The Women’s Tennis Association Slams Trans and Intersex Athletes with Discriminatory New Testing Policy 

August 5, 2026

On June 30, 2026, to the dismay of supporters of human rights, the Supreme Court ruled that states may exclude transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Court’s rulings in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox will permit discrimination across the U.S.

Just a little over a month has passed, and we’re already seeing the consequences. In late July, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) adopted a new policy: it will now require athletes to submit to genetic testing. (The policy falls in line with policies from the International Olympic Committee and World Athletics.) Now, if someone wishes to compete in WTA tournaments, they must be screened for the SRY gene, which is typically (but not always) found on the Y chromosome.

WTA’s policy is blatantly anti-trans, which is cause enough for outrage. It is also – perhaps more subtly – going to impact intersex cisgender women, many of whom may not know that they are intersex. Many intersex variations involve women who have XY chromosomes and would thus fail the SRY test. WTA attempts to account for this possibility by setting forth exceptions for intersex women, but those exceptions do not remedy the issue. Rather, they require individuals to undergo potentially multiple other levels of invasive “investigation”: they would need to submit to additional testing, provide medical records, and possibly involve their physicians. This is approach belies the policy’s ostensible certainty of what sex and gender mean. The fact that WTA wants to review such extensive information demonstrates that there is no single measure of a person’s sex or supposed athletic advantage.

We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation are disgusted by WTA’s new policy. We have made our position – which is in line with the research – abundantly clear, and we encourage you to review our Fact Checked by Woodhull pages on these issues if you want to know more. First, sex and gender are not the same. Second, trans athletes do not have an “unfair athletic advantage” or pose any other kind of risk to cis athletes. WTA’s policy is thus both misguided and unwarranted. And it will cause serious harm to many athletes. As intersex advocacy group interACT puts it, sex testing invades “all women’s privacy, forcing them to surrender their personal medical and genetic information.” We at Woodhull firmly believe that all women – including trans and intersex women – should be able to pursue their athletic dreams without being subjected to an invasion of their privacy.