The number of transgender women who have competed at the Olympics is far smaller than the culture-war debate around the issue might suggest. That conversation has intensified again after the International Olympic Committee confirmed a new policy that will bar transgender women from women’s events from the Los Angeles 2028 Games onward, with eligibility tied to a one-time genetic screening for the SRY gene. The IOC says the policy is intended to protect fairness and safety in the female category.
Despite years of political argument, media attention and rule changes across elite sport, only one openly transgender woman is publicly known to have competed at the Olympic Games: New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard at Tokyo 2020.
Hubbard competed in the women’s +87kg event and did not win a medal. There are no confirmed cases of an openly transgender woman medalling at the Olympics.
Hubbard’s path to the Games was long and difficult. She had competed in weightlifting in the 1990s before stepping away from the sport in 2001. In later interviews, she said that trying to exist in a world “that perhaps wasn’t really set up for people like myself” became too much to bear. She later returned to competition, transitioned, and eventually qualified for Tokyo, where she made history simply by taking part.
Her appearance at Tokyo 2020 triggered enormous backlash and scrutiny, far out of proportion to the actual number of openly trans women who have competed at the Games. And despite the intensity of that debate, no openly transgender women were publicly confirmed to have competed at Paris 2024.
Some confusion comes from the fact that other openly trans and non-binary athletes have competed at the Olympics, but they were not trans women. Quinn, for example, won gold with Canada’s women’s football team in Tokyo and became the first openly transgender and non-binary Olympic medallist, but Quinn does not identify as a trans woman.
The IOC does not publish official data on athletes’ gender identity, so any count depends on athletes who have publicly shared that part of their identity. That means it is theoretically possible that others have competed without disclosing it. Even so, based on documented public cases, the number of openly transgender women known to have competed at the Olympics remains one.
That single known case sits in stark contrast to the amount of political and media energy spent on the issue. Whatever side people take in the broader argument, the Olympic record itself is remarkably small: one openly transgender woman across the modern Games.
