The WTA has just implemented a new genetic test policy, and it’s now facing an organized effort to repeal it. The Sport & Rights Alliance, a coalition of advocacy organizations, issued its call on Thursday, describing the policy as discriminatory. 

“The WTA can claim it does not intend to cause harm, but good intentions will never erase the stigmatization and trauma that women and girls will suffer due to sex testing,” said Andrea Florence, the organization’s executive director. 

The policy in question, which was confirmed by the WTA last month, stipulates that each player on tour must be tested once for the SRY gene, which is linked to male-typical sex development, using a cheek swab, saliva sample or blood test. Testing began rolling out this week, starting at the Cincinnati Open.

Lily Dong Li Rosengard, advocacy senior specialist at ILGA World, an international organization which represents LGBTQ rights, took it one step further in criticizing the timing and rationale of the policy.

“The WTA has hurriedly cobbled together a policy that does not advance the rights of women and girls but instead undermines the safety and dignity of everyone on the tour,” she said. “Despite the fact that no out trans women are currently competing at the professional level, all women and girl tennis players will now have to ‘prove’ their gender just so the WTA can ensure they never play at all.”

The policy became one of the more talked-about topics at the start of the Canadian Open, where top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka spoke in support of it on competitive grounds, saying it was necessary for fair competition in the women’s game. Coco Gauff struck a more careful tone, saying she supported fairness in women’s sports while voicing discomfort with how the surrounding debate had unfolded.

After the second-round victory in Toronto, Gauff commented that she was on board with protecting fairness in women’s sport but felt that a debate had created “animosity towards the trans community” and that she didn’t support people using the policy as an excuse to attack transgender people. 

Other prominent voices in the sport have lined up on opposing sides of the issue as well. Martina Navratilova has publicly expressed her support for the policy as a “fair competition” issue in the top level of women’s tennis. Billie Jean King, however, has been one of the loudest critics of the practice of exclusionary eligibility in sport in general, calling such practices discriminatory. 

There have also been scientific questions raised about the policy’s design from some medical professionals and human rights groups that a single gene marker is not enough to reflect the complexity of human sex development, and the policy could inadvertently affect intersex athletes alongside the transgender athletes which it’s supposed to protect.

The WTA, meanwhile, has stated that the policy is meant to offer a clear, consistent eligibility standard and will be in effect in tandem with its comprehensive player engagement and education programme. Reuters reported it was unable to reach the WTA for comment on the Sport & Rights Alliance’s specific call for the policy to be dropped. 

SRY testing debate extends beyond the WTA

The WTA’s policy comes in the wake of other similar policies adopted by sports organizations around the world in the past year and a half. In 2025, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that only athletes who have undergone a similar one-time SRY gene test will be allowed to compete in the women’s category at future Olympic Games, while World Athletics and World Boxing have instituted similar SRY gene-testing requirements. 

Notably, the WTA is not the first target of this kind of campaign, the Sport & Rights Alliance, ILGA World and more than 80 other organizations had already issued a joint statement in March urging the IOC to abandon its plans before they were finalized. They warned at the time that the policy would set back gender equity in sport and cited criticism from bodies including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the World Medical Association. 

The IOC’s policy remained unchanged despite the campaign, and World Athletics and World Boxing have also kept their testing protocols the same since their implementation a year ago, even after facing comparable criticisms and continuing to call for a reversal. The discussion of the policy appears likely to carry on long after its implementation in Cincinnati.