Over the course of reporting Tested, we went down a lot of rabbit holes. Not all of them made the final cut. At one point we thought we might spend a whole section of an episode on the Atlanta 1996 Olympic games — or, more specifically, on the people who worked in the gender verification clinic at those games. We didn’t have time or space in the final series to include this moment of history, but it’s really compelling. And so we wanted to bring it to you here, in this little bonus post/newsletter. Here’s my colleague Lisa Pollak with more:
In the summer of 1996, Jake Elsas didn’t try to hide the fact that he was volunteering at the Atlanta Olympics. But when people asked him what exactly his job was, Jake purposely kept the answer vague.
“I was very cryptic most of the time, because I didn’t want to admit that there was a level of embarrassment… and I didn’t want people to think right off the bat that I condoned it,” Jake told us when we visited him at his home in Atlanta.
“It” was the policy requiring female Olympians to prove they were women by taking chromosome tests in order to compete. For 30 years – from 1968 to 2000 – these tests were carried out at “gender verification clinics” at the games. And in the summer of 1996, that is where Jake Elsas worked.
“Most people today react like, what the hell are you talking about?” Jake says. “They find it dumbfounding that it would be done at all.”
One of the signs from Atlanta 1996, directing athletes towards the Gender Verification facility.
Jake’s official job on the gender verification team was making photo ID cards – or, as he described them in an email to me, the “‘I’m-an-Honest-to-God-Real-Woman!’ badges” that female athletes were required to carry.
Jake had a background in photography and film and was handy with IT. But that’s not the real reason he ended up as a volunteer in the sex testing clinic. Jake’s role at the Olympics turned out to be part of a bigger story, about a scientist so dedicated to preventing the harms caused by chromosome testing that he agreed to oversee a process that he felt shouldn’t be happening at all.
That scientist was Jake’s late father, Dr. Louis “Skip” Elsas.
Skip Elsas was a physician and scientist who ran a well-regarded medical genetics research lab at Emory University in Atlanta. So it’s easy to see how the organizers of the Atlanta Olympics would have seen him as a perfect choice to run the gender verification program for the 1996 games.
Except that Elsas had serious problems with the sex testing policy.
“He found the whole concept unscientific, unfair, and potentially destructive,” says Jake.
Like others in his field — some of whom you heard from on the “Tested” podcast — Elsas knew that because not all women have XX chromosomes, and not all men have XY chromosomes, the presence of a Y chromosome was not a valid reason to kick women out of competition. He knew that the Y chromosome didn’t make a woman into a man or a cheater.
As Elsas wrote in the journal “Genetics in Medicine” in 2000, “Women with intersex conditions exhibit no differences in biophysical and anatomic scales relevant to sports performance outside the range of possibility for XX female athletes. Therefore, blanket on-site chromosome screening constitutes invasion of privacy, harassment, and discrimination based on arbitrary assumption of advantage.”
Rose and I learned from our archival research that Elsas actually urged the IOC to abolish blanket sex testing in the leadup to the Atlanta Olympics. (The International Amateur Athletic Federation – the governing body for track and field – had by that point already stopped its blanket testing.) But the IOC was insistent that testing had to be done.
Jake said his father knew that if he didn’t take the assignment, a commercial laboratory would be hired to do the job, and that concerned him.
“He founded and ran a number of bioethics committees, so he was always concerned about ethical medical practices,” said Jake. “A commercial lab isn’t necessarily going to care about that as much. They just want results. Then when it comes to the actual science, at least at that time, commercial labs were not the top of the field. They did not have the facilities, they did not have the in-house knowledge to do the type of processing of these samples that would be necessary. So there was both the ethical side and also the actual technical, practical side to it that really concerned my dad.”
Jake was living in Oregon when he got the call from his father, explaining that he’d taken the job running the gender verification program, and asking his son to come home to Atlanta and help out with it. “He told me that he felt like it was his responsibility to take this position, to make sure it was done correctly,” Jake told us. “He came around to think that if he were to do it, he could oversee it, every level of it.”
For 26 days in the summer of 1996, Jake’s dad oversaw a complex operation that included 50 volunteers dedicated to making the sex testing process as compassionate, non-invasive and accurate as possible. While Jake took photos and ran the badge machine, his mother Nancy, a nurse with years of genetic counseling experience, helped oversee the DNA collection. “He wanted it to be basically kind of like this family-run enterprise,” Jake said.
Jake said his father ran the program with a very clear point of view, and goal — which was to make sure that as long as athletes weren’t cheating, no one would be sent home. “He wanted to make sure we all understood why we were there,” Jake said.”We weren’t there to disqualify anybody. In fact it was quite the opposite. We were there to make sure that everyone was allowed to compete.”
Skip knew that statistically 1 in 500 women would test positive for a Y chromosome, and some would be finding this out for the first time on the eve of a high-pressure international competition. So he made sure a female gynecologist was on call throughout the Olympics to counsel women and offer guidance for followup care. In the end, just as the statistics would have predicted, eight women out of the 3376 tested were found to have a Y chromosome. But all were women, and all were cleared to compete.
One of the badges Jake made for his cat, to set the women who came through the process more at ease.
For his part, Jake said he did what he could to make a potentially awkward situation a little easier, like decorating his desk area with sample gender verification badges featuring the face of his cat to lighten the mood. (The apple didn’t fall far from the tree; Jake showed us one of the “Team GV” polo tshirts that his father had designed for the crew featuring a little male symbol crossed out in a red circle.
“I couldn’t help myself sometimes because I could see how uncomfortable some of the athletes were while they were seated waiting for me to take a picture,” Jake says. “I would kind of place the badges in front of the computers on the tables so that women who were seated could see these badges of my cat. And a lot of people would smile.”
The “Team GV” shirts in action
Sketches for the design of the shirt we found in Jake’s archives.
As strange and surreal as this whole testing process sounds, Skip Elsas’ archives at the Atlanta History Center hold a clue as to why it took 30 years for the IOC policy to be abolished. In 1996, the female Olympians who came through the clinic were given a survey, asking how they felt about sex testing. Most of them – 87 percent – said that it should continue.
“The only thing that makes me anxious,” one woman wrote on the survey, “is that there actually are teams posing men as female.”
As Rose reports in the “Tested” podcast, there’s no evidence that any man has ever cheated by masquerading as a woman. But there’s plenty of evidence that women with intersex conditions have been stigmatized and humiliated by sex testing. The problem isn’t men pretending to be women; it’s that sports are binary and human bodies are not.
Meeting Jake Elsas was a milestone in our reporting – the first time that Rose and I actually met someone who’d worked at a sex testing clinic. All these years later, Jake no longer feels awkward sharing his connection to this history. In fact, his father’s efforts to keep women athletes from being harmed is a memory that makes Jake really proud.
Six months after the Atlanta Olympics, Dr. Elsas published a paper in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia explaining how he strove to run a sensitive and meticulous testing operation – and then re-stating his belief that the practice should be abolished. Which, three years later, in time for the Sydney Olympics, it finally was.
Jake still has the note from his dad sharing the good news: “There will not be testing in Sydney,” Elsas wrote. “Love Dad.”
Jake didn’t become a scientist himself, but he took his dad’s lessons to heart. This summer Jake watched in dismay as the gold medal winning boxer Imane Kelief was accused of being a man based on vague reports that she had failed a test administered by the International Boxing Association.
“Kudos to (IOC head) Thomas Bach for pushing back hard against the ignorance that is still sadly pervasive,” Jake wrote to us in a recent email. “I’d like to think that my dad had a hand in convincing the IOC of the scientifically unfounded gender verification program…..(but) they really need to reevaluate ALL of this anti-woman, anti-science nonsense.”
More of Jake’s archives that he so graciously allowed us to go through.
In 2016, along with his wife Nina, Jake co-founded and now runs The Patch Works Art & History Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history of Atlanta’s Cabbagetown. You can find out more about that here. You can find out more about that here.
