TESTED

EPISODE SIX: LUMPERS AND SPLITTERS

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by

rose
in

Christine and Max are some of the most recent female athletes in this century-long history to face tests, stigma, and restrictions. But they are unlikely to be the last. In this episode, we find out whether Christine qualifies for the Paris Olympics, as well as the fate of Max’s court case. And we explore the broader implications of the sex binary in sports. Is there a better way for sports to be categorized?

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TRANSCRIPT

Henk Botha: Quicker, quicker, quicker. Go, go, go. Don’t, don’t be that, up, up. It’s a quick movement, right.

Rose Eveleth: Christine Mboma trains in a nondescript gym in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. It’s not fancy, and it’s certainly not private. She’s training next to middle-aged men who are just trying to get their workout in before they head into the office; while her coach, Henk Botha, pushes her.

Henk Botha: Lift it up, Steenie. Your mind is as strong as I’ve seen in an athlete, so show me your mind, Christine. Come on Christine! Come on Christine!

Rose Eveleth: At one point, Christine is sitting against a wall, her legs at a ninety-degree angle, holding a medicine ball out in front of her.

Henk Botha: I know the pain is there but you’re not going to give up, you’re not going to give up. We don’t give up! [Christine grunts]

Rose Eveleth: She has to keep the position for a full minute.

Henk Botha: I want more, come on! Yes, yes yes! [Christine screaming indistinctly] 5, 3… Thank you. [Laughs]

Rose Eveleth: This is the life of an elite athlete — before the spotlight, the glory, the finish line at the Olympics, there is this: pain, and sweat, and unglamorous days at the gym. And for Christine, she’s had to go through more than just hard workouts. Her road to Paris included things that almost no other athletes have to go through: regular blood tests, and drugs.

But just like every other athlete, Christine still had to run an Olympic qualifying time by the deadline: June 30th. And after failing to qualify at the Kip Keino Classic back in April, time was running out.

Over in Kenya, Maximila Imali was doing her own kind of training: preparing for her case at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS. When I called her in April, she told me she was constantly in touch with the people helping with her case.

Max Imali: I always talk to them because they need to prepare me very well. We need to, actually, to prepare for their testimonies and everything.

Rose Eveleth: Not being able to compete in elite races has taken a toll on Max’s income. She told me that she struggles to find the money to continue in athletics. She has to scramble and scrounge to pay her coach, get to the track, and even to feed herself.

Max Imali: Sometimes, like yesterday, you know, I went the whole day until 20:30 p.m. And that time is the time that I, I ate something. It’s not good. I need at least to have a good diet and all of these things need money. I went bankrupt. Totally bankrupt. I have nothing to my account. So I’m fighting this alone, and, uh, it is very painful.

Rose Eveleth: Christine and Max are just two of the women impacted by these policies. They chose different paths — take the medications, take World Athletics to court — but they’re both living with the effects of these policies every single day. And over the last few months, they’ve both been preparing for one of the hardest things they’ve ever done.

And on this final episode, you’re going to find out how it went for each of them, and how their stories could affect so many other athletes.

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

In April, Max was just a week away from flying to Switzerland to present her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS.

Max Imali: Now I’m so nervous because, you know, it’s my first time to go and contest the case. Sometimes you feel that, like, this case, we are going to win this case, or, what are we going to do?
Rose: Are you allowed to talk to people during the case? Can you talk?
Max Imali: You will not be there?
Rose: No, I can’t be there. I was hoping, but I can’t come.
Max Imali: Okay, I’ll be talking to you. Actually, we will be talking.

Rose Eveleth: On that call, Max and I made a plan that I would call her every day at the end of the hearings, so we could talk about how it went.

And on the first day of the case, I called. And instead of answering, Max sent a cryptic note, asking me to talk to her lawyers. Something unexpected had happened, and I made a lot of calls to try and figure out what it was.

At this point, all I can tell you is that things didn’t go the way anybody had planned. The court has still not released anything about the hearing. And no one, on either side, is talking about it publicly yet.

And since there’s still been no public decision, it means that Max has no shot at Paris. Without a ruling from the court striking down the testosterone rules, she can’t race to qualify. So she’s missing the Olympics once again.

And while I can’t tell you what went on in the courtroom, I can share with you something that happened outside of it. Here’s Payoshni Mitra, the athletes rights advocate. She was in Switzerland with Max. And she said something that surprised me.

Payoshni Mitra: I would say that I have witnessed the most powerful moments of my career in that week, which made me feel, like, you know, life is worth living.

Rose Eveleth: Max wasn’t the only athlete who went to Switzerland for this case. There were other women impacted by these rules, who had flown in from around the world to speak in front of the court. And when they came together, they had time to basically… hang out and talk. Which is kind of unprecedented.

Payoshni Mitra: Each of these athletes have been made to feel in the past, you have something wrong about your body, you are inadequate and therefore you are not supposed to talk about it in public. You should be ashamed of your body. You should hide it. You should fake injury and not say what exactly has happened. And therefore this has not allowed them to feel any connection with anyone else, because they always feel they are the only one going through this. They feel that this time, because they are together, they are not willing to accept being treated unequally. And, in a very organic way, they came together and said things like, we are not going to be oppressed again.

Rose Eveleth: Regardless of what happens at CAS, some of these athletes say that they will never give up.

Last December, Caster Semenya spoke at a sports and human rights conference at the United Nations. Here’s what she said:

Caster Semenya: The minute you start categorizing women’s sports, you’re touching us, and we come for you. I promise that as long as I live, I’m never going to stop. I’m going to be that whistle in your ear. Your ceilings will be written Caster Semenya.1

Rose Eveleth: The Court of Arbitration for Sport isn’t the only way to fight these rules. Last year, Caster Semenya won a case in front of the European Court of Human Rights — a ruling that is now being challenged by the Swiss government.2

Meanwhile, Christine was still trying to make it to Paris. And after her last place finish in Nairobi, Henk told me that she was struggling. Not physically, but mentally. After Kip Keino, she went home and ran a small race in Namibia, on the track where she trains, but she didn’t land a qualifying time there, either.

Christine doesn’t like discussing her problems. When I was with her in January, I asked her who she goes to when things get hard. And she told me that she rarely talks to anybody.

Christine Mboma: I really don’t, you know, talk to like, people, like, for me. When I tell someone my problem, and that person feels pity for me, I feel bad. I don’t want someone to see that I’m weak.

Rose Eveleth: At one point, in May, Henk told me that he was going to offer Christine an out.

Henk Botha: We will have a nice chat tomorrow, and, and I need to tell her, listen, if you don’t want to do this anymore, let’s just leave it. We are not, you are not forced. You are still a human being. You are not an object. So I’ll, I’ll have the talk with her tomorrow, and I’ll let you know.

Rose Eveleth: Henk and Christine had a long talk, and after their conversation, he told me that she agreed to talk to a sports psychologist. And Henk told me that it’s important to him to not pressure her into anything.

Henk Botha: And I will say this a thousand times, that, that it’s not about medals and winning and everything. It’s nice to have those, but that if it’s not meant to be, it’s not meant to be.

Rose Eveleth: But Christine didn’t want to give up. Not yet. So in early June, they flew to Europe.

Their first stop was France, where Christine visited the Eiffel Tower. The Olympics were happening so soon, that the tower had the iconic rings put up. Christine posed for a selfie beneath them. Watching her Instagram stories I couldn’t help but think that she was so close… yet still so far away.

On June 18th, she left Paris, and ran in a tiny event in Romans, in southeastern France. And again, she couldn’t land a qualifying time.

Then, in the last week of June, Christine went to Cameroon, for the African Athletics Championships.3 This was her last chance to hit a qualifying standard. In the semifinal, Christine lined up in lane 2.

African Athletics announcer: Set.

Rose Eveleth: She gets off to a strong start off the blocks. And then about halfway through, she gets passed by almost everybody in the field.

African Athletics announcer: 11:15 for the winner of this semifinal number 2, Gina Bass.

Rose Eveleth: Christine came in last… again. Her time was twelve seconds flat. Nearly a second too slow to qualify. Christine would officially miss the Olympics in Paris.

Henk Botha: You know, it was just everything went wrong. We thought that will be our big one. But everything didn’t work out.
Rose: Yeah, was she disappointed or are you disappointed about the Olympics?
Henk Botha: I must be honest with you. I was, and I think, she didn’t say she was. She, she said this is okay, but I can see in her face she was not happy about it. And then obviously, knowing it’s 20 days to go and knowing that other athletes are on their way and not being part of that doesn’t make you happy but it’s not the end of the world.

Christine Mboma: Yeah, it’s sad, but that’s life, so I’m okay with that.
Rose: That’s very positive. Yeah. You weren’t sad at all. I feel like you’re allowed to be a little bit sad.
Christine Mboma: Yeah, just a bit sad but yeah it’s okay.

Rose Eveleth: I asked Christine how she stays so positive and keeps going in the face of all of this. And she told me, basically, that her whole life has been full of hurdles. This is just one more.

Christine Mboma: I’m a strong person, so a lot of worse has happened in my life. Like, for me, not — missing out the Olympics for this year, it won’t be like, it won’t bring me down. So, I lost my mom. A lot of people criticize me. That was, this is not the, the only thing, the bad thing that happened to me. But still, I stand out, being strong and, yeah.

Rose Eveleth: Some people will point to Christine’s failure to qualify for the Olympics as proof that these rules are necessary and working — that it was only her high testosterone that made her great.

But we can’t know whether or not the medications are what have kept Christine from being able to get back to her previous pace. It could be her nagging hip flexor injury from two years ago. It could be that it takes a while to get back into shape if you haven’t been competing at the elite level for two years. It could be the mental toll, the stress and attention on her. It could be… all of the above.

While on the drugs, Christine has struggled with getting back to her peak competition weight. And while she says she doesn’t think she’s got side effects, Henk recently learned that she has been sleeping way more than usual.

Henk Botha: I didn’t realize she’s sleeping the whole day. She, she’s literally in bed covered with the blankets in bed.
Rose: Yeah, when you told Christine, like, “Hey, I noticed you’re sleeping all day,” what did she say?
Henk Botha: Yeah, she was… She was, like, looking at me funny at first, but I think, after today’s session again, she actually, like, say, “Yes, it’s true, coach, I’m sleeping more than usual. And I feel like I can’t do anything.”

Christine Mboma: Just the medicine just make me tired, yeah.

Rose Eveleth: The medicine made me tired, she says. And Christine told me that she wishes she just had more time.

Christine Mboma: The time was short. I didn’t get enough time for me to qualify.

Rose Eveleth: But it’s not over for her.

Henk Botha: I think our focus was too big on the Olympic qualifying than just getting back to running and get her back on a career. So that’s what we are doing currently. So we haven’t stopped with our season. We, we will go ahead and see if there’s still races. And we will still run for the rest of the year.
Rose: So you’re still, you’re still racing. You’re going to race the rest of the season. So you’re not like, giving up on the drugs and trying something else?
Henk Botha: I mean, she’s got a family to support, and we decided this is what we going to do for at least another year. And then, if we see there’s still no results, then we’ll look at a different option for what we’ll do then. But, I’m still fairly positive. She just told me she’s positive. We’ll just have to work twice as hard.

Christine Mboma: I was just… Yeah, I just had to focus on my season, it’s not the end of my season.
Rose: You think you’ll be back to it, though? Next Olympics will you be there?
Christine Mboma: Yeah. Next time.

Rose Eveleth: Over this series, we’ve followed Max and Christine. Because they are examples of two of the key choices — take the drugs, or fight. But there are other athletes impacted by these rules, too. Some of whom also tried to qualify for this year’s Olympics. But as far as I know, based on all my reporting, none of them were able to do so. No DSD athlete, as far as I’m aware, will compete in track and field in Paris.4

☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎ BREAK ☀︎ ☀︎ ☀︎

Rose Eveleth: For the last several years, I’ve traveled around the world, and talked to athletes and coaches whose lives have been upended by these rules.

Aminatou Seyni, from Niger, has opted for the medication, too. I visited her back in December, in France where she trains, to talk about her decision to take the medication.

Rose: What do you want people to know about you? Like, what would you hope that we would make sure to include?
Aminatou Seyni: [speaks in French]

Rose Eveleth: She says: I’d like people to understand one thing — even if we have a different body, or even if I’m different to others, it doesn’t mean I’m not human. Because there are people who judge with no holds barred.

In June, Amina started competing again, but it was too late for her to manage to qualify for Paris.5

Other athletes have had irreversible changes made to their bodies in the hopes of getting to run. One of them is Annet Negesa of Uganda.

Annet Negesa: I’m a female. I was born a female. My parents know me a female, my fans know a female, and my friends know a female.

Rose Eveleth: But in 2012, she was told she couldn’t compete in the female category unless she lowered her testosterone. And to do that, she wound up having surgery to remove internal testes from her body.

Annet Negesa: So cause I, like, there are too much love for the sport, I had to go in for the surgery.

Rose Eveleth: Annet says that at the time, nobody made sure she understood what “surgery” meant. She told me that she thought they were going to give her an injection, to somehow pull the testosterone out of her body. Instead, she says she woke up and found incisions on her abdomen.

Annet Negesa: So whereby I waked up in the morning from the operations room when I have the cuts under my body and was wondering myself. Man, I was so scared.

Rose Eveleth: She says the surgery, and lack of post-surgery care, ended her career.

Annet Negesa: I didn’t know the consequences, which will come later. I didn’t know that it would be the end of all my dream, which I was chasing for.6

Rose Eveleth: Annet’s story was featured in a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, titled “They’re Chasing Us Away from Sport.”7 At least three other women have undergone surgery in an attempt to comply with the regulations.8

World Athletics says that it doesn’t advise athletes on treatments, and has “never forced any athlete affected by its regulations to undergo surgery.” The latest regulations specifically say, “surgical anatomical changes are not required in any circumstances.”

Another story I’ll never forget is about Margaret Nyairera Wambui. In 2016, at the Kenyan national trials, she won gold in the 800 meters.

Celestine Karoney: She crossed the finish line, she had got a ticket to her first Olympic Games. A moment of celebration.

Rose Eveleth: That’s Celestine Karoney. At the time, she was a sports reporter for CGTN Africa.

Celestine Karoney: But you have a section of the crowd saying, no, no, hapana. Hapana. Hapana — that means “no” in Kenya. Hapana. Si mwanamke. Si mwanamke in Swahili means not a woman. When a whole crowd shouts at somebody who’s won their first Olympic ticket that you’re not a woman. Imagine what it does to that person.

Rose Eveleth: Margaret has given up on competing in track and field at the international level.9 So have other runners I spoke with for this series, who have found it impossible to keep training when they have no idea if they’ll be able to compete again.

Payoshni, the athletes rights advocate, is in touch with 38 women affected by these rules. Not just in track and field, but in other sports too.10

And all of this is happening because elite sports remain committed to that original division — men over here, women over there.

Here’s Alison Carlson, who worked tirelessly to get the chromosome tests abolished in the 1990’s.

Alison Carlson: Humanity is messy, and sports is asking for humanity not to be messy. And they’re trying to find a definitive standard or measure to make humanity less messy for the convenience of sports.

Rose Eveleth: Sports are binary. Human bodies are not.11 So… what do we do?

There are a lot of answers to this question. Each one has pros and cons. So let’s run through them, shall we?

One option is, do what World Athletics is doing now. Ask some women to regulate their body’s chemistry to be allowed to compete in the female category.

And some athletes who aren’t impacted by the rules, don’t mind them. We reached out to as many non DSD track and field athletes as we could think of, trying to see if any of them would speak to us about these rules. Nobody would.

Here’s Celestine Karoney again.

Celestine Karoney: A lot of people from early on tended not to really speak their mind on record. So on record no one will tell you they’re cheating. No, no, no. But the undertones you got and the whispers were that. No. This is tantamount to cheating.

Rose Eveleth: And if we do keep these regulations in some form, there’s a big question we haven’t tackled yet: at what age should this kind of testing and regulation begin? Here’s Dr. Casey Orozco-Poore, a medical resident at UCLA and intersex health specialist:

Casey Orozco-Poore: At what point do you look at someone’s genitalia and run their blood? Do you do it at the middle school level if someone’s really good? How good do they have to be before you check their genitals?

Rose Eveleth: A second option is to allow for regulations, but based on more appropriate science.

This is what the International Olympic Committee says it believes should be done. In 2021, the IOC parted ways with World Athletics — and effectively said it was getting out of the business of regulating DSD athletes.

That year, the IOC published a set of principles for sports federations on how they should tackle the issue. It emphasizes words like fairness and inclusion, while leaving it up to individual governing bodies, like World Athletics, to make their own, sport-specific rules. But it says those rules should be “evidence-based,” and the data should be gathered from a population consistent with the athletes who are being regulated.12

Reading between the lines, the IOC seems to be suggesting World Athletics’ science isn’t good enough. Because most of the data didn’t come from DSD athletes competing at the elite level. Still, a set of principles can only do so much.

Madeleine Pape works for the IOC as an Inclusion Specialist. She once raced against Caster Semenya.13 And she says the IOC’s position is a balancing act.

Madeleine Pape: On the one hand, the IOC framework insists that any policies that are put in place should be based on appropriate evidence, and at the same time recognizes that appropriate evidence is really hard to come by.

Rose Eveleth: I asked Madeleine if the IOC would ever step in, to stop World Athletics from enforcing rules that don’t meet IOC standards.

Madeleine Pape: You need the sport specific knowledge to be able to identify how you’re gonna go about defining what you, you consider to be fair and meaningful competition. So I think it’s not really feasible for the IOC to be able to decide for each sport actually what the eligibility rules should be.14

Rose Eveleth: Some athletes I met in my reporting said they felt abandoned by the IOC. Here’s Max Imali:

Max Imali: Yes, it is very frustrating because, you know, they are the head of, uh, sports. They’re the one to protect us. They have to stand for us. They know we are being violated, but they don’t act on that, and that is not good at all. Yes, I’m very pissed off with them.15

Rose Eveleth: Another option is to simply… not do any of this. We could let athletes like Max and Christine compete as they are, and allow for whatever advantages might exist to just… to be one of the many advantages that one athlete might have over another. Here’s Kelvin Chiringa, a radio reporter in Namibia:

Kelvin Chiringa: A scorpion stings. Why should you want to inject it with something that stops it from stinging? That’s the nature of a scorpion to sting. Christine Mboma is a bullet. Why, then would you want to, uh, tone down on the speed of that bullet? It was designed to move it that particular speed. So live with it, accept it, and move on.

Rose Eveleth: So far, all of these solutions have still operated within a world where sports stay separated by the sex binary. But there are also solutions that people have proposed that break that.

One of them is to create a third category. Sometimes you hear about this as a category for intersex competitors, other times you hear about it as a category for trans competitors, and still other times you hear about it as a category for nonbinary competitors. And some people suggest just throwing all three of those groups together into this… other space.

Some of the athletes impacted by these policies have supported this idea — saying basically, “Fine, sure, whatever; I just want to run.”16

But other folks have argued that this isn’t a real solution. Here’s is Frankie de la Cretaz, a journalist who covers sports and gender.

Frankie de la Cretaz: If we’re putting a third gender category, we are essentially forcing people to out themselves, either as intersex or trans, just to compete. And I don’t think that should be required.

Rose Eveleth: And Frankie says it’s not just about ethics. It’s also about just baseline practicality.

Frankie de la Cretaz: The trans athletes and intersex athletes who are competing at this very, very elite level are really small in number. In a team sport, you may not even have enough people at the elite level to, like, field a whole team. They just don’t exist.

Rose Eveleth: The last solution, and perhaps the most radical, is to simply end the sex binary in sports all together.

Frankie de la Cretaz: I think that we are so limited. That people’s imaginations won’t even let us go there. What does it actually look like to blow up the way sports are organized and imagine something different?17

Rose Eveleth: These solutions all try their best to tackle this big question — what is fair?

Frankie de la Cretaz: We talk about fairness and inclusion as if they are diametrically opposed things, but I don’t think that they actually are. And I think the other question we need to ask is fair to whom.

Rose Eveleth: Throughout this series, we’ve kind of skirted around a topic that you’ve almost certainly heard about in the news: trans athletes. The athletes I followed in this series aren’t trans. And advocates for athletes with sex variations say that it’s important not to conflate the two groups.

But there is also some overlap in this discussion — who gets to race in the women’s category, and who doesn’t?

Right now, DSD athletes are allowed to race with these restrictions. But trans women are no longer allowed to compete in elite track and field at all, no matter what their testosterone levels are. World Athletics officially banned them a year ago.18

Here’s CeCé Telfer, the author of Make It Count: My Fight to Become the First Transgender Olympic Runner, talking about the day the ban was announced.

CeCé Telfer: I was sleeping. I got a call from my manager and he said, it’s not good. And right then and there, I knew what it was and my heart broke, because it was also on International Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31st. So it was more like a slap in the face.

Rose Eveleth: And while there might be different rules governing trans and DSD athletes, CeCé points out that they do have some things in common. Both groups are constantly under extra scrutiny. And both groups just want to run.

CeCé Telfer: We didn’t ask to be born this way. All we ask for is accommodation and inclusivity, and we’re trying to find a place for ourselves, and where we belong. I’m doing this to live and to survive. This is why I’m doing this, and because I love it. And it makes me free. And I want to do it at the highest level that I can possibly do it.19

Rose Eveleth: There’s an interesting conundrum here, and it’s something that I’ve noticed a lot in reporting on this story. Sometimes, you hear advocates for trans women in sports argue in favor of policies that limit testosterone. Because many trans women are already doing that — for them it is gender affirming care. But those exact policies are the ones that are causing harm to athletes like Christine and Max. So you have this situation where these two groups are almost pitted against one another.

And at the same time, there is a lot of confusion about the differences between trans athletes, and athletes with sex variations. Some people I spoke with say they think World Athletics is contributing to that confusion.

Silvia Camporesi: In the court for arbitration on sport in 2019, uh, the federation, has tried explicitly through their lawyers to, to link together the question of, uh, trans and the question of DSD. Using it as a narrative of this, there is a threat and we need to protect the female category.

Rose Eveleth: This is Silvia Camporesi, a bioethicist at King’s College London. She argues that World Athletics has conflated trans and DSD athletes.

One reason, people argue, that they’re doing this, is because if the organization were to let DSD athletes run without any regulations, it would be harder for them to maintain a ban on trans women athletes. Because in the logic of World Athletics they’re basically the same — they’re both quote “biological males.”

Silvia Camporesi: And I think that was a strategic, uh, move on their part to, to say if we don’t regulate, uh, DSD, we’ll end up with having, uh, trans athletes competing in the female category and winning all the medals.

Rose Eveleth: I asked World Athletics to respond to this allegation, but nobody there replied to my many questions. And the organization declined to do an interview for this series.

I’ve spent the last ten years thinking about this story. In part because it has so many compelling wrinkles, so many people I’ve come to care about, so many twists and turns. But I think the reason I spent so long trying to tell this story is because it forces me to grapple with how we try to impose order on a messy, confusing world.

Where I live, in northern California, there’s a bird called the Red-shafted Flicker. It gets its name because when it’s flying away, you can see reddish feathers. On the East Coast, there’s a very similar bird, called the Yellow-shafted Flicker, which shows yellow feathers when it flies away. Otherwise, these birds look and sound… basically the same.

And they are kind of the same. They’re so similar, in fact, that they can breed, and create a hybrid bird that has kind of orange-colored feathers. Birding books now consider this one species — it’s now called the Northern Flicker.

And I’ve spent the past few months trying to see one. Because this bird has come to symbolize something for me.

Rose: Oh, are you my bird? You’re big enough. Where’d you go? Dang it, where are you?

Rose Eveleth: Today, most people think that the Yellow-shafted Flicker and the Red-shafted Flicker should be considered the same species. But for many years, some birders said, “No. They’re different colors, so they’re different.”

In science, we say that people are either lumpers, or splitters. Lumpers are more interested in what links things, what brings things together, the things we might have in common. Splitters are more interested in differences, what makes one thing separate from another.

Rose: What was that? [gasps]

Rose Eveleth: There’s not necessarily a correct way of doing things. In some cases, it’s useful to focus on the differences. In other cases, those differences don’t really matter. It depends on your goal — the question you’re trying to answer.

Charles Darwin himself wrote about these two approaches in a letter in 1857, saying, “It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers.”20

But sometimes lumping… or splitting – based on genitals or chromosomes or testosterone – causes suffering. All in an effort to create neat categories, when in reality, there’s just a continuum. And you have to ask — how much suffering is worth allowing, and whose, in the name of categorizing?

We started this series with a fable. And it’s tempting to end with one. Once there were sports, and all was good. But we’re not going to do that. Because fables are, by their nature, simple. There is a clear villain, and a lovely little moral arc, and in the end, a straightforward answer. This story, and our world, is a lot more complicated than that. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is joy in the chaos. Wonder in the spectrum.

If we let ourselves embrace the bigger, weirder, more interesting world out there, we get to be excited when we see a bird, no matter what color its tail feathers are.

Ed: That’s a flicker! [Rose gasps] That’s slowing over that way. You can see the flashes of red. Oh goddamnit! Did you see it though?
Rose: I saw it! I did! It was flying from there to there. Yes!
Ed: Fucking did it!
Rose: We did it! For four and a half seconds we saw a flicker. [Ed laughs]

CREDITS

And that’s it. That’s Tested!

Tested is written, reported and hosted by me, Rose Eveleth. And I’ve been working on this series on and off for ten years now. I spent eight years pitching this story, and five traveling around the world reporting it. Which means that on top of the normal credits, I have a lot of people to thank. So… buckle up. If you’re a credits listener, boy do I have some credits for you.

Tested is edited by Alison MacAdam and Veronica Simmonds, and produced by Ozzy Llinas Goodman, Andrew Mambo, and Rhaina Cohen. Additional development, reporting, producing and editing by Lisa Pollak who worked on this show with me, unpaid, for many years before we found a home for it. Sound design by Mitra Kaboli, who made musical magic happen. Our production manager is Michael Kamel, who made sure that everything actually got done on this show. Anna Ashitey is our digital producer. This series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. Long live fact checkers, the unsung heroes of journalism. Our intersex script consultant is Hans Lindahl. Archival research by Hillary Dann.

Our cross-promo producer is Amanda Cox. Our video producers are Jon Lee and Evan Aagaard. Our project manager at NPR is Lyndsey McKenna. Translation and interpretation in this series was provided by Vanessa Nicolai, Rozena Crossman, and Jerome Socolovsky. Tested episode art by Dani Pendergast. Thanks to Laura Rojas Aponte for production and administrative support.

Special thanks for this episode to Max, Christine, and Henk, who fielded endless texts and phone calls from me over the course of this project. And to Ed Yong, who helped me see that flicker after I failed to find one several times.

Tested would not exist without the help of so many academics, lawyers, scientists, archivists, and more who helped us track down documents, understand studies and lawsuits, and explain history. Thank you to Diego Girod, Laura Freeman, and the rest of the team at the Olympic Studies Centre, Amanda McGrory at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee archives, the Library and Archives Canada, and Chris Zollo and the rest of the team at the Medical Historical Library at Yale University. Thank you also to Lindsay Pieper, whose book about sex testing was an invaluable resource throughout the project.

Special thanks to also Adéyanjú Aiyégbùsì, Bradley Anawalt, Leon Baham, Sydney Bauer, Andy Brown, Anastasia Bucsis, Danne Diamond, Jake Elsas, Sonja Erikainen, Myron Genel, Paul van Gool, Sharon Kinney Hanson, Kathi Isham, Beth Jacobs, Evans Kathimbu, Ben Kitili, Soundworks Recording Studio, Third Wheel Podcast Studio, Elaine Tanner, Sammy Macharia, Gordon Mack, Debbie Meyer, Frank Montgomery, Ivan Oransky, Celia Roberts, Seema Patel, Helge Schulz, Erastus Someno, Sam Sharpe, Vivian Topping, Sari van Anders, and Michael Waters. When I said that I talked to a LOT OF PEOPLE for this show, I was not lying. Thanks also to those who spoke with me off the record. You know who you are.

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. Leslie Merklinger is the Executive Director of CBC Podcasts.

At NPR, Katie Simon is Supervising Editor for Embedded. Irene Noguchi is Executive Producer. Legal support from Micah Ratner and Adam Zissman. Tony Cavin is the managing editor of standards and practices at NPR. Collin Campbell is NPR’s Senior Vice President, Podcasting Strategy and Franchise Development.

At Bucket of Eels, my production company, our web producer is Joanna Thompson. Legal support from Quinn Heraty and Beverly Davis.

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

And, special thanks to you… for listening. All the way to the end, which is very impressive.

  1. You can watch the full interview here. ↩︎
  2. For more about this ruling, see the ECHR press release. ↩︎
  3. This event was riddled with problems from the start. Athletes complained about bad transportation, poor organization, and having to wait hours to figure out when they were set to run. Marie-Joseè Ta Lou, from Ivory Coast, withdrew due to the conditions. ↩︎
  4. There are athletes with sex variations competing in other sports: Barbara Banda in soccer, and Imane Khelif and Lin Yu‑ting in boxing. There are likely others we don’t know about. ↩︎
  5. For more on Amina’s story, check out these interviews with her (in French): here, here, and here. ↩︎
  6. For more on Annet’s story, see this essay she wrote. ↩︎
  7. Available here. (See also the World Athletics response.) ↩︎
  8. For more information, see this paper coauthored by Stéphane Bermon, the director of the health and science department at World Athletics. You can see discussion of how this paper was used by World Athletics here. ↩︎
  9. Margaret has recently spoken in favor of a Kenyan intersex rights law that includes protections for athletes. ↩︎
  10. For more on Payoshni’s perspective, see this article she coauthored. ↩︎
  11. For more about the limits of the sex binary, check out Gender/sex/ual diversity and biobehavioral research by Sari van Anders. ↩︎
  12. You can read the full statement here. ↩︎
  13. You heard Madeleine in episode four, and you can hear her speaking about how she changed her mind about Caster and other athletes with sex variations here. ↩︎
  14. For more on Madeleine’s perspective, see this position statement she coauthored. ↩︎
  15. I did this interview with Max at the United Nations, where we were both attending a sports and human rights conference. You can read more about what that was like in the newsletter. ↩︎
  16. See, for example, this interview with Margaret Wambui. For another perspective, see this paper co-authored by Maria Patiño. ↩︎
  17. For more on the various solutions people have proposed to this problem, see this review article. ↩︎
  18. You can download the World Athletics policy on trans athletes here. ↩︎
  19. You can read more about CeCe’s story in her book. ↩︎
  20. You can read the full letter here. ↩︎