feature image photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images
The Olympics are officially over, and while it’d be nice to report that they went off without an ounce of gender panic, we of course can’t really do that. As we saw last week, Algerian Olympic women’s 66kg boxing champion Imane Khelif had to stave off accusations that she is either transgender or “too” intersex to compete in the Olympic games after her defeat of Italian boxer Angela Carini. After their bout, which saw Carini giving up on the fight after being punched by Khelif only twice, misinformation about Khelif’s sex, biology, and eligibility to compete quickly spread online thanks to comments from Carini and her team. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) quickly stepped in to defend Khelif and assure the public that the sex test results being circulated online and in the media were bogus and came from the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA), which is banned from Olympic participation. Regardless, the IOC’s statements had almost no effect on the misinformation being spread on social media and the news. Once again, the conversation on sex testing women’s sports has blasted back into our international consciousness, and people are debating everything from the efficacy to the necessity to the injustices of these tests in the public sphere.
Although it began before this recent “scandal” erupted, Rose Eveleth’s new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and NPR podcast, Tested, provides some of the answers people might be looking for as this conversation makes its way through their lives. Tested opens with the story of Namibian track star and Olympic silver medalist Christine Mboma and her quest to be eligible to compete in the Olympic games after international track and field authorities changed the sex testing requirements last year. Under the new rules, Mboma, along with a small group of other elite track and field athletes, were deemed ineligible to compete as women because of their testosterone levels and other variations in their chromosomes. Unlike Khelif, these women do have legitimate biological differences, but like so many other questions of biology, it’s unclear just how much of an advantage — if any — they actually have. These international sports governing bodies, however, don’t seem to care about the nebulousness of these results or the practice of sex testing. They’ve requested that Mboma and other athletes with similar biological circumstances take medical measures to control these “conditions” if they wish to continue competing on the international stage. As Tested explores, some of these athletes, like Mboma, have chosen to abide this request while others have chosen to challenge these policies in the court of law and of public opinion.
Mboma’s story, along with the stories of Kenyan sprinter Maximila Imali and South African sprinter Caster Semenya, among others, is then expertly weaved by Eveleth into the larger and longer history of sex testing in women’s sports, from its earliest days of being implemented by Nazi Germany during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to how these tests are being utilized now. Along the way, Eveleth interviews scientists, doctors, international sports officials, Olympic athletes of the past and present, and historians — including Michael Waters, whose new book The Other Olympians chronicles the very beginning of sex testing in women’s sports. Over the course of Tested’s six short episodes, Eveleth attempts to answer the burning questions that so many of us also have on our minds: What is the actual purpose of these sex tests in the first place? Who are they serving? And why are people so anxious about “sex fraud” in women’s sports anyways?
“I think that it really comes down to this really deep-seated set of assumptions about what women should be doing, what they’re capable of, what women should look like, how they should behave,” Eveleth tells me. “So often when you ask them the question of ‘Why is this necessary?’ the answer you get is that they need to ‘Protect women’s sports.’ Now, it’s not always clear to me what they are protecting women’s sports from and which women they are protecting, but I really think that it comes down to this really core idea that the reason we have men’s sports and women’s sports is because women are fundamentally less good at athletics. They’re fundamentally weaker, and they need to be ‘protected’ from men or male-like people who might try to take advantage of that weakness. I think there is this really deep-seated paternalism around needing to ‘shelter’ women from other women who seem a little bit ‘too manly’ or ‘too masculine’ or whatever it is. That is really where all of this fundamentally comes from. Once you know that, because you’ve seen it through history and through their communication, I think it genuinely pulls the wool off of people’s eyes in terms of what’s happening now. You can say, ‘Oh, well, in that case, why are we doing what we’re doing?’”
As you listen to each episode of Tested, this final question becomes a blaring inquisition that, when fully examined, produces no satisfactory answers or rationalizations. Eveleth and the various athletes and experts they talk to remind listeners of how indefinite, unclear, and unfairly wielded these sex tests have been since their inception. Beyond that, they’ve also served to undermine so much of what athletes like Mboma, Imali, Semenya, and, now in a more fabricated way, Khelif have done throughout their athletic careers. The results of these sex tests are often used to discount these women’s accomplishments in the sports they practice without any scientific evidence pointing to the fact that having varying levels of testosterone or different chromosomal make-ups actually do provide a significant advantage of any kind.
“It’s so offensive to the women, like Khelif, who have trained incredibly hard to make it to the Olympics and have been told basically, ‘No, no, no, all that hard work that you did, all that training you did, that doesn’t matter. Actually, you don’t deserve this,’” Eveleth says. They note that this is something they talked about a lot with Mboma, who shared it was almost easier to brush off people who are just mean and extremely ignorant, saying out-of-pocket things like “you’re gross.” For professional athletes, it’s almost more cutting to hear from the people who say they’re not actually talented or working hard and that they are only succeeding because of a factor they have no control over that gives them a supposedly unfair advantage. It’s a way of telling them their wins and successes aren’t real, aren’t the result of hard work. “I think that’s actually, for a professional athlete, more cutting than some of the trolling, gross people on the internet,” Eveleth says.
Beyond the questions of necessity and efficacy, Tested also reveals some unexpected realities about sex testing in women’s sports. The majority of the athletes who gain our attention through this conversation, including Khelif, and the majority of the athletes highlighted by Eveleth are from the Global South. They’re competing for countries that are not seen as part of the “moral and intellectual ‘West,’” and, instead, are competing for countries that have, historically in one way or another, been seen as either “enemies of the ‘West’” and/or have been subjected to the imperial domination of the ‘West.’
Mboma, Imali, Semenya, and Khelif are but four examples of athletes coming from places like this, but as Eveleth shows on Tested, much of the sex testing in women’s sports that we see utilized today actually ramped up during and throughout the Cold War. During that time, a now understood hypocritical “war” on using performance enhancing drugs in the Olympics was launched by many of the powers in the ‘West’ on the USSR and China. Although sex tests and doping tests are obviously completely different, this emphasis on “purity” in sports aided in amping up concerns about what other potential measures these countries might use to perform at a higher athletic advantage than the nations of the “pure” ‘West.’
“The thing about sports is that it is and has always been a proxy for politics and culture,” Eveleth says. “There’s no escaping that. And so, throughout the sex testing history, you see the ways in which whatever geopolitical situation at the time is influencing how these decisions are being made.”
For example, in the 60s, Eveleth explains, there was a scare around “Eastern bloc athletes” coming in looking super strong. They were accused of doping, whereas American athletes were positioned as being “innocent.” “We don’t talk about this on the show, but there’s this idea that floats around which is that the ‘moral’ countries [in the ‘West’] would never do this,” Eveleth says. “And you saw that in the Cold War, you see it now, and you see this idea that, of course, in the Global North, we ‘enlightened, moral’ countries would never do such a thing, but these other ‘Dark Ages’ countries are going to do that.”
And then, of course, this also brings up questions of race and racism in sports more broadly. “In this modern era, what you’re seeing is almost exclusively Black and Brown women from the Global South being affected by these policies,” Eveleth says. “I really think it’s important to note that not everybody is being tested. Only people who rise to some opaque and completely unclear level of suspicion based on what we don’t know are getting tested.”
“And that immediately gets into these questions of racist histories around who looks like a woman, what femininity looks like, what womanhood looks like” Eveleth continues. “All these women, and you’re seeing this now, they’re caught in the middle of these big geopolitical tensions. And these women, they’re just trying to do their sport, and they’re just trying to show up and go to the Olympics. And they’re caught in between these much bigger machinations of giant nations who hate each other.”
Although Tested seemingly came out at just the right time, Eveleth has been trying to get the podcast produced and made for the last eight years. A former soccer, track and field, and cross country athlete themself, Eveleth understands the amount of time, dedication, training, and planning that it takes to even be a somewhat decent competitor in these sports. While they never pursued it to the elite level, Eveleth’s love of sports continued well into their adulthood, and they stayed active as an avid fan of women’s sports, eventually making it onto the staff of ESPN’s 30 for 30 for some years. While Eveleth had been made aware of Semenya’s story when it broke in 2009, it wasn’t until they were an intern at Scientific American in 2012 when it hit them that there should really be more coverage of stories like Semenya’s in the media and in our broader conversations about elite athletes and sports. At the time, they were tasked with covering a story on Oscar Pistorious, a disabled former South African sprinter and Paralympian whose use of running blades was being hotly debated as a possible advantage over other able-bodied runners.
As Eveleth was reading and researching scientific articles and other opinions on Pistorious, Semenya’s story came rushing back to them. “In 2009, she broke out onto the world stage,” Eveleth says, recalling Semenya’s story. “She had this amazing race in Berlin, and instead of being able to celebrate, she gets thrust into this absolutely Bizarro-land media circus around ‘Is she really a woman?’”
“When I re-encountered all of that, I just remember that was the moment where I was like, ‘Wait, I’m sorry, what? What are we talking about?’” Eveleth continues. “I just genuinely started from a place of pure confusion because I was reading these articles from 2009 and just asking, ‘What are you actually saying? What are you actually insinuating about this person? Do you genuinely believe that this person is a man? What do you mean by that?’ I just couldn’t stop thinking about it because it just felt so bizarre. And then also as a science person, these allegations that Caster had this ‘unfair advantage,’ I got really deep in on the science question of it all, which is, what does that mean? And allegedly, where does this advantage come from? What do we actually know about the level of advantage here?”
Eveleth was inspired to do more research on those questions. In their downtime, they compiled more and more information. Then, in 2016, they were hired at ESPN’s 30 for 30 and explained to their bosses there that they were interested in telling stories specifically about women and women’s sports and “not the classic 30 for 30 dude stories.” Their bosses were initially excited to hear this and willing to allow them to pursue these stories, but when Eveleth pitched a story on sex testing, Semenya, and other athletes with similar stories, it was the beginning of a very long process of being told “no.”
Over the next eight years, Eveleth would go on to pitch Tested to 26 different production and media companies that refused the pitch for reasons varying from the fact that Eveleth wasn’t yet famous to the fact that Tested doesn’t have one major character to focus on to COVID making financing for these kinds of project much more difficult.
“I don’t know, I think I’m just a little bit deranged,” Eveleth says of their persistence in continuing to pitch after dozens of rejections. “I was like, ‘I can’t let it go.’”
We’re lucky they didn’t. As Eveleth notes at the end of Tested, the conversations and considerations around sex testing in women’s sports are not only prescient, but they continue to impact the lives of women around the world who are desperately trying to keep competing at the elite level.
And even Eveleth isn’t sure how much of a dent something like Tested can really make, but they’re hopeful the tides are finally turning and public opinion might actually be changing. “I truly oscillate between being hopeful and being just absolutely in the darkest hole of depression about this,” Eveleth says. “On the one hand, I talk to so many people who worked on trying to fight against sex testing policies for decades and decades and decades. And a lot of the folks who worked in that era from 1960 to 1999, they aren’t involved anymore.” They aren’t involved, unfortunately, because they’re exhausted by having the same conversations over and over again, Eveleth explains.
But on the other hand, Eveleth admits there has been a shift in this conversation. Semenya being so vocal and open about what this was all like for her has been instrumental to that shift. “It has changed a lot of people’s opinions. It has changed a lot of people’s minds,” Eveleth says.
And we’re seeing that play out in real time, especially after these Olympics. “Seeing the IOC actually step up in defense of [Khelif] was surprising to me,” Eveleth says. “Not necessarily that they did it, but the intensity and firmness with which they did it and the words they used were very unequivocal in a way that I was pleasantly surprised by.”
As for the future of professional and elite sports, we still have a lot of problems to solve in regards to the question of how to categorize sports, as Eveleth puts it. One is this issue of a “moral panic” around gender, in which sports have become an easy target for transphobes to project misguided points about gender essentialism onto. Then there’s the issue of what is actually fair in sports. To Eveleth, these are different problems to solve. “There is an overlap, and we’re in the Venn diagram, but they’re actually quite different in my opinion,” Eveleth says. “People say, ‘well, what should we do?’ And the answer is twofold. One, we should stop being so weird about gender and sex and learn, actually… Teach people what sex variation looks like. Teach people that this is much more common than they think. Try and really push back on this gender essentialism and the ways in which that bleeds into everything, not just sports. It bleeds into the business world. It bleeds into everything where it’s so many people who have been told, ‘you’re too good to be a girl,’ not just in sports.”
Eveleth says we need to push back on basic assumptions of what a woman is, what she should look like, how she should behave, and what she’s capable of. “And then there’s the question of fairness in sports, which is connected, but also a different thing,” Eveleth says. “You can’t really have that conversation until you’ve fixed the first thing.”
Maybe one day more sports can introduce nonbinary categories. More and more nonbinary athletes are fighting for inclusion and expansion, like Cal Calmania, who advocates for nonbinary marathon recognition. As Eveleth puts it, the “giant fire hose of misinformation about gender and sex” has to be plugged for there to ever be fairness in how sports are categorized and organized.
There are still major ramifications of that fire hose, misinformation breeding misinformation. For example, Eveleth mentions The Boston Globe erroneously reporting that a transgender boxer won at the Olympics — referring to Khelif, who is not trans, never mind the fact that the IOC banned transgender athletes from the games. While the paper issued an official retraction for the headline, it was too little too late. The sentiment was already out there, framing trans people as a threat to women’s sports and Khelif as undeserving of her win simply because of how she’s perceived by others.
Despite all this, Eveleth again does point toward an upward shift in the conversation in small but significant ways. “I do think that the energy around women’s sports right now is really great,” Eveleth says. “There have been more and more high profile women in sports who have come out in support of these folks, Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird, these people who are culturally quite powerful. I think that there are reasons to be hopeful.”
Just wanted to add that doping by Eastern European countries in athletic events continued far past the 1960s and well into the 80s at least. It took a serious toll on the physical and mental health of the athletes.
Yes, I also wanted to point this out. The Eastern bloc were accused of doping…and they were! The metrics used to decide that they were are (‘masculine’ appearances etc) are very much part of this conversation around perception of what’s ‘acceptable’, but also the Soviet state was very much doping those athletes from an extremely young age.
From an intersex activism perspective: it is often forgotten that while there is a massive part of racism in this, testing for intersex conditions, even in utero, is happening a lot more in richer countries. That means all traces of intersex appearance, or even just non conforming appearance get eradicated mostly in childhood or early puberty in the “west”. From hormone levels to hypospadias or gynecomasty, to enlarged clitoris, to height etc etc.
So nowadays western people are not used to seeing “inbetween” traits, while they are actually natural. People used to be aware of this a lot more before medical intervention was possible. So basically, the physical spectrum of what was male and female was broader. And it still is whereever interventions are not available.
So yes, this has to do with racism, but not only in the simplest sense.
Sex as we know it today is basically already a medically formed category, not nature. And I’m not even talking about the regular intake of sex hormones by something like 70 percent of the female population.
When terfs are coming now not only for trans but intersex athletes i wonder if they really think it fits with their feminist agenda to demand forced sterilisation, hormone treatment or segregation for people who grew up and lived their whole life as women? Who have an F in their passport since birth? Who might have given birth even. What do they mean when they talk about “protecting women”?
All this is just so bonkers.
Solving the sports situation is not so easy as creating a third category as it would separate these athletes from the main competitions, just as 3rd sex entries in passports expose and endanger intersex people. Getting rid of gender categories and introducing a variant of weight category might work possibly?
But as long as the actual, regular physical violence and eradication against “other” bodies from earliest childhood is not prohibited and collectively shunned, political symbols will not help those who are directly affected.
The link “banned trans athletes” does not actually support what the link text is saying… There were some trans athletes this year but not many. Depending on your governing body is whether you need to do hormone tests or not, iirc.
Just wanted to add that doping by Eastern European countries in athletic events continued far past the 1960s and well into the 80s at least. It took a serious toll on the physical and mental health of the athletes.
The link “banned trans athletes” does not actually support what the link text is saying… There were some trans athletes this year but not many. Depending on your governing body is whether you need to do hormone tests or not, iirc.