Chand was thrilled. “This wasn’t just about me,” she said, “but about all women like me, who come from difficult backgrounds. It is mostly people from poor backgrounds who come into running — people who know they will get food, housing, a job, if they run well. Richer people can pay their way to become doctors, engineers; poor people don’t even know about their own medical challenges.”

Chand hoped that the ruling would prompt the I.O.C. to suspend its testosterone policy, too, so she would be eligible to try to qualify for the Rio Games. After all, the I.O.C. policy — which also called on national Olympic committees to “investigate any perceived deviation in sex characteristics” — was based on the same science that the court deemed inadequate.

In November 2015, the I.O.C. established new parameters for dealing with gender. But it never actually addressed whether it would suspend its testosterone policy, as the I.A.A.F. was forced to do. That ambiguity left intersex athletes in limbo. Finally, in late February, the I.O.C. said it would not regulate women’s natural testosterone levels “until the issues of the case are resolved.” It urged the I.A.A.F. to come up with the evidence by the court’s deadline so the suspended policy could be resurrected. It also said that to avoid discrimination, high-testosterone women who are ineligible to compete against women should be eligible to compete against men.

Advocates for intersex women were dismayed. “It’s ridiculous,” says Payoshni Mitra, the Indian researcher. “They say the policy is not for testing gender — but saying that a hyperandrogenic woman can compete as a man, not a woman, inherently means they think she really is a man, not a woman. It brings back the debate around an athlete’s gender, publicly humiliating her in the process.” Emmanuelle Moreau, head of media relations for the I.O.C., disagreed, writing in an email, “It is a question of eligibility, not gender or (biological) sex.”

A separate section of the I.O.C. gender guidelines addressed a different group of atypical women (and atypical men): transgender athletes. Unlike the intersex section, the transgender section stresses the importance of human rights, nondiscrimination and inclusion. It eschews most of the I.O.C.’s former requirements, including that trans competitors have their ovaries or testicles removed and undergo surgery so their external genitalia matches their gender identity. In the new guidelines, female-to-male athletes face no restrictions of any kind; male-to-female athletes have some restrictions, including suppressing their testosterone levels below the typi­cal male range. And once they’ve declared their gender as female, they can’t change it again for four years if they want to compete in sports.

Reactions among trans advocates ran the gamut. Many trans advocates viewed the liberalized regulations as a victory. But some trans­women athletes who long ago had their testicles removed (and as a result, make virtually no testosterone) were unhappy with the policy; they argued that lifting the surgery requirement gave transwomen who still had testosterone-producing testicles an unfair advantage over trans­women who didn’t. And still other advocates said that requiring transwomen to suppress their testosterone below 10 nanomoles is premised on the very same claim about testosterone that the court rejected — that naturally made testosterone is the primary cause of men’s competitive advantage over women.

Without evidence that “male range” testosterone levels really do provide that advantage, some say it’s premature to base a policy on speculation — especially one that requires people to transform their bodies. In May, the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sports, which manages the country’s antidoping program and recommends ethics standards, issued trans-related guidelines for all Canadian sports organizations. The statement says policies that regulate eligibility, like those related to hormones, should be backed by defensible science. It adds, “There is simply not the evidence to suggest whether, or to what degree, hormone levels consistently confer competitive advantage.” And yet it’s hard to imagine that many female athletes would easily accept the idea of competing against transwomen athletes without those regulations in place.