Throughout the reporting and production of TESTED, we ran into some really interesting and challenging questions around language. In the show, you’ll hear a handful of terms used to describe the athletes at the center of our story through time. Often, when it comes to reporting on marginalized communities, language is an ever moving target. Over time, certain phrases and terms fall out of favor. Other times, there is disagreement even within groups about which words should be used. And on top of that, some words make sense to one culture, and don’t at all to another. This story spans over a hundred years and communities across the globe. It was an ongoing point of discussion within our team about which words to use, and when. 

We wanted to explain our choices a little more and dig a little deeper into some of the words and terms that have been used through time to describe athletes who might complicate the gender binary in sports. 

In making these decisions, we leaned heavily on the Trans Journalist Association stylebook and coverage guide, the interACT FAQ resources, and the Trans & Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide. We also had a consultant, Hans Lindahl, who worked on the show from the very beginning to help us make these decisions. 

Our guiding principle was to try and be as true as possible to the language that a person would use for themselves. This might seem obvious and easy, but as you’ll see below, it was not always so. 

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Gender

These two seem pretty easy and straightforward. But when it comes to talking about people from the past, it gets tricky. Take Zdenek Koubek, for example. Today, Koubek might identify as trans. But in his actual lifetime, he almost certainly had never heard that term. Historians of gender have written extensively about this issue. On one hand, we don’t want to erase trans narratives from history. On the other hand, we also wanted to be careful not to over-project modern ideas of gender and sex onto people who thought about the world quite differently. Michael Waters, in his book The Other Olympians, writes about whether to refer to Koubek as trans or not, saying: “It is tempting to place a contemporary label like ‘trans’ or ‘intersex’ onto these athletes, but I try to use these labels sparingly throughout the book. It is difficult to fit any of them into a contemporary identity category.”

When Koubek was competing, ideas about gender were quite different from today’s views. For one thing, at the time, people didn’t see a clear-cut difference between gender and sex. In the show, you hear us discuss “balance theory,” and the prevailing idea at the time that rather than there being two extremely rigid sexes, there was actually a mix of both in each person — a mix that could change during a person’s life. 

Koubek, in his own memoir, refers to himself using she/her pronouns and his old, feminized name. Today, trans-inclusive journalists don’t consider it appropriate to use someone’s deadname unless they specifically ask us to. We obviously can’t ask Koubek what he preferred. 

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Sex

In the show, you’ll hear some sources use these terms (at one point, you also hear an endocrinologist use the term “male bodied”) but we never do unless it’s referring to that usage. The Endocrine Society actually suggests that “the terms biological sex and biological male or female are imprecise and should be avoided.” You’ll also hear a discussion of the ways in which these terms are used to potentially suggest that the women we’re following in our story are actually male, even though they were assigned female at birth, and have never questioned whether they were female.

In my interviews for this story, some sources used these three terms interchangeably. They are not synonyms, but they are often used as such. And it’s understandable that people might be confused. In 2011, for example, the regulations for runners were called the “Hyperandrogenism Regulations,” and focused on purely high testosterone. Later regulations changed to talk about DSDs.

Intersex used to be the medical term used by doctors. It was reclaimed by activists in the 1990’s, and has now become more of a community and identity — much like the term “queer.” Today, intersex advocates largely dislike the phrase DSD. interACT points out in their FAQ and language guide that “Many intersex people reject the term “DSD” because it supports the idea that their bodies are wrong, or up to doctors to “fix.”” 

In light of this, it might seem like the clear choice would be to refer to athletes like Christine Mboma and Max Imali as intersex. But they don’t use that term for themselves. Neither Christine, nor Max, nor Caster call themselves intersex. None of the athletes I spoke with for this series, who are impacted by these regulations, use that word. For one thing, it’s not a term they’re familiar with, generally. For another, its inclusion in the LGBTQAI list makes it unsafe for some of them to claim. Some of these women come from places where being associated with queerness or transness in any way is dangerous to their wellbeing. Using a term like intersex for them, in this context, would not just be inaccurate, but also potentially harmful. 

Payoshni Mitra, an athletes rights advocate who has become the go-to activist for women impacted by these rules, uses the phrase “women with variations of sex characteristics” instead. Which we use a few times in the show, but can be quite a mouthful.

Then you have the athletes from history. Based on newspaper accounts, writings, and diaries, we might guess that Helen Stephens or Zdenek Koubek were intersex. They write about shaving their faces, and having deep voices — two potential clues that point, perhaps, to an intersex body. But we don’t know, and don’t think that it’s necessarily appropriate to speculate. And again, they would probably not have used the term themselves. Neither would any of the other athletes whose stories we know about — Eva Klobukowska, Maria Patino, Heinrich Ratjen. It’s also hard to know how these accounts compare to our modern understanding of gender — today, for instance, many cisgender women who aren’t intersex regularly remove hair from their faces, and most people don’t assume this means they aren’t cis women.

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What this means is that there is no singular word or phrase that can accurately, and sensitively, sum up this big group of people who have been excluded from sports over this century-long history. They’re not all intersex athletes. They’re not all DSD athletes. They’re not all cisgender athletes, or transgender athletes. These policies have swept across many different communities and groups over time. 

When referring to the modern athletes, we tried to be specific when we could — with phrases like “athletes currently impacted by these policies,” for example. When referring to the rules in question, we used “DSD” but tried to attribute the phrase, saying things like “World Athletics believes that these DSD athletes have an advantage.” And for historical athletes, we tried to avoid labeling them with modern terms as much as possible. 

It’s not a perfect solution — and at times it led to some clunky writing that perhaps was more confusing than helpful. Just like in other kinds of writing about science or government or sports, there is always a tension between making something as accessible as possible to a listener who might know nothing about the topic and using the correct terminology. We tried our best, and hopefully this guide helps people better understand our choices.

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Thanks to Hans Lindahl for help drafting and editing this explainer.