Even though this isn’t a UK rule or UK laws, but one of an international organization, it’s certainly an optics opportunity for them to make their own fund to help those who need to pay for it.

Especially since it can be argued that the alarmism around trans athletes was started by terfs.

But if they won’t, that’s an optics opportunity for progressives, like this Pink News headline here.

Headlines like “No plans to help female athletes pay for testing” - says [insert terf org here like sex matters or for women scotland or whatever] would work pretty well too.

Especially if then some relatively rich trans person or ally then went ahead and made their own independent charity fund to help struggling athletes pay for these tests, assuming there is actually demand there (I have no idea how much they make at that level), all while having some blerbs on their website out of the way on their website about advocacy for removing barriers to participation, education about intersex disorders that cause false positives or even true positives to unknowingly intersex cis women and how they are working on streamlining this yada yada and how few trans athletes there are total or how some studies show that over time performance equalises and how they already test for T levels etc etc.

Even then, I wouldn’t be surprised that most cis fem athletes don’t see it that way, and I’m not sure where I stand on it either.

Personally I could give a fuck about sports regardless, but while millions of trans folks are stuck suffering from dysphoria without proper care, anything that damages the terf establishment is a good thing.

There is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that gender transition (in either direction) improves performance. There is ample evidence to support the claim that gender transition inhibits performance.

Incidentally, the Olympic Committee has had rules on transgender athletic participation 1968, ffs. The idea that this is some kind of novel threat to competitive sports is absurd. “Men are participating under a false gender” is an allegation that stretches back two years prior to 1966, after Western media began accusing Soviet athletes of faking gender certification (allegations that were never proven but have persistently circulated in competitions even to the modern day).

As often as not, the accusation of transgender athlete participation skewing the results of competitions has come from chronic underperformers and has been used by Western athletes to defame and discredit athletes from “enemy” nations and from the Global South.

Incidentally, one of the most outspoken anti-trans athletes - Riley Gaines - spent years accepting money from reactionary activist groups to denounce her transgender peers as a personal threat to her safety, while covering up sexual assault by her team’s coach for over a decade.

Men don’t even have to be tested, according to the article:

Male athletes need not complete a test in order to compete.

Men don’t have to do this, but FTM athletes, or any other athletes who take testosterone for medical reasons, are normally barred from competitions as a result. Because we are already banned from most sports, we don’t need to be added into thes3 laws, but simply overturning explicit bans on trans people won’t allow us to compete either. What we really need is an overhaul of sports to make them based on things besides assumed sex.

No no, they are forced to test sex for a fee, so it’s just the tip.