, and that naming it requires a moral vocabulary broader than sports ethics supplies. Drawing on Eric Weil's account of violence as the refusal of discourse, it distinguishes rules that regulate a practice from rules that constitute their addressee as someone to whom justification is not owed, and proposes a test for telling them apart. It closes by identifying an evidential gap that the analysis predicts: transgender athletes have been extensively measured and never systematically asked for their reasons, and a policy that has not sought such evidence should not describe itself as evidence-based.