We meet Kenyan sprinter Maximila Imali, who—like Christine—has been sidelined by DSD policies. She makes a different choice from Christine: to fight the regulations in court. And we learn about an earlier fight, when scientists, athletes, and journalists spent thirty years trying to end an earlier version of sex testing.
LISTEN
VOICES
- Max Imali, runner from Kenya
- Debbie Brill, reigning Canadian high jump record holder
- Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, former professor of genetics in Glasgow
- Lindsay Pieper, author of Sex Testing
- Alison Carlson, tennis pro turned journalist
- Ann Simonton, model turned feminist activist
- Henk Botha, Christine Mboma’s coach
TRANSCRIPT
Rose Eveleth: Two years ago, in the spring of 2022, Kenya hosted the annual Kip Keino Classic.
FloTrack announcer: Really good to see a real knowledgeable Kenyan crowd.
Rose Eveleth: Kip Keino is early in the athletics season. It’s one of those spring races where runners are just getting back out there. And that year, some absolute superstars had shown up in Nairobi to race. Including Christine Mboma… although the announcers somehow still have not learned how to pronounce her name.
FloTrack announcer: And wow. Listen to that crowd. Listen to that roar. This is for one of the rising stars of world athletics, Christine Mboma, silver medalist in the 200m in Tokyo. And one of the home favorites, Maximila Imali from Kenya, she goes in lane eight.
Rose Eveleth: This 100m race, at Kasarani stadium, really shows the highs and lows of track and field. The way everything can happen so fast, both glory and disaster.
FloTrack announcer: Oh, and Mboma, but she’s pulled up. Oh, we didn’t want to see that did we? And what does the clock stop at? But 10.68 seconds for Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, one of the fastest times in history.
Rose Eveleth: While Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce celebrates, Christine is laying face down on the track. She pushed it too hard, and pulled a hip flexor. The injury ruined her season.
FloTrack announcer: But that is not a sight that we wanted to see there for the youngster, Christine Mboma1.
Rose Eveleth: When I met Christine in January, it was about a year and a half after this race. She was gearing up for a new season, her first since this injury. At the same time, she was trying to adapt to the new drugs to lower her testosterone.
And soon, she’d have to go back to Nairobi. Back to the Kip Keino Classic. As part of her quest to make it to Paris.
Back in 2022, all the coverage of the race focused on either Christine’s injury, or Shelly-Ann’s incredible finishing time. There was almost no coverage of the runner four lanes over from Christine, the Kenyan, Maximila Imali.
FloTrack announcer: And one of the home favorites, from Kenya, Maximila Imali…
Rose Eveleth: Which makes sense. Max came in last in this race. And nobody usually cares, really about the last place finisher. But we do.
Because just like Christine, Max is considered a “DSD athlete” by World Athletics — an athlete with a Difference of Sex Development. Which means that, about a year after this race in Kenya, Max was given that same choice: change her body, or give up on racing in the female category. Christine has opted to play by the rules, and take the drugs. But Max took a different path: she decided to fight.
And with that, she joined a battle that’s been going on for decades — about the use of science to exclude women from sports.
From CBC and NPR’s Embedded, this is TESTED. I’m Rose Eveleth.
In January, I went to the scene of that Kip Keino classic you just heard about — Kasarani stadium, in Nairobi — to see Max Imali.
Rose: Oh, sure. Do you want to…?
Max Imali: Yeah, let me come sit with you.
Rose Eveleth: Max comes here almost every day to train, from her home all the way across the city — a trip that can take hours on the public buses.
That Kip Keino race might not have gone well for her, but Max is the reigning women’s national record holder for the 100 and 200 meters in Kenya.2 In a country known for its elite distance runners, she’s an inspiration for sprinters.
Max Imali: The athletes who are looking at me and say that, oh Max has win. And I’m going to win, too.
Rose Eveleth: But because of the latest World Athletics rules, Max isn’t currently allowed to win. Because right now, she’s not allowed to race. And while Christine is young, with plenty of time left in her career, Max is 28. Which might seem young… but for a professional elite athlete, really isn’t.
Max Imali: And I’ve missed the 2016 Olympics, the 2020 Olympics. And now I’m going to miss the third one. This Olympics, maybe can be, maybe it can be the last Olympics.
Rose: How does that feel?
Max Imali: It is very painful for me. I’m feeling bad. This world is not fair. It’s not fair.
Rose Eveleth: Max’s saga with these policies started nearly 10 years ago, in 2015, with a phone call. One that would be the beginning of a really harrowing experience.
Max Imali: They called me and told me, Max, you are needed in Nairobi.
Rose: Did she say why?
Max Imali: I don’t know. I did not ask anything. So they just called me and tell me Maximilia, you are needed in Nairobi. They took me to the Nairobi hospital for, the, uh, the testing. They undressed me in front of a man, the doctor. I remember that day. It was so emotional and I was like, how can a man undress me and tell me to just lie down, I need to see you? So he opened my legs. He tested my, my chest and, uh, he took samples. So I was like, why are these people doing this? Even my mom have never done this to me.
Rose: Did they tell you anything about why?
Max Imali: No, they did not tell me at that time why they are doing that to me. After they have undressed me, I ask mummy and I call her and told mama they have done this to me. And, uh even before I talk to her, she told me, “Don’t talk to me, just come back home, then we will discuss this at home.” Because she was so emotional. My mom was like, “Why are these people doing this to my child?”
Rose Eveleth: Eventually, her manager called her and gave her the news about what that exam, and the blood tests, actually showed — that she had high levels of naturally occurring testosterone.
Max Imali: They just call me and tell me Max, you know, uh, you have high testosterone, that’s why you are not supposed to run with other girls.
Rose: Did you know what he meant by that?
Max Imali: I did not know. So I went home crying. Like I went to my mom and tell mama, this is why — this is why these people are undressing me.
Rose Eveleth: Despite that upsetting call, Max was allowed to keep running. Because at the time, in 2015, the rules governing DSD athletes had been suspended after being challenged in court.
But in 2018, that changed. That year, World Athletics introduced a new set of regulations. These new rules allowed athletes like Max and Christine to compete in some events, but not others. If Max wanted to keep running her main event, the 400, she’d have to lower her testosterone levels.
This rule is why, the next year, Max found herself dropped from the Kenyan 400 meter relay team, the day before they were supposed to leave for an event in Japan.3
At the time, Athletics Kenya said they couldn’t “risk” bringing her. But Max says that she saw a paper with another reason written down, that said:
Max Imali: These athletes are not supposed to go. They will ruin the name of the Athletics Kenya.
Rose Eveleth: Athletics Kenya did not respond to our requests for an interview. Technically, according to the 2018 rules, Max could still run shorter races, so she focused more on her sprinting, and started breaking records in the 100 and 200.4
KBC announcer: And she does 23.12 seconds. It’s a new national record.
Rose Eveleth: Then, in the spring of 2023, the rules changed again, expanding to all distances.5 Which meant Max wasn’t eligible to run even these shorter races.
Max Imali: That day, you know, the news was shocked. World Athletics decide for themselves that you are not going to run. They just decide and make their own decision. I don’t know why.
Rose Eveleth: And Max was faced with that same choice you heard Christine grapple with: lower her testosterone, or stop competing in the women’s category.
Max knew she didn’t want to take medications, and she didn’t want to have surgery either. The side effects were too mysterious and unknown to her. She told me that God created her the way she should be. Changing her body like this, just didn’t make sense to her.
Max speaks often of her mother, and their conversations. But her mother is no longer around to help guide her. Around the same time Max was tested, her mom got sick. And about a year later, in 2016, she died, and Max is still struggling with the loss.
Rose: What do you think she would tell you, advise you right now?
Max Imali: If my mom was around now, she could have come, she could have hug me, she could have talk to me nicely and tell me, “Max, go and fight for this case. I need you to fight for other athletes.”
Rose Eveleth: For Max, fighting for other athletes meant going to court. When I visited her in January, she was four months away from flying to Switzerland, to bring a case before the Court of Arbitration for Sport. A case where she’d argue that these rules are discriminatory and a violation of her human rights.
It’s a risky move. The last athlete to challenge testosterone regulations in this court lost6. But if Max were to win, it wouldn’t just be for her — it could affect all athletes.
Max Imali: It’s very hard. It’s very hard for me to give up. It is hard. I can’t give up because of — if I give up, these athletes will say like, “Max has given up. This athletics is not good. We need to leave athletics.” And that is something that I don’t want to to see athletes suffering.
Rose: It’s a lot of pressure on you, though.
Max Imali: Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure, so I need to keep on going. I need them to see me. I need to stand firm. I need to stand for my own. I need to fight this case for my own. Yes.
Rose Eveleth: When Max was dropped from the Athletics Kenya team, it made international headlines. But reading stories from the time, you would never know that the idea of testing a woman, and arguing that her body was too male-like to be allowed to compete as a woman, isn’t new. That there is this long history of trying to find, and exclude, women who have supposedly “male traits.” The only thing that has changed, is what those “male traits” allegedly are.
Back in the 1960’s, the so-called “nude parades” were meant to root out women who simply looked too masculine, too muscular. But when athletes around the world balked at having to be examined like this, sporting bodies went searching for another method. A way to actually measure this vague notion of manliness. And they didn’t have to look very far. Because all around them — in magazines, in scientific journals, on TV and on the news — there was a new, and perfect solution: genetics.
Narrator: It has been said that when the history of science in this century is written, the first half will have been the study of things: the automobile, airplane, rocket. The second half will be the study of living things. The cell, the chromosome, the gene.
Rose Eveleth: Let’s take a trip to a lab in Ontario, Canada to visit a mild-mannered medical researcher named Dr. Murray Barr. Dr. Barr studied the science of sex.
Murray Barr: We found that a certain condition that occurs only in males was very interesting from a cellular point of view.
Rose Eveleth: In 1948, Barr made a discovery. He was looking at cat cells under the microscope. And he happened to notice that in the nucleus of some cells, there was a small dark dot. Upon further examination, he realized that the dots coincided with the cat’s sex. Female cats had the dots. Male cats did not. These little dots became known as Barr bodies.7
Five years after Barr noticed those little bodies, Watson and Crick would publish their paper on the double helix structure of DNA.8 With it, the era of genetics would truly begin.
Narrator: Inside the gene is the exact blueprint for every human characteristic, like skin color expressed in a chemical code.
Rose Eveleth: In the 1960’s, genetics captured the public’s imagination. People became enamored with this idea that our genes determined everything about us9.
Which is exactly what sports needed — a scientific test to tell who was really a woman, and who was not.
And so they turned to Murray Barr’s little dots. Because those little dots tell you if a cell has two X chromosomes. You only really need one, so if you have two X’s, one of them becomes inactive and makes a little dark spot inside every one of your cells.
ABC reporter: The test is called the Barr body test. Cells scraped from the inside of the cheek are placed under a microscope. Except in rare abnormality, this dark spot shows up only on female tests, but not in males.
Rose Eveleth: And to the leaders of sports, it was perfect. All they had to do was collect some cells from an athlete, look at them under a microscope, and that’s it! Females and males neatly sorted into tidy little piles of slides.
And so in 1967, the governing body of track and field replaced nude parades with the Barr Body test.
Debbie Brill: It was just a, it was just a little classroom basically where you walked in and they had somebody just doing cheek scrapings and lining up the test tubes of, of cheek scrapings.
Rose Eveleth: That’s Debbie Brill, the reigning Canadian high jump record holder. In 1970, Debbie went to Edinburgh and competed in the Commonwealth Games.
CBC announcer: Canada’s Debbie Brill. The gold medal winner in the high jump.
Rose Eveleth: But before Debbie could win her gold, she had to go through sex testing.
Debbie Brill: I think every young girl felt a little anxious about what was going to come up there, you know, cause a lot of us were tomboys, and we were athletic, you know, and we were more athletic than all the other girls that we knew. So there was some anxiety around what the test was going to show.
Rose Eveleth: For Debbie, it wound up being worry over nothing. She passed. And like every other woman who passed, she was handed a Very Important Document.
Debbie Brill: We got to carry a card that said I am female. [laughs]
Rose Eveleth: These cards were called certificates of femininity.10
Rose: And the card? Can you describe it for us? What is the card like?
Debbie Brill: Yeah, it’s a little tiny card, like, like a, business card. Here’s my business card. I’m female. I can, I can do this job.
Rose Eveleth: This policy, taking a cheek swab and issuing femininity cards, started with track and field, the International Amateur Athletic Federation or IAAF. It’s now known as World Athletics11 — and it’s the same organization making the rules today that impacts Christine and Max. Soon, the Olympics did the same, and added mandatory sex testing to the Olympic games.12
From 1968 to 1999 — for more than thirty years — every woman who competed in the Olympics, in every single sport, had to take a chromosome test, and get one of these little cards verifying that they were female.13 And they had to bring this card with them if they wanted to compete.
And ending that practice would be quite a battle.
☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎ BREAK ☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎
Rose Eveleth: While Debbie Brill was feeling nervous about her test, in that little room in Edinburgh, there was someone about fifty miles away who was already arguing against these policies.
Malcolm Ferguson-Smith: Well, do you have any questions for me?
Rose: Oh, boy, do we.
Rose Eveleth: Dr. Malcolm Ferguson-Smith is 93 years old now, and very retired. But in 1970, he was a professor of genetics in Glasgow, and he had actually been asked to run the sex testing lab at those Commonwealth Games.
Malcolm Ferguson-Smith: I said I wasn’t going to do that. In fact I refused to do it.
Rose Eveleth: He said no in part because he knew that the test would not actually solve the problem that the sports organizations claimed to have.
Malcolm Ferguson-Smith: What they were trying to do was to pick up males that were masquerading as females, and illegally going into female competition.
Rose Eveleth: At this point, the leaders of sports were no longer really worried about women turning into men. But they still were worried about the other two things: women who were not womanly enough, and men sneaking into women’s competition to win.
There is no documented case of that happening in the Olympics, by the way. Every story about a “masquerading male” that I have ever encountered has proven to either be unverified, or misunderstood.14
And even if you did think that men were sneaking into women’s competitions, this chromosome test wasn’t even a good way to catch them. Remember in episode one we talked about all the ways that human biology can vary? Some cisgender men can have XX chromosomes. And some cisgender women have Y chromosomes. And this can happen in some or all of a person’s cells. It’s really hard to know how common this is, because many women born with Y chromosomes will live their whole lives not knowing they have them.
Even Murray Barr, the guy who invented this test, warned against using it in this way. In 1956, he wrote that sex chromosomes are “a minor detail in the femaleness or maleness of the whole person.”15
So using this test wouldn’t catch cheaters. But it would catch women who didn’t have the second X chromosome, and tell them that according to science they were not women.
Malcolm Ferguson-Smith: Well, I thought it was very discriminating, for them to identify them. It was discriminating against the athlete, I thought an athlete who’s, who had lived and brought up as a female, who should be a female athlete. Their genetics was of no consequence as far as I’m concerned.
Rose Eveleth: Malcolm worried that women would be unfairly banned from competition simply because they happen to have some cells with Y chromosomes. And this wasn’t hypothetical. It happened immediately16. Here’s Debbie Brill again.
Debbie Brill: I knew a couple of women who were XY women. So.
Rose: Did those women find out that they were XY because of these sex tests?
Debbie Brill: Yup.
Rose: Wow. So they found out because of this?
Debbie Brill: Yeah.
Rose: Wow. What was that like for them?
Debbie Brill: It was life changing. It was, it was awful. It was horrible to find out that, oh. Not only can you not compete, you’re not actually female — is how it was — you know, that’s what they were told. It was a terrible thing.
Rose: And so those women, they couldn’t compete anymore once they found out about this through the sex test?
Debbie Brill: No, they couldn’t compete in women’s sport. And they certainly couldn’t compete in men’s sport, cause they were women!
Rose Eveleth: We still don’t know how many women this happened to — how many people’s careers were ended with a single peek into a microscope. But while athletes quietly disappeared, experts were sounding the alarm.
Lindsay Pieper: Ever since the introduction, especially of the Barr body test, there have been geneticists and endocrinologists and different people from the medical community who are protesting and opposing this.17
Rose Eveleth: That’s Lindsay Pieper, a professor at the University of Lynchburg and the author of Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports. These experts she’s talking about eventually started sending letters back and forth, and recruiting other scientists to the cause from all over the world.
And they spent the next thirty years trying to get sports organizations to stop these chromosome tests. They contacted experts around the world, explaining why these tests made no sense. They published papers in journals about it. They lobbied the sports organizations directly, like the International Olympic Committee, or IOC.
Lindsay Pieper: There’s correspondences in the IOC archives to the IOC Medical Commission saying this is wrong, this is unethical.
Rose Eveleth: Murray Barr himself even got involved — in 1987, he wrote to the Canadian Olympic Committee saying that the use of his test in sports “has been an embarrassment to me.”
But for many years… they got nowhere. Most scientists could look at the test, and look at what sports were doing and go… yeah, obviously, this is not going to work.
But that doesn’t matter if you can’t convince sports organizations that it’s wrong. And that was like talking to a brick wall.
The chairman of the IOC Medical Commission at the time was Prince Alexandre de Merode. Yes, an actual prince, from a noble family in Belgium.
De Merode spent 35 years as the head of the medical commission — from 1967, the year these tests were introduced, all the way to his death in 2002 — and for most of that time he was dedicated to drawing a distinct line between who is a man, and who is a woman.
In 1987, de Merode wrote a letter to the scientists lobbying the IOC, explaining his feelings about sex testing. Here’s what he said, read by a voice actor.
Voice actor: “When we carried out the first tests in 1968, we simply wished to put a stop to the development of a particularly immoral form of cheating which had been spreading insidiously within high-level competition sport.”
Rose Eveleth: In this letter, he doesn’t explain what particularly immoral form of cheating he’s referring to, but we can guess that he’s talking about men faking their way into women’s competition. De Merode then wrote that sex testing had solved this problem:
Voice actor: “Since 1968, the denunciations and rumors have ceased and the scandals have disappeared. We have thus achieved our aim.”
Lindsay Pieper: I think it’s important to note that he is not a scientist. De Merode had no medical or scientific background.
Rose Eveleth: Here’s De Merode speaking in a documentary called Sex Games.
Alexandre de Merode: If you are a scientist in a, in the deepest way of your laboratory, uh, you can have a completely different point of view. I understand that, but we have another way.
Rose Eveleth: He’s basically saying, okay nerds, that’s all fine in your little labs, but this is sports. It’s different. And this test does exactly what we need it to do.
Lindsay Pieper: It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s cheap. Athletes like it, and it gives us a clear cut answer.
Rose Eveleth: And he’s not entirely wrong. Based on our reporting, athletes were actually pretty happy to replace nude parades with these cheek swabs. I mean, really anything is better than being taken into a room and having to get naked so someone can check and see if your vulva looks right.
And some athletes did want some kind of test like this. Remember, this all started in the Cold War era, where doping had become so widespread in athletics that sporting bodies had no choice but to address it.18
Here’s Esther Stroy, an American sprinter, from an oral history assembled by the University of Texas at Austin.19
Esther Stroy: I’d heard about the Eastern Bloc countries, and their unfairness and what they were trying to do to win. So if it would eliminate that, then. Then let’s do it.
Alison Carlson: Most athletes just passed the test, and they didn’t think much about it. And the complexities of sex biology were not, you know, on their radar. They didn’t understand it.
Rose Eveleth: This is Alison Carlson. In 1987, she came across an article in Women’s Sport and Fitness magazine about sex testing, which by then the IOC was calling “gender verification.” And she — kind of like me — went… wait, what?
Alison started reading more about sex testing, and got so engaged in this issue that she became part of this little group of doctors who were fighting against these policies — a group that included Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, who you met earlier.20
Unlike Ferguson-Smith, Alison wasn’t a doctor or a geneticist or an endocrinologist. But she had been a serious athlete. A tennis player.
Alison Carlson: I was never good enough to be sex tested. But the idea of carrying around a certificate of femininity that looked like your video membership card kind of thing, or your driver’s license…
Rose Eveleth: That seemed ridiculous to her. Alison was also a budding journalist, and — as she says herself — a “pain in the neck” because she “made a lot of noise.” She believed that scientists just needed to explain to athletes and the public… basically all the stuff I’ve been telling you on this podcast! About variations in sex biology, about the fact that women were being kicked out of sports for no good reason. And that if they explained that clearly, everybody would be appalled.
And so Alison set out to write that story. She just needed an athlete willing to talk to her. Which wasn’t easy to find, because remember, these women quietly disappeared from sports.
But after some research, Alison came across the name of a Spanish hurdler named Maria José Martínez-Patiño, who had been disqualified after a chromosome test in 1985. Alison wrote an impassioned letter, basically begging Maria to talk to her, had a friend translate it into Spanish, and sent it off in the mail.
Alison Carlson: And at least a month or two passed. And I gave up, thinking it’s not going to get there. It’s probably the wrong address. Whatever. And it was about five in the morning. And then my phone rings and I hear this voice and she goes, “Hello, Alison, it’s Maria. I got your letter. Please help me. I want to work with you.” And I started crying, and she started crying, because I cared so much about, like, these people who got hurt and nobody was trying to hurt them, but they didn’t have a voice.
Rose Eveleth: Maria and Alison met up, and spent three days together, and Alison had her story. The piece ran in March of 1991 in Women’s Sport and Fitness, the same magazine that started it all for Alison.
Soon — just as Alison had hoped — big mainstream media outlets were telling Maria’s story. Here’s NBC:
NBC reporter: Maria Patiño was a promising Spanish hurdler until seven years ago when a judge at Collegiate Games in Japan demanded a genetic gender test. That saliva test revealed that Maria had a set of X and Y chromosomes like most men. Women usually have a pair of Xs. She had been unaware of the genetic birth defect that made her develop as a woman rather than a man. Humiliated, she was banned from track events. She lost her scholarship. Her boyfriend. Newspaper headlines branded her a freak.
Alison Carlson: Maria was a real-life representation of all the problems with chromosome screening.
Rose Eveleth: I asked Maria if she’d do an interview for this show, but she declined, saying she had already said it all before. But here she is in a 1994 interview.
Maria Patiño: Eh… es que, yo no solamente perdí mi beca. Es, es importante pero importante es que yo perdí el prestigio. Perdí años de mi vida, dedicación al deporte, perdí, eh, la confianza de mis amigos. Eh, perdí todos mis récords. Y perdí los mejores años de mi vida.
Rose Eveleth: She says: I didn’t just lose my scholarship. Yes, that’s important but what’s important is that I lost prestige, I lost years of my life, dedication to the sport, I lost the trust of my friends, I lost all my records, and I lost the best years of my life.21
Maria’s willingness to speak publicly was a big deal. Her story created pressure on the people who ran sports to actually do something. And it inspired ordinary people to get involved.
Ann Simonton: I mean, that was amazing. She did an amazing job of helping focus on the injustice of that particular work.
Rose Eveleth: This is Ann Simonton, a former Sports Illustrated cover model turned feminist activist. After hearing about these sex tests, and athletes like Maria who failed them, she led a letter-writing campaign to end sex testing, featuring a postcard she wrote and had people sign.22
Ann Simonton: “Dear Prince Alexandre de Merode, chairman of the IOC Medical Commission. I’m very concerned that you insist on putting every female athlete through archaic gender tests…”
Rose Eveleth: De Merode actually saved these postcards. When producer Ozzy Llinas Goodman and I were in Switzerland, we came across them in a box of correspondences.
Rose: This one says, “Dear Dr. Walker, I am writing you to protest the injustice of women athletes in the Olympics being subjected to…”
Ann Simonton: “…if the Olympic Games are to be fair and nondiscriminatory, please stop these biased tests, or at the very least, test everyone equally.”
Rose Eveleth: All these things built and built and built. The postcards, the media attention, letters from scientists. There was even internal pressure within sports organizations.
And finally… change came. The International Amateur Athletic Federation caved. In 1992, it dropped sex testing. But the IOC held on.23
Then, over the course of the next few years, nearly every major medical society called for an end to gender verification. The French Medical Association said it would discipline any doctor who participated. The Norwegian government passed a law against the practice. The IOC’s own athletes commission came out against these tests.
Finally, the IOC had to fold.
On June 23rd, 1999, the group of scientists that had been fighting these tests for thirty years now received a celebratory fax from a guy named Arne Lundqvist. Arne was a Swedish geneticist and IAAF official who had helped get the policy dropped. “Victory is finally ours,” he wrote to the group, “the genetic based test for screening for female gender at the Olympic Games has gone into the history books!”
The 2000 Sydney Olympics were the first games in decades where female athletes didn’t need a little card saying they were actually women.24
But… you knew there was a but coming didn’t you. There was one concession that these organizations made to appease those who were worried about so-called “masquerading males.”
Arne Lundqvist, in his fax celebrating their victory, shared the official IAAF policy. Which was:
“The Medical Delegate shall have the ultimate authority in all medical matters. He shall also have the authority to arrange for the determination of the gender of the competitor should he judge that to be desirable.”
Which means, sports authorities could still check someone they considered suspicious. Arne went on to say that the Olympics would soon add a similar policy.25
Much like the first policy in 1936, we found no explanation of what exactly someone might be looking for, or what would rise to the level of true suspicion. And there was no protocol for what test they would use to determine a woman’s gender.
But still… for ten years, women were, mostly, left alone to run — untested and unquestioned.
Then, in 2009, sex testing came back to life.
Celestine Karoney: Some athletes were like, “Oh, no, this athlete? We really doubt whether she’s female.” And I’m like, yo, backup. What do you mean?
ABC reporter: The controversy continues this morning about that champion runner from South Africa, who’s now undergoing a battery of tests to determine if she is really a she.
Malcolm Ferguson-Smith: Well, well, I just thought well… here we go again.
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Tested, from CBC, NPR’s Embedded, and Bucket of Eels. The show is written, reported, and hosted by me, Rose Eveleth.
Editing by Alison MacAdam and Veronica Simmonds. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman, Andrew Mambo, and Rhaina Cohen. Additional development, reporting, producing, and editing by Lisa Pollak. Sound design by Mitra Kaboli. Our production manager is Michael Kamel. Anna Ashitey is our digital producer. This series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. Our intersex script consultant is Hans Lindahl. Legal support from Beverly Davis. Archival research by Hillary Dann.
Voice acting this episode by Keith Houston and Amir Nakhjavani. Special thanks this episode to Jerome Socolovsky, Alison Carlson, and Jake Elsas. Additional audio from KBC, CBC, and CBS.
At CBC, Chris Oke and Cesil Fernandes are Executive Producers, Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager, and Arif Noorani is the Director of CBC Podcasts.
At NPR, Katie Simon is Supervising Editor for Embedded. Irene Noguchi is Executive Producer. NPR’s senior vice president for podcasting is Collin Campbell. We got legal support from Micah Ratner. And specials thanks to NPR’s Managing Editor for Standards and Practices, Tony Cavin.
This series was created with support from a New America fellowship.
- You can watch the race here. ↩︎
- Max also currently holds the national record for the women’s triple jump and long jump. ↩︎
- For more information, see this article. You can see a 2019 interview with Max here. Interestingly, the Olympic Channel also published an interview with Max around this time. ↩︎
- You can watch Max break the 100m record here, and the 200m record here. ↩︎
- See the World Athletics press release. ↩︎
- That athlete was Caster Semenya. You’ll hear more about her story, and case, in the next episode of Tested. ↩︎
- Barr published his findings in this 1949 paper. For more information on Barr’s work, see the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. ↩︎
- See here. ↩︎
- For more information, see this article. ↩︎
- An example of one of these cards can be seen here. ↩︎
- The IAAF changed its name in 2019. ↩︎
- For more information on how sex testing worked during this time, see this internal report on the 1968 Winter Olympics. You can also check out this 2022 analysis of sex testing at the 1968 Summer Olympics, and this 1972 JAMA article on “putative female athletes” by a member of the IOC medical commission. ↩︎
- According to one analysis of tests conducted onsite at the Olympics, “13 women have been excluded from athletic competition between 1972 and 1990 using sex chromatin testing.” Other athletes dropped out of competition amidst press speculation about their genders — including Erik Schinegger, Klavdiya Boyarskikh, Krastana Stoeva, and Kirsten Wengler. ↩︎
- For more information, see Rose’s CBC article on Heinrich Ratjen. ↩︎
- See this article. ↩︎
- Ewa Kłobukowska was the first woman to be disqualified from elite sport by a chromosomal sex test. You can read contemporary articles about her experience here and here. ↩︎
- See, for example, this 1991 paper by Ferguson-Smith and a collaborator, Elizabeth Ferris. ↩︎
- For more information, see Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport by Sonja Erikainen. ↩︎
- You can listen to this oral history here. ↩︎
- For more examples of scientists’ critiques during this time, see this 1986 JAMA article and this 1992 JAMA article. For one response from the IOC perspective, see this 1992 letter to the editor from the scientists who conducted sex testing at the 1992 Winter Olympics. ↩︎
- Maria wrote more about her experiences in this 2005 article for the Lancet. ↩︎
- For more on Ann’s story, see our article. ↩︎
- This created a discrepancy between IAAF and IOC policy that Ferguson-Smith called “a real muddle.” For more information, see this 1993 article. To see all the various eras of sex testing policies of the IAAF/WA and IOC, see our timeline. ↩︎
- For more information, see this 2000 article by Arne Lundqvist, Alison Carlson, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, and other collaborators. ↩︎
- In a 2000 statement, the IOC said that it “will nonetheless reserve the right to conduct such tests, if necessary.” ↩︎
