When the real test isn’t on the court

A stopwatch. A scoreboard. A stat sheet. This is how sport is supposed to decide winners. But in the 33rd Southeast Asian Games in Thailand, victory is being measured not by play, but by “gender”. 

The chief operating officer of the SEA Games Federation, Chaiyapak Siriwat, has enforced mandatory “gender” testing for athletes for the upcoming SEA Games this December 2025 in Thailand. Their explanation: it is about fairness in women’s categories. Their procedure: medical checks, hormone evaluations, and even genetic assessments. Their defense: tradition. But in reality, it is about policing athletes at the expense of their dignity.

Chiayapak explained that testing protocols would be decided by each sport’s federation, stressing that the SEA Games Federation operates independently from the Olympic Council of Asia. He added that three countries had already requested gender testing across all sports, a policy that, he noted, could even include Thai athletes. 

The International Olympic Committee has already abandoned gender testing in 1999, declaring it both scientifically flawed and a violation of athletes’ dignity. For more than two decades, global sport has moved forward. Yet, Southeast Asia, instead, has dragged itself back.

The term ‘gender testing’ itself is misleading. What officials are examining are sex traits, chromosomes, hormone levels, physical features, not gender—which is a social identity. This misuse of language exposes how outdated the policy is: it polices bodies, not identities. 

With Vietnam’s Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, one of Asia’s most exciting volleyball players, withdrawing from the FIVB World Championship in Thailand after relentless gender-based scrutiny. The cost is immediate and visible. Days before one of the sport’s biggest stages, Vietnam lost one of its best weapons—not to injury, not to fatigue, but to stigma.

The Philippines knows this story too well. Adamson University’s Trisha Tubu has lived under the weight of mean comments and casual cruelty, with her very womanhood constantly put on trial. No clearance, no certificate, no official ruling has been enough to silence the whispers. Her career is already proof of her ability. Yet in this climate, ability alone no longer seems to be the measure.

Proponents frame the tests as a safeguard for “fair play,” particularly in women’s events. But this argument collapses under scrutiny. Sex cannot be reduced to a single hormone or a genetic marker, and science has shown that performance is shaped far more by training, nutrition, and discipline than by chromosomes. What these tests protect is not fairness but outdated stereotypes about what women should look like or how they should perform.

This tension becomes even clearer when you compare sports. In non-contact disciplines like tennis or athletics, fairness is often measured through times, distances, or precision; outcomes that training and discipline directly shape. But in contact sports such as boxing or rugby, governing bodies frequently invoke biology, particularly testosterone, as a determinant of strength. The problem is that no test can draw a clean line between advantage and identity without reducing athletes to laboratory results, rather than recognizing their full humanity. 

Indeed, testosterone is often cited as the biological equalizer, since it plays a major role in protein synthesis and muscular development. On paper, a woman with higher testosterone levels could be seen to have an advantage in physically demanding contact sports. Yet this argument ignores the reality that athletic performance is never determined by a single hormone. 

If fairness were only about hormones, then no woman could ever outperform men. Yet history shows otherwise: Serena Williams redefined power and dominance in tennis; Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes for her groundbreaking work in physics and chemistry; Ada Lovelace envisioned the first computer algorithm; and NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson’s calculations helped launch astronauts into space. 

Gender testing erases trust in sport. It replaces the joy of competition with humiliation. It reduces victories to asterisks and turns athletes into suspects. It is not a protection of women’s categories. It is a violation of women themselves, especially those who do not fit narrow molds of femininity.

The weight of these policies has fallen even heavier on intersex athletes, whose very existence challenges the rigid categories imposed by governing bodies. Athletes such as Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand have endured invasive tests and suspensions, forced to prove that their bodies are “woman enough” despite living and competing as women their entire lives. Their stories reveal how gender testing often targets those who do not conform to western-coded norms of femininity.

In past international competitions, women wrongly flagged as ‘suspicious’ were later cleared after humiliating and invasive investigations. By then, the damage to their reputation and careers was already done. Gender testing does not guarantee fairness; it guarantees mistakes with human costs.

The bigger tragedy is that while athletes fight to qualify, to train, to endure, governing bodies fight to question their very right to play. Instead of celebrating skills, we debate chromosomes. Instead of recording times, we record hormone levels. The Games lose their meaning when the loudest headlines are not about medals, but about tests.

Sports are meant to lift, to show the best of what discipline and passion can achieve. Gender testing does not add to that mission; it diminishes it. It leaves athletes reduced, and audiences robbed of the very excellence they came to see.

The SEA Games Federation cannot continue parading unity while enforcing exclusion. Nor can it cling to a process the rest of the sporting world has long abandoned. This policy must end, not after debate, not after the Games, but now, before a single athlete is forced to prove their identity instead of their skill. 

Because in the end, the stopwatch, the scoreboard, and the stat sheet are enough. They always have been. They always will be.