Nude parades and testosterone: The Olympics's obsession with sex and gender

The 2024 Summer Olympics start in Paris on July 26th. Most elite athletes on Earth will be there. But not all of them. Over the past 100 years, a litany of athletes, confronted by doctors they’ve never met, are suddenly told their identities are wrong: they are not women, and are therefore sent home, barred from competing. 

This is because they might have a previously unknown difference in sex development (DSD), or their body produces an amount of testosterone that’s deemed unusual. Athletes at the highest levels have been prevented from competing, their personal lives becoming tabloid fodder. A new podcast from the host of Flash Forward dives into the history of the Olympics, elite athletics, and a seemingly simple question at the heart of sports: who is a man and who is a woman? And who gets to decide? Can someone be too good to be a woman?

Rose Eveleth is an award winning reporter and writer who explores how humans tangle with science and technology. They’re the host of a new podcast called Tested, created in collaboration with NPR’s Embedded and the CBC.

Eveleth interviewed athletes from around the world and dove into the archives to investigate the century-long history of sex testing in the Olympics. I spoke with Eveleth over Zoom about the podcast, the history of elite athletics, and the impossible line athletic governing bodies keep drawing in the sand, over and over, on sex and gender. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

What are we doing here? How did you get started on this topic?

When I was an intern at Scientific American, I got interested in Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee Olympic sprinter who uses running blades. The question was: does he have an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners? He was beating them. He appealed to the Olympics but was not allowed to run. They said, “no, because you have this unfair advantage.” But, sports are all about advantages, right? Every athlete is a freak of nature, that’s what makes them elite.

In 2011 or so, I started reading about Caster Semenya, who’s South African like Pistorius. In 2009 she won gold at the World Championships in Berlin that year, and people started talking about how there’s something wrong with her, that maybe she’s kind of a man, that she’s “male-like.” But what are we talking about? What does that even mean? What does it mean to be too good to be a woman? I’ve been vaguely obsessed with that question and the story since then. I tried to pitch in 2016 to ESPN when I was at 30 for 30, and finally I’m here getting to tell it [at the CBC and NPR].

It's a question for sports but it's also this question of science, and what science can really tell us. And there is history, there's a really interesting history.

Great segue. Without getting into a whole 40-minute episode, can you talk a bit about that history of gender at the Olympics?

The modern Olympics were founded in the late 1800s, by a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin. He had just watched France lose a war [Ed: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870]. He was very upset that the French were, well, seen as weak as a result of the war and he really saw a lack of physical education as a lack of an investment in physical strength, particularly for men. He was not thinking about women at all. The original idea of the modern Olympics was to try and encourage men to be athletic. Women were just not on his radar.

Was he himself a particularly athletic person?

Not really. He was very interested in sports but he was kind of a little guy. Accounts at the time love to refer to him as “diminutive” — even if he was only 5’5” or 5’6”. He was interested in fencing sports. He really wanted to make fencing on horseback happen as a sport. Not jousting, fencing on a horse. It did not take off, obviously. 

So he’s not what you would think of when you think of an Olympian?

Not necessarily no. A lot of the accounts at the time refer to him as “diminutive.” I think he’s like 5’5”, 5’6”. He has a very large mustache.. He was very invested for a while in trying to make fencing on horseback happen. Not jousting. Actually fencing on a horse, which did not take off. 

But if you look at the literal Olympians in 1900, they were just normal people. Today, Olympians are absolutely jacked in a way that makes them look incredible. That was not a thing in the 1900s. 

You see these eras of sex testing when there was a big shift in women’s participation in society — like in voting or sports — and men reacted to that in all sorts of ways

When do women get interested in participating?

Immediately. But de Coubertin resisted. So instead, a group of women led by Alice Milliat went off and started their own event, the Women’s World Games. And these got very, very popular. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) then essentially staged a takeover of the Women’s World Games from Milliat. They did this not because they are invested or interested in giving women opportunities in sports, they did it because they don't want competition. Women got to compete, slowly, in sports that are deemed “feminine,” like tennis. They were forced to wear corsets so tight that they draw blood. 

1928 is the first year women are allowed to run on the track. This is a big deal because track and field had long been considered the most manly of sports in the Olympics. From the beginning it was the sport men could use to show their athleticism. Allowing women was a concession people did not want to make. The longest race women were allowed in was the 800m, the half mile. There’s silent footage of it.

At the end of the race, they looked tired, as one does. The newspapers covered it like they’ve all just been gunned with a machine gun. There were women laying on the ground! They’re dying! “Sobbing girls” was one of the headlines. Because these women had their hands over their heads, the way you do at the end of a race, [the IOC] tried to ban all track and field for women. They compromised eventually and only banned the 800m. Women were not allowed to run the 800m again until 1960.

So from the very beginning the consensus is that track is too hard, too manly,  and that any women who want to do this are “defective,” if they’re good or interested. That there's something wrong with them. That idea percolated for a long time. In the 1930s there's an American runner named Helen Stevens, who the newspapers described as “too fast to be a woman.” There's no way that this woman is a woman. The exact same thing happening to Caster Semenya today.

When did sex and gender testing come into things?

In 1936, at the Berlin Olympics, they talk about women who are not 100% women, same as today. The Nazis had quite strong opinions about what a woman was, the traditional gender roles you’d expect. They enacted the first ever sex testing because Nazi doctors suspected that some of the women were “too manly,” particularly Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech athlete who transitioned and lived life as a man after his athletic career. 

Koubek is one of two athletes who transitioned after retiring from women’s sports, the other was Mark Weston, a British athlete. The men at the time saw this and assumed that if women competed in sports, the women would be turned into men. There was this idea that they had to somehow root out these “incorrect” women.

What exactly do you think their fear was? 

That’s a great question. You see these eras of sex testing when there was a big shift in women’s participation in society — like in voting or sports — and men reacted to that in all sorts of ways, including this idea that something is wrong with these women, like, “what's wrong with you? You know that's not your place.” And you’d hear this not just about women on the track, but women who wanted rights.  In the late 1910s, 1920s, when women were starting to, for example, try to wear pants, that is a thing that was said a lot.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was no idea that sex and gender were separate. There was no popular conception of chromosomes, sex chromosomes, or anything. The prevailing idea of gender and sex at the time is this thing called “balance theory.” The idea is that every person is born with some percent of male and female inside of them, and you can do things that actually will shift your balance. 

Honestly I’m kind of into it?

Right? In some ways it's actually slightly more accurate than the rigid sex binary that we talk about today. And if you believe this idea, then sports turning a woman into a man feels like a reasonable thing to be worried about. Anyway, men at the time were genuinely worried that these women were going to accidentally turn themselves into men, because they were competing.

We don't divide sports by your inseam, or whether you have webbed feet

Something worth remembering is that the men in charge of sports, particularly in the 1920s and even now, are all wealthy; they are wealthy aristocrats, even princes and dukes. They are particularly regressive in their ways of thinking about women because of their background. Some of them said this pretty explicitly. Avery Brundage, a mid-century American sports official, was fairly explicit that some of them just don't like the look of it. It was just ugly to them.

Going back to your question: what are sports officials afraid of? What problem are they trying to solve? They never just say it. I think it's a lot of anxiety about how the world is changing, which, of course, you see today, too.

How did the pseudoscientific aspect of looking at people’s genitals start?

Early on, there was no technical process which they can use to test athletes’ sex early on. Just taking them into a room, getting them naked, seeing if they look like a woman. And if a person doesn't look right they can be accused of being a man.

In the 1960s, doping became a problem, particularly in the eastern bloc. A lot of women start taking testosterone and show up with masculine looks. In 1966 they started testing every single woman, but not the men. Men have never been tested, as far as I know.

They’re called “nude parades.” They go in front of a panel of doctors and they get a little card that says they passed. This is unpopular, and eventually they switch to chromosome testing. Athletes are generally fine with the switch to chromosome testing because it’s just a cheek swab, although it becomes clear to scientists quickly that it’s not a great test.

From about 1968 to 1999, the concern became less about women “becoming men” and more about men dressing up as women to compete. What these chromosome tests found in 30 years of every single female athlete being tested is that (A) they’re not catching any men, (B) every Olympics some female athletes would find out that they had some chromosomal abnormality they never knew about, they might have XXY, they might have XY mosaicism, 5α-reductase deficiency, a bunch of things, and (C), those women were told that they were not women and they had to leave. There are no records of how many times this happened. 

Eventually we must come to this later switch to testosterone testing, which is all the rage now. 

Right. In 1999 the IOC was convinced to stop chromosome testing because they’re not finding any “masquerading males,” as they were called. It becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Sports are a binary, men or women. Sports officials have decided that there has to be a test, a singular one thing that we can do to try and draw a line between those two things. First it’s a visual test, then a chromosome test. 

Now we’re in the era of testosterone and we’re no longer looking for masquerading males. Now we’re talking about women who are maybe not actually really women who have this unfair advantage in sports, because they have high testosterone. It’s this endless game of drawing a line in the sand when that line does not exist.

The Court said, yes it’s discrimination but it’s a just discrimination

Has there ever been any effort to root out “masquerading women,” or people who are suddenly deemed not men? 

No it’s only in one direction. It’s funny, there's no verified case at the elite level of a man masquerading as a woman to win medals. There are several cases of women pretending to be men because they were not allowed to compete. Women dressing up as men to compete in a marathon are very famous examples.

There's this assumption that of course, women are worse at sports than men, so that even if they were to do that, it wouldn't matter because they wouldn't win. We don't care. 

And there's no testosterone cap within the men's categories, we don't care about that either. That's fine. Michael Phelps is like a fish person. His waist, his inseam; he’s all torso, but that's allowed. He could have webbed feet and it’d be fine. It doesn't matter. We don't divide sports by your inseam, or whether you have webbed feet. But because we divide sports by sex, there is this idea that it is okay and justified to then have these tests and categories and regulations. 

Is there any movement to drop the current testosterone test?

There are two organizations at play here: the IOC and World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, the sport where most of this testing drama takes place. For most of this history, the IOC and World Athletics have been simpatico, they're doing the same tests. 

That has changed recently. The IOC, for a variety of reasons, has recently tried to embrace a human rights framework. You can roll your eyes at that if you cover the Olympics at all, but that's fine. There were a number of high profile examples of host countries perhaps violating human rights during the construction of Olympic venues, etc. etc. So the Olympics responded by saying, “Okay, we're going to try and really change the way we think about these things.” And one of the ways they did that was reevaluating their support for testosterone caps in sports.

World Athletics has doubled down on testosterone caps, and gone to the Court of Arbitration for Sport twice to defend this, and won. The Court said, yes it’s discrimination but it’s a just discrimination.

One of the challenges of this story is that both sides say “the science is on our side.”

But there’s been no study comparing these particular athletes with DSDs, females, to females without DSDs. That would be the ideal study, but it doesn’t exist. 

In 2017 there was one study which compared all female athletes in all events and found a 1.5-4% advantage of higher testosterone (in certain events, hammer throw being the biggest, at 4%).

This study has large problems – it was co-authored by two employees of World Athletics, who want to find this result. The second problem is that when an independent analyst redid the data, 17-30% of the data was flawed, ghost data, duplicated data, or data from people who were doping.

The original authors published a letter to the editor, took out the bad data in 2018, reanalyzed it,  and didn’t find the same scale of differences, and in some cases the effect of a DSD went from positive to negative, which is a red flag, to say the least. World Athletics still stood by the paper. 

The argument World Athletics is making is that women with DSDs and high testosterone are functionally equivalent to biological males. 

Katie Ledecky is beating people by enormous margins, but no one talks about her sex or gender

Now all athletes with these high-testosterone DSDs have to take testosterone lowering medications. This impacts somewhere between four and 12 athletes. Many athletes have declined to take the drugs. All of the women affected are Black or brown or from the global south. And none of the women affected qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

How much of this is wrapped up in plain old transphobia?

None of the athletes involved in the podcast are trans. Some of them stressed heavily to me to not be lumped in with trans athletes — for their own safety. Being trans in places like Uganda is dangerous.

There’s a muddying of the water, an attempt by officials to not equate trans athletes with DSD athletes, but to use the same language. They have two policies: regulate DSD athletes, ban trans athletes, which is confusing since they supposedly have the same advantage. And there are people close to the elite athletics world who will admit to this internal inconsistency. 

The chatter is that they draw this line with DSD athletes because without it they couldn’t ban trans athletes, which they want to do. There’s so little public thoughtfulness here, and lots of moral panic.

There’s this sense that women like Caster Semenya are decimating the competition, that they’re competing at the level of men. This isn’t true, Semenya’s fastest time would’ve been beaten by a middle schooler. They’re just not competing at the level of top women, let alone men. Katie Ledecky is beating people by enormous margins, but no one talks about her sex or gender, possibly because she’s white, pretty, American, blond, etc. 

Nevertheless, World Athletics’s justification is that female athletes with DSDs are just mediocre male athletes.