EPISODE ONE: THE CHOICE

Would you alter your body for the chance to compete for a gold medal? That’s the question facing a small group of elite athletes right now. Last year, track and field authorities announced new regulations that mean some athletes can’t compete in the female category unless they lower their body’s naturally occurring testosterone levels. In this episode you’ll meet one of those runners, Christine Mboma, a reigning Olympic silver medalist, and hear about the difficult choice she faces.

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VOICES

• Christine Mboma, runner from Namibia
• Celestine Karoney, BBC Africa Reporter
• Henk Botha, Christine’s coach
• Kelvin Chiringa, radio host at The Namibian

TRANSCRIPT

Rose Eveleth: Sometimes the best way to begin a complicated story is to start with something very simple. So — a fable.

It begins at the end of the 19th century, with a little French man with a very large mustache, named Pierre de Coubertin. De Coubertin was full of ideas and schemes. Many of which didn’t pan out — like his passion for a strange new sport: fencing, but on horseback.

But eventually, after much persistence, one of his odd ideas caught hold. A reimagining of a glorious gathering of ancient Greece. Every four years the most athletic men would travel from far and wide to celebrate what made them men: strength, endurance, power! It was… the modern Olympics.

But then, de Coubertin encountered a challenge. Women. They wanted to compete in the Games. But again and again, de Coubertin turned them away. “What is the appeal of that?” he said. Women competing in the games would be “impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and, I do not hesitate to add, improper.” The Olympics were for men. And men alone.¹

But eventually, the women were impossible to ignore. And nearly a hundred years ago, de Coubertin and the members of his International Olympic Committee let women into the Games. But they did so with a very specific condition: A new category. Just for women. Men over here, women over there. Problem solved…

When the men of the Olympics created a women’s category, they did not, in fact, solve their problems. They only created new ones. Here’s the thing: If you’re going to insist on having men’s sports and women’s sports, you have to know who’s who. You have to have a way of separating the sexes.

The men thought this would be easy! But almost immediately, some of the athletes who showed up to compete did not fit their notions of what a woman should be. They were too strong, too fast, too competitive. Some men questioned whether they were really women at all.

Sports authorities have now spent the past century devising — and revising — rules, creating tests to tell the difference between men and women. Tests that defy biology, and don’t really work.

Over the years, thousands of women athletes have been asked to prove that they were women.² And today, a new generation of elite female competitors is facing a similar challenge, with a new twist: They’re being asked by sports authorities to do something many doctors don’t even consider ethical —  manipulate their biology in order to compete as women.

From CBC and NPR’s Embedded, this is TESTED. I’m Rose Eveleth.

This past January, I traveled to Namibia to meet an athlete named Christine Mboma. In a lot of ways, she’s a normal twenty one year old — shy, funny, obsessed with her dogs. She’s also one of the fastest women in the entire world. Even announcers seem extra excited watching her run: 

Diamond League Announcer: Mboma is charging. Mboma is coming very, very quickly. And she just gets it on the line!

Rose Eveleth: In Namibia, Christine is a superstar. Her face is absolutely everywhere — on murals and posters and signs, the cover of magazines,³ t-shirts for sale on the street.⁴ She’s even name-dropped in a song called “Silent Hero” by Yeezir, one of the hottest rappers in Namibia right now.⁵

Christine got this famous by becoming the first woman in Namibia to ever win an Olympic medal. In 2021, she took the silver medal in the 200m dash. And she did it when she was just 18 years old.

But I flew all the way from California to Namibia not only because of that. I also went, because Christine has become, in some ways, the latest and most prominent athlete to be told by sports authorities that she actually falls on the wrong side of the line separating the men’s and women’s categories.

We’ll get to that soon. But meeting Christine, you’d never really know she has 100 years of sports policy hanging over her head.

Rose Eveleth: We’re driving through Christine’s hometown, a small village called Shinyungwe, in the northernmost part of Namibia.⁶ It took us about eight hours to get here, from the capital where she now lives. 

Christine Mboma: It’s just. We grew up here, like, next to the beautiful view of the Kavango River. It’s so special and… Yeah!

Rose Eveleth: At one point, Christine takes me to a small beach along the Kavango River.⁷ There are kids playing in the water in their underwear, while their parents lean against their cars and watch. 

Rose: What can you tell me about Mboma?

Child: She’s a superhuman. Yeah! Aha…

Rose: Yeah?

Child: She’s superhuman. [laughter]

Rose: Hello. Can I ask you a question? 

Parent: Oh, Lord. 

Rose: Do you know Christine Mboma? 

Parent: Yeah.

Rose: Is she famous around here? 

Child: Yeah… 

Rose: Yeah?

Child: She’s so famous. 

Rose: Why is she famous? 

Child: Because she is Mboma! 

Rose: Did you watch when she won in the Olympics? 

Child: Mhmm

Rose: What was that like? 

Child: It was so fast. 

Rose: So fast? Yeah? Do you want to meet Christina Mboma? 

Child: Yeah

Rose: She’s right over there. 

Child: But how can I go like this? 

Parent: Run towards her.  

Rose: Yeah, do you, do you want to come meet her?

Rose Eveleth: Most of the people I met along the Kavango River remember Christine as a little girl, playing with her friends. It’s surreal, they told me, to be watching her on the big stage, competing all over the world.

Person at river: It’s something that that really makes you feel, man, you belong to something. And then everybody is proud. At a point she is an inspiration to the young ones.

Rose Eveleth: Growing up here, in rural Namibia, Christine did not have big dreams of athletic superstardom. Her father abandoned the family when she was very young. And when she was just 13, her mother died during childbirth. 

Celestine Karoney: She’s forced to really grow up because then she has to care for her two younger siblings. In fact, she even says when you talk to her, she says, they’re my kids. She calls them my kids. 

Rose Eveleth: This is Celestine Karoney, a BBC Africa reporter who has been covering track and field for years.⁸

Celestine Karoney: She had this period of her life, you know, where she socially, she felt alone, you know? But then she found sport, she found athletics and she was excelling. She was doing well.

Christine Mboma: When I’m running, I feel good. It’s just that I feel good. Like, when I was at the village, when my mom passed on, things changed, like, people that love you and your mom was there, they’re like, they now don’t love you. And if you lost friends. That’s why I was into sport, like, everytime when I go and play netball and everytime when I go and run, I just feel like I forget about, like, things people say to me or things that are happening to me, and running helped me a lot with, like, stress and all the stuff, like, depression because I lost my mum when I was 13.

Rose Eveleth: Christine didn’t really get serious about running until she met a coach named Henk Botha.

Henk Botha: Christine came to me by accident, and somebody asked me whether I will look and see whether she can perform. And, and my first thought was, I don’t think she’s going to make it.

Christine Mboma: And the people were saying that I’m still like, small and skinny, that I was not able to run with the people in Windhoek.  

Rose: They said that?

Christine Mboma: Yeah.

Rose Eveleth: But once as they got onto the track, Henk realized that he, and everybody else, were wrong. 

Henk Botha: And after the first session of training, I said to my brother, actually, I said to him, this is something special. 

Rose Eveleth: Pretty soon, Henk and Christine would make Namibian history.

Tokyo. August, 2021. Christine has managed to make it all the way to the 200m final at the Olympics. 

CBC Announcer: Here we go. The setting is ready for the final of the women’s 200 meters. And what an unbelievably deep field we have for this group of fleet-footed women.

Rose Eveleth: Making it to an Olympic final is always a huge deal. But making it to the 200m final in 2021 was extra impressive. Because in 2021, the 200m for women was absolutely stacked with talent. People like Marie-Josée Ta Lou, Gabby Thomas…

Celestine Karoney: And of course, then you had the Jamaicans come out and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, you know, with her flaming hair and everybody’s just looking at, oh, can Mommy Rocket get another, you know, gold medal? 

Rose Eveleth: Celestine Karoney, the BBC Africa reporter, was at that final in Tokyo. 

Celestine Karoney: And everybody’s wondering, well, will it be Jamaicans and Americans? Will it be Jamaicans and another Caribbean? I will honestly say, coming into this final I did not give Christine a chance. 

Rose Eveleth: Amidst all these legends, nobody really thought much about Christine Mboma, which, if we want to be generous, might be part of the reason so many announcers pronounce her name wrong. I’ve heard Bomba, Mamba and M-bamba.  But just so that we’re clear, her last name is Mboma.

CBC Announcer: Here’s the other 18 year old from Namibia, Christine Mboma. 

Rose Eveleth: Christine wasn’t the only Namibian in the race. Her teammate, Beatrice Masilingi, was there too — Henk was coaching both of them. 

The starting blocks in Tokyo were different than the ones they were used to — bigger and fancier, with built-in electronics to sense a false start — and so before the race, Henk gave both Namibians, Beatrice and Christine, one big piece of advice.

Henk Botha: I said to them, please don’t false start. And maybe from my side was also a rookie mistake. I think they were so scared to do a false start they were so slow out of the blocks. 

Christine Mboma: That’s my biggest fear. Also, like, like, when coach said ‘don’t false start’ that was the, I was more scared. That was like I have to make sure that I must listen to the gun. And I must not go first and all this stuff. 

CBC Announcer: Set. [starting gun fires] And they’re away in the opening band, and Ta Lou with her trademark start. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce…

Rose Eveleth: Unlike Ta Lou, Christine, terrified to false start, gets out to a really slow beginning. Around the first turn, she’s near the back of the pack, and it is not looking good. In fact, she isn’t even mentioned in most of the race commentaries I’ve watched, because she’s just not really a factor in the race for the first 80 meters.

Christine Mboma: I wanted to give up. Then I saw that the finishing line was like calling me.  

Rose Eveleth: In the last 60 meters, Christine passes Marie-Josée Ta Lou of Ivory Coast, Mujinga Kambundji from Switzerland, Shelly Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica, and then finally Gabby Thomas of the US. Here’s Celestine again:

Celestine Karoney: At this point, I’m now I’m standing up. I’m like, Christine is coming into contention. She’s making ground. She’s making ground. And I remember shaking. I was shaking, um, someone was sitting next to me. I don’t remember who it was. I was like, look, look, look Christine is going to do it. Christine is going to make it. 

Rose Eveleth: In the final seconds, Christine rockets past everyone except for one of the Jamaicans.⁹

CBC Announcer: Mboma! The 18 year old from Namibia will get the silver…

Celestine Karoney: And I think she was just as shocked as we were. I was like, where did that come from?

CBC Announcer: And the youngster from Namibia with a world junior record: 21:81. At every stage here in Tokyo, she has upped the ante!

Christine Mboma: And I was so excited when I reached the finish line. I thought like I would not be second to last or something like that.

Rose: You really thought you’re gonna be second last?

Christine Mboma: Yeah.

Celestine Karoney: At that moment, almost everybody who is of African descent or who is African in that stadium, was Namibian.

Rose Eveleth: After the finish, Christine runs to the stands and grabs her coach, Henk, for a huge hug.¹⁰ 

Henk Botha: And she, she whispered in my ear. And she said to me, “coach, I’m the boss”. And yes. It was just, it was just a wonderful moment.  

Rose: “I’m the boss.” I love that. 

Henk Botha: That is her motivation. She will go down — if she’s just scared or she got nerves, she’ll just tell herself “I’m the boss. I can do it. I’m the boss. I can do it.”

Rose Eveleth: When she returned home to Namibia, a marching band met her on the tarmac, along with water cannons.

That was 2021. It should have been the beginning of an incredible career for a young, talented athlete. But lurking in the background, something else was happening — something that had the potential to derail Christine’s career entirely.

☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎ BREAK ☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎

Rose Eveleth: In the spring of 2021, before winning the silver in Tokyo, Christine was already having an incredible season. She was racing all over the world, running really impressive times in both the 400 and the 200.  

FloTrack Announcer: But look at Mboma there from Namibia. Quite a strange technique.  

Rose Eveleth: In June, just a few weeks before the Olympics, Christine ran a race in Poland.¹¹

FloTrack Announcer: And Mboma is absolutely flying. Keep an eye on that clock. And you don’t do this! You’re not supposed to do this to world class athletes.

Celestine Karoney: Everybody was like, hold up, there’s a teenager from Namibia running crazy times in the 400 meters.

FloTrack Announcer 1: Oh my goodness, 48.56 seconds. The fastest time in the world by over half a second.

FloTrack Announcer 2: That is crazy. That is absolutely crazy…

Celestine Karoney: And so that is when everybody was like, “hmm, you know, like, okay, who’s this athlete? Where is she from? How does an athlete come from nowhere to run this fast?” But she hadn’t come out of nowhere. Just because she hadn’t run on the international stage, that doesn’t mean she came out of nowhere. She came from somewhere. She came from Namibia. 

Rose Eveleth: Around that same time Henk says he got a call from someone at World Athletics, the governing body of track and field.¹² He says that the person on the other end of the line told him that they needed to test Christine, not for doping, but for something else.  

Henk Botha: We had to go to a doctor in Italy. We did some blood tests there. And we also did some, some I think it was, uh, sonar sound imaging with a doctor.

Rose Eveleth: What the doctors were looking for wasn’t entirely clear to Henk at the time — but somehow, Christine’s performances on the track had raised suspicions. 

We reached out to World Athletics for this series, but they declined our interview requests. In an email they wrote, “World Athletics has a long-standing practice not to provide specific comment on any individual or ongoing cases.”

But I know from Henk and Christine that the results of the tests showed that Christine has naturally higher testosterone levels than most women do. And she was told she has something called a difference of sex development, or DSD. Some people with these kinds of bodies use the term intersex.¹³

This was news to Christine who, like most people, had never once questioned her biology. 

But now, with this diagnosis, World Athletics placed Christine into a new category. Because the organization has spent years developing specific policies governing how track and field should deal with DSD athletes.¹⁴ The organization believes that some women with DSDs should not be allowed to compete against other women, at least not without additional restrictions. 

At the time, in 2021, the DSD rules said that Christine could no longer run the so-called middle distances — 400, 800 and the mile. But she could still run shorter races. So she did. 

Diamond League Announcer: I’ll be watching the Namibian, Christine Mboma, very carefully. She is, of course, one of those athletes with the DSD question mark hanging over her head.

If these rules seem confusing — trust me, it’s not just you, they’re confusing for athletes and coaches, too. And they keep changing.

In the spring of 2023, World Athletics announced new regulations regarding athletes like Christine.¹⁵ Here’s Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, at a press conference:

Sebastian Coe: Let me, if I may, now turn to our DSD Eligibility. The World Athletics Council, today decided to reduce the testosterone threshold for DSD athletes to 2.5 nanomoles per liter across all our events.

Rose Eveleth: So while before, Christine could still run some distances — now, she wasn’t eligible for ANY distances. 

This is where we come to the huge — and incredibly hard — choice that DSD athletes like Christine are facing: give up on elite-level racing in the female category, or alter their biology to lower their testosterone.

Sebastian Coe: Our scientific advice is that six months is the minimum period necessary to ensure their naturally high testosterone levels are no longer giving them an advantage over biological women.

Rose Eveleth: Biological women… What does that mean? I’m so glad you asked. Because the answer is actually really important. And it requires us to tackle a little bit of science.

Maybe you remember high school biology. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you loved dissecting that frog. Or maybe you skipped class completely. But probably, at some point, your teacher did some kind of lesson about human sex biology. And maybe it went a little something like this. 

Scientist:¹⁶ We are about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science. The science that deals with the nature of living things. Through the magic of electronics we’re inviting some of the audience to come along with us and join in. Question?

Audience member: Is it genes that tell whether a baby will be a boy or a girl?

Scientist: Yes they do. In every male human being, the 23rd pair of chromosomes is a mismatch, one large partner and one short one. We call them an X chromosome and a Y. In the cells of every female human being, there are two X chromosomes and no Y. A fertilized egg that has two Xs will grow into a girl. One that has an X and a Y can only grow into a boy.

Rose Eveleth: Sound familiar? XY equals boy. XX equals girl. And that’s that, the two kinds of human beings there are.

Like probably a lot of things you and I learned in high school… that’s not quite the full picture.¹⁷ So let’s try again.

Scientist: Question?

Audience member: Is it genes that tell whether a baby will be a boy or a girl?

Rose Eveleth: Possibly. You see, there are all kinds of ways that bodies can be configured. Biology is a rich tapestry. Genes are just one of the many threads. Anatomy is another. Hormones are a third. And there is an amazing number of combinations of those things. 

You can have a person with XX chromosomes who has a penis and testicles. You can have a person with XY chromosomes who has a vagina. Some women make a ton of testosterone, and some men don’t make any at all. The list of combinations and recombinations of these traits goes on and on.

Scientist: For the physical nature of life around us, in all its wonderful variety, is a constant marvel to mankind.

Rose Eveleth: Today, doctors and scientists have a much better picture of all the ways that human biological sex can vary. And that’s one reason that medical experts often recommend avoiding phrases like “biological women” — the one you heard Sebastian Coe use earlier.¹⁸

There’s no one biological thing that makes someone a woman. And lots of people have a blend of biological traits. It’s hard to pin down exactly how prevalent these variations are, but some estimates put the frequency at between one and two percent of the population.¹⁹

So with all this biology in mind, let’s get back to World Athletics. 

Sebastian Coe: Let me, if I may, now turn to our DSD Eligibility…

Rose Eveleth: Their policies regulate DSD athletes. But to make this all a little more confusing, there are lots of conditions that are considered DSDs, and the rules don’t apply to all of them. Only a handful. And specifically ones that involve having high levels of naturally occurring testosterone. 

To be clear, these are not trans athletes. The athletes in question here were all assigned female at birth, and, just like Christine, most say they never suspected that there was anything different about their bodies. But because they have high testosterone, World Athletics believes that they have an unfair advantage over other women. 

Here’s Sebastian Coe again, the president of World Athletics, in an interview with the British news agency PA Media:

Sebastian Coe: My instinct is always to try and keep athletes in competition, and asking those athletes with DSD to reduce their testosterone level so that we can at least try, where possible, to create a more level playing field was, I felt, the right decision, the right course of action to take for the sport.

Rose Eveleth: There’s a lot to say about that, and we’re going to unpack all of this over the rest of the show. World Athletics says it has proof of that alleged “unfair advantage.” But other experts argue that there’s no solid evidence. 

And by the way, as far as we know, it’s only women athletes who ever get tested. Not men.

Henk, Christine’s coach, remembers vividly the day the new rules came out. It was March 2023. 

Henk Botha: Somebody sent me a message asking me, did you see this? It was early in the morning with us. And my first reaction was I’m not sure this is true. And obviously when I googled, and then I realized this is the truth.

Rose: Do you remember that?

Christine Mboma: Mhm.

Rose: What was your gut feeling?  

Christine Mboma: I was just feeling like, I don’t know, I was just so disappointed.

Rose Eveleth: When Celestine Karoney, the BBC reporter, saw the news, the first person she thought about was Christine. 

Celestine Karoney: And I was like, oh. Christine is out of the World Championships. Now, she was being told, the rules have changed. Blanket regulations across all events in athletics. And, honestly, I thought to myself, she can’t catch a break.

Henk Botha: So we had to do a lot of tests and we had to do a lot of research. And we had different discussions with Christine on different options and, and stuff that we, we need to try and explain to her.

Rose Eveleth: Christine was just 19 when this all went down. So Henk worked with her to make this big, hard, choice. He and his wife, Elize, who is a doctor, explained to her what her medical options were to lower her testosterone levels. 

One of those options was surgery. Some people with DSDs have internal testes, which is the reason they have high testosterone levels. Surgery would remove those organs from her body, but that’s a permanent change, and she’d have to be on hormone replacement therapy for the rest of her life. 

The other option was medication — like oral contraceptives. These drugs have known side effects. Increased risk of blood clots, fatigue, mood changes. Other athletes who’ve taken them have reported feeling both physically and mentally sluggish and fuzzy.²⁰

Most doctors we spoke with said they would not prescribe this medication to someone who didn’t want or need it. The World Medical Association, an organization that advises doctors on ethical standards for care, has explicitly come out against World Athletics here — saying that asking women to take medications they do not need, purely to qualify for competition in the sex category they already occupy, is medically unethical.²¹ 

All this to say: this is a big choice to put on a young runner.

Rose: I mean did you ever consider giving up and just stop – stopping running. Was that ever an option?

Christine Mboma: Yeah, somehow. Yeah… Felt the point that I don’t want to go through it. I mean, this stuff feels like it’s hurting me. And, just every time. Um…, like, I will, uh, they break me down.

Rose Eveleth: Running isn’t just Christine’s job… it’s everything to her. 

Christine Mboma: I just love running. I just, I don’t, I don’t love it because to become famous, um, I just love it. Yeah. This is my favorite thing.  

Henk Botha: It’s in your blood.

Christine Mboma: It’s in my blood. I will say that, yeah.

Rose: Did you ever consider trying to fight World Athletics on the rules?

Henk Botha: I think we would love to fight them. Uh, but for now, I don’t think we don’t have the resources. We don’t have the money. And we, we also, uh, don’t have the time. If you are not on the track, you are not earning money. And the career that was supposed to be a 12 year career just become a one year career. 

Rose Eveleth: And so ultimately, Christine opted for the medication. In April of last year, she started taking the drugs.

When I was with her in January she wasn’t cleared to compete yet. She still had to prove to World Athletics that she had kept her testosterone levels down, consistently, for six months. Once she did that, she’d get a letter from them, saying she was once again eligible to compete.  And after that, she would only have a short window of time to run in races that would give her a chance to qualify for this summer’s Olympics in Paris.

Christine is not the only athlete in this position. From my reporting, I’m aware of at least a dozen women right now who are facing the same choice as Christine. I’ve traveled around the world to spend time with some of them. And what I learned is that the impact of these policies goes far beyond this one, painful choice about surgery or medications. Many of these women have now been outed as different, somehow not “real women.” 

Another athlete in this same group, Aminatou Seyni, told me that when she returns home to Niger people come up to her and ask her “are you a woman or a man?” Almost every woman I spoke with for this series, who has been impacted by these regulations, has a story like this — about people questioning them, telling them they don’t deserve their medals or honors. 

When I was in Namibia, I stopped by the offices of The Namibian, a local news outlet, to talk to radio host Kelvin Chiringa.

Rose: What is the most common question you get from readers or listeners about Christine?

Kelvin Chiringa: Is she a girl?

Rose: That, people ask you that? 

Kelvin Chiringa: I mean, people that are outside Namibia and especially people that are outside Africa. Is she a girl? 

Rose: And what do you say?  

Kelvin Chiringa: I don’t say anything. That’s an offense to me. It’s not a question. It’s an offense.

Rose Eveleth: But no matter what people say, Christine’s coach, Henk, believes in her. He’s confident they’re going to be able to overcome these obstacles, and even with the medication, make it to the Olympics in Paris. And if they do… he’s going to want some answers.

Rose: You said you’re a sore winner. 

Henk Botha: Yeah, I’m a sore winner. 

Rose: What are you going to say to them if Christine does well?

Henk Botha: [laughs] to be honest with you, I will rub it in their faces and they’ll have to give me answers. Why would you do this? Why would you put this girl through all these things? And it’s just, it’s a public humiliation. Because we need to understand that this is the life of somebody. It’s not just, uh, somebody in a paper that you sit in the office and decide who must do what. This is a life that you just destroyed.

Rose Eveleth: I’ve been following this topic for over ten years, ever since I heard about a South African runner named Caster Semenya who made headlines back in 2009, when athletes, officials, and journalists all very publicly questioned whether she was really a woman.

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.

Rose Eveleth: Caster ran the 800m, the half mile, which many consider one of the hardest races on the track. I tend to agree, because it was one of my events when I was an extremely not elite runner.²² And when I saw people saying that this South African woman had an unfair advantage because she was actually, sort of, but not really, a man, I thought… what?

I’m a sports nerd, and a science journalist, and also someone who loves to crawl into a historical rabbit hole, and what I pretty quickly realized is that this story intersects with all of those things.

Because it turns out that sports organizations have been on a century-long pursuit to find a singular, foolproof exam or test that can determine without a doubt whether an athlete is female. And over and over they have failed – with disastrous, career-destroying results – because of one very important fact: sports are binary, but human bodies are not.

For this series, I’ve traveled to Germany, Kenya, France, Namibia, Switzerland and more to try and understand how we got here. I’ve watched women impacted by these policies train, and seen how their lives have been upended by a single lab test.

Henk Botha: Come on, push it!

Rose Eveleth: I’ve read tons of research papers and archival documents squirreled away in libraries and in people’s closets. I’ve called scientists and policymakers on all sides, trying to better understand where these rules come from and why some people think they’re so essential.  

Over the next five episodes, we’re going to go on a little ride together —

Maximila Imali: It’s a beautiful place, Maasai land.

Rose Eveleth: — around the world, and back in time. I’m going to follow Christine, as she tries to make it back to another Olympics, this time while changing her body’s biology.

You’ll meet athletes who are taking on these policies —

Maximila Imali: I need to keep on fighting for this.

Rose Eveleth: — and those who have been forced out of sports entirely. You’ll hear historians who have studied this 100 year history, doctors who are trying to weigh the ethics of it all, and scientists who are trying to figure out what a biological advantage even means, and how to study it. 

And together we’re going to grapple with some big questions: what is fair? Who gets to decide? And what happens to the people left behind? 

Henk Botha: You don’t quit with me! Come on, Christine, come on, we do not quit!

CREDITS 

Rose Eveleth: 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 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. Archival research by Hillary Dann. Legal support from Beverly Davis.

Special thanks to Yeezir for letting us use his song Silent Hero, and Keith Houston, Amir Nakhjavani, and Damon Papadopoulos. French translation by Vanessa Nicolai. Special thanks also to CBC Licensing. Additional audio from World Athletics and Warner Brothers.

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 thanks to NPR’s Managing Editor for Standards and Practices, Tony Cavin.

This series was created with support from a New America fellowship.

1. For more about Pierre de Coubertin’s views on gender, see this article from the International Society of Olympic Historians. ↩︎
2. Between 1968 and 1999, every woman who went to the Olympics had to provide proof they were a woman. For more information, see our timeline. ↩︎
3. You can read the cover story on Christine and her teammate Beatrice Masilingi here. ↩︎
4. Christine also has her own streetwear brand. ↩︎
5. You can listen to the song here, and read about Yeezir’s rise to fame here. ↩︎
6. You can see some of her village in this video. ↩︎
7. In Namibia, this river is known as the Kavango. In Angola, they call it the Cubango. And in Botswana, they call it the Okavango. For more information about the river, see here. ↩︎
8. You can see some of Celestine’s reporting work here, and hear her interview Christine here. ↩︎
9. You can watch the race here. ↩︎
10. After the win, they gave Christine a Namibian flag to hold. For some reason, her flag was absolutely gigantic compared to those of the other two medalists. This is not important, I simply find it very funny. ↩︎
11. You can watch the race here. ↩︎
12. For more information on World Athletics, see its website. ↩︎
13. For more information, see “Intersex is not DSD” by This Is Intersex and Intersex Explained (101) by Hans Lindahl. You can also read about our strategy, when it comes to language on this show, here. ↩︎
14. The first regulation around this particular form of eligibility came out in 2011. ↩︎
15. You can read the press release here. ↩︎
16. This clip comes from a fun little educational film from 1960 called Thread of Life. You can watch the whole thing here. ↩︎
17. A 2024 study found that the majority of current US high school science textbooks communicate inaccurate information about gender. ↩︎
18. The Endocrine Society says, “the terms biological sex and biological male or female are imprecise and should be avoided.” ↩︎
19. For more information, see How common is intersex? by the Intersex Society of North America. ↩︎
20. Caster Semenya has spoken at length about the side effects she experienced taking these medications. You can read more about her story in her book, The Race to be Myself. ↩︎
21. You can read the statement here. ↩︎
22. Track and field nerds love to debate this question. If I’m honest, I’d take the 800m over the 400m hurdles any day. Runner’s World says that the 800 is the “oddest race,” and I think that’s one reason I’ve always liked it. One other interesting thing about the 800 is that because it combines both endurance and speed, you sometimes see a wider range of body types in this event than you do in others. ↩︎