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Myrtle Cook of Canada (left) winning a preliminary heat in the women’s 100 metres race at the VIIIth Summer Olympic Games / Myrtle Cook (à gauche), du Canada, remportant une éliminatoire pour l’épreuve du 100 mètres femmes, aux VIIIe Jeux Olympiques d’été
Library and Archives Canada, PA-150994 / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, PA-150994
The attacks on Imane Khelif’s gender at this year’s 2024 Paris Olympics is not new. In fact, the focus on women’s appearance and gender expression goes back to the founding of the Olympics, the minute women entered elite sports.
We talk to Rose Eveleth, host and producer of the podcast Tested about the history of sex testing in the Olympics and why it existed in the first place, why there’s no easy way to classify the natural, biological variation that exists in human beings and why we might want to consider new ways of organizing athletes that is less sexist, racist and more accepting of genders outside of a simple binary.
Featuring: Rose Eveleth, host and producer of the podcast Tested Music:
Credits Making Contact Team:
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TRANSCRIPT
Making Contact Intro Music.
Boxing Match: Both Fighters being called to the center of the ring..
Salima Hamirani: Welcome to Making Contact – I’m Salima Hamirani. And to start us off today we’re going to go back to August 1st, at the 2024 Paris Olympics. To a boxing match between Imane Khelif and Angela Carini
Boxing Match: Our final welterweight fight of this season. session between Algeria and Italy, and we’re off.
Salima Hamirani: at first, Khelief and Carini weave back and forth s. and Carini lands a punch
Boxing Match: A hook from Carini. Khelif looking to come with the straight punches to the body of Carini.
Salima Hamirani: Then all of a sudden Carini walks to the corner of the ring and she pauses
Boxing Match: Carini just asking to get her head guard tightened in.
Salima Hamirani: She comes back out to fight. And quickly Khelif lands a punch. it’s honestly so fast I don’t even see it.
Boxing Match: Solid, straight right hand. From Khelif there.
Salima Hamirani: And then, all of a sudden Carini quits. 46 seconds into the match. She retreats to the corner.
Boxing Match: A little demonstrating from Carini. Carini. She talks to a corner. She’s not happy about something.
Salima Hamirani: Carini has been shouting “it’s not fair, it’s not fair” meanwhile Khelief looks sullen and worried.
Boxing Match: We are waiting the results of Here. The Winner by abandon… In red from Algeria. Imane Khelif
Salima Hamirani: Khelif wins this fight because Carini quits- after one punch, less than one minute into the fight. But Khelief doesn’t look triumphant in this moment. Her face looks confused.
This fight – this 46 second match – began a firestorm in this year’s Olympics. Almost immediately commentators flooded twitter, facebook and instagram. Khelif the Algerian fighter they said, is not a woman. She’s secretly a man. They argued that Carini quit because she was hit so hard by a man that she didn’t feel as if it was fair to continue. She was in danger during the fight. Elon Musk and JK Rowling got involved.
News clip: Rowling using incorrect pronouns, tweeting that Khelif was enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambitions he’s just shattered.
Salima Hamirani: Former president trump jumped into the fray saying that if he was elected he’d forbid men from competing in women’s sports.
But here’s the thing. Imane Khelif isn’t a man!
Imane Khelif: speaking in Arabic
Salima Hamirani: That’s Khelif speaking out about the controversy later saying “I’m a woman, like any other woman. I was born a woman. I have lived as a woman. I compete as a woman. There is no doubt about that.”
So why did everyone suddenly become convinced that she wasn’t a woman?
That’s the topic of today’s show – the extreme focus on proving women’s identities in sports. And to help us understand what’s going on with gender in the olympics I sat down with Rose Eveleth
Rose Eveleth: I am the host and reporter behind a new podcast called Tested, which is about sex testing, past, present, and future, unfortunately, probably.
Salima Hamirani: Rose has been investigating gender testing in sports – especially track and field -for over a decade.
Salima Hamirani: Ok to start us off, why did people start making this accusation that Khelif was a man? Was it based on her appearance? What was it?
Rose Eveleth: So it’s a couple things. I think some people will say things like, well, just look at her, right? Clearly she doesn’t look like a woman, which of course is completely subjective.
The other thing that’s happening here is that last year, in the spring of 2023, the IBA, the International Boxing Association, held a meeting and they disqualified these two boxers, Halif and Lin, and they did so because they claimed that these boxers had failed some unspecified laboratory test. About their gender. And, it is still very unclear what test was done. They’ve gone back and forth. They’ve said it was testosterone, and then they said, no, no, it’s not testosterone. It’s chromosomes. It was all very confusing.
But in the spring of last year, they disqualified these two boxers. And it was very strange because it was sort of in the middle of an event. The big sort of international tournament for boxing. And so, because some people, I guess, knew about this past disqualification, they sort of resurfaced this idea that perhaps Khelif is not somehow a woman, which of course is not the case.
Salima Hamirani: And, and why did they single out Khelif and Lin?
Rose Eveleth: We don’t really know. It’s, I think, just based on appearance, right? I think it’s that they seemed somehow not womanly enough, but there’s not, it’s not clearly written out in the meeting minutes what it was that flagged these two women in particular
Salima Hamirani: But, the IBA has had its own controversies, right? which have predated this particular gender scandal. Is there a reason to be wary of what the IBA claims it discovered during those tests?
Rose Eveleth: Yes, so the IBA is, uh, fraught. Um, to put it maybe nicely. The IBA is the International Boxing Association. They used to be known as the AIBA. They’ve, they’ve sort of gone through different, uh, iterations. And the IBA has been in hot water for many years, since about 2019. Because there have been allegations of corruption, of unethical practices, of all sorts of things that actually have nothing to do with sex testing at all.
They were already kind of in trouble. And so in 2019, the IOC actually gave them kind of a laundry list of things saying, look, if you want to maintain your status as the recognized international federation for boxing, you need to clean up your act. You gotta do this, this, this. And the IBA essentially didn’t do those things. And so a couple of months after this meeting at which these two boxers were disqualified, The IOC stripped the IBA of recognition.
Salima Hamirani: The IOC – the International Olympic Committee – came out in support of Khelif – with a rare, very rare, progressive statement on gender
IOC comment: They have competed and they continue to compete in the women’s competition. They have lost and they have won against other women throughout over the years. The testosterone is not a perfect test. Many women can have testosterone which is in what would be called male levels. And still be women and still compete as women. So, this panacea, this idea that suddenly you test, do one test for testosterone and that sorts everything out. Not the case, I’m afraid.
Salima Hamirani And keep those words in mind from the IOC! because that’s not how they’ve normally thought about gender.
Salima Hamirani Rose, the other thing about the … truly horrifying media obsession with Khelif’s gender is that it’s not new. In your podcast you talk about the earliest olympics, and how this immediately became a problem. when the very first women began competing. Can you talk to me a little bit about the history of gender testing in sports.
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, so, so one of the things I think is the most surprising about the history of sex testing is just how old it is. How long ago we started doing this. So in 1928, it’s the first year that women are allowed to compete in track and field. Now women had been allowed to compete in the Olympics before 1928, but they were only allowed in sports that were deemed at the time more feminine. So things like swimming or tennis…track and field was seen as the manliest of man sports. If you were a real man, you competed in track and field. And so in 1928, when women are allowed to compete, essentially right off the bat, as soon as women hit the track.
You hear people talking in newspapers, you know, quotes, all these headlines saying there is something wrong with these women. That woman looks too muscular. That woman looks too strong. The woman who won silver in the 800 meters in 1928, Hitomi Kinue, who’s a Japanese runner, people said things like, you know, she had all the power of a halfback, right?
Talking about how they had these muscles, there was something wrong with them. And that sort of begins sex testing. So, you know, you have a couple of anecdotal stories about women being pulled aside. There was a story about Hitomi Kinue being pulled aside and examined. There’s a story about Helen Stevens, an American runner, being pulled aside and examined.
And then in 1936, you get the first sort of on the books policy for track and field, saying that if there are what they called “questions of a physical nature” You could take them aside and you could examine them
Salima Hamirani Wait, when you say examined what do you mean?
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, it was purely visual, there’s not a lot of, you know, Good documentation about exactly what test would be done and I, I sort of often don’t even like to call it a test because really it is a visual exam. It means that you take someone aside and, in the best case scenario, you ask them to go to their doctor and ask them to get like a, essentially a doctor’s note that says, you know, we’ve examined this woman and she’s a woman.
But in the worst case scenario, you wind up with a sports official taking a woman aside and asking her to, again, get naked so that they can examine her body and make sure that, I guess, her vulva looks correct in some way? And again, this is not written down. They don’t, they don’t write down exactly what they’d be looking for. It’s all very vague.
Salima Hamirani It should be pointed out here that the 1936 Olympics that Rose mentions were the Berlin Olympics which took place during the height of the Nazi regime in Germany. There were huge boycotts asking the US to pull out of the games because of the Nazis. But, while the persecution of Germany’s Jewish population was taking place in the background, what were Olympic officials worried about? If the women were feminine enough. This has ALWAYS been an underlying worry. Are the women competing feminine and attractive enough for men to want to look at.
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, I mean, Avery Brundage, who is, a really critical figure in the period of the 30s, 40s, even to the 50s, he’s, he’s really the instrumental American sports official who pushes the United States to not boycott the 1936 Nazi Olympics, right? He is the reason, largely, that the U. S. did stays in those games, because he had a lot of friends in the Nazi party and was quite sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
You know, he talks fairly explicitly about one of the reasons why he doesn’t like women participating in sports is because he finds it unattractive. He does not find it attractive to watch women exert themselves, because when you run really hard, you know, you make a weird face and you look like you’re trying really hard.
And that was just sort of disgusting to him. And he’s, he’s not, he doesn’t really mince words about that. He’s very straightforward about it.
Salima Hamirani But even in Nazi Germany testing was one on a case by case basis. That changed in the 1960s.
Rose Eveleth: and then in 1966 rather than abandoning sex testing the governing body of track and field decides that actually They needed to test every single woman, that doing it on a case by case basis wasn’t enough.
And so they roll out something called the nude parades, which are unfortunately quite what they sound like. women were asked to go into a room and get naked and be examined by someone, usually a doctor, that they don’t know, to make sure that their, basically, genitals look correct and they looked like a woman. That also was called the peak and poke tests by some of the athletes at the time.
Salima Hamirani Rose actually managed to interview athletes who underwent “the peak and poke tests” for her podcast “Tested”. Here’s Carol Martin, who was a young 18 year old athlete at the time she competed in Jamaica in 1966 at an international competition.
CAROL MARTIN: I remember we were taken under the stands before the competition into a large room, and had to pull my pants down in front of this woman so she could see I had a vagina. I remember thinking, what the (…) is this? This seems a little invasive, this seems a little inappropriate.
Salima Hamirani This was really astonishing to me. Men have never undergone this kind of scrutiny. Just women. The nude parades were incredibly unpopular for obvious reasons and were successfully banned in 1968. But by then, science had progressed and we were able to start testing for testosterone and chromosomes, which gave the IOC a new tool kit with which to examine gender.
Rose Eveleth: So between 1968 ish and 1999 every woman who competed at the Olympics had to go into a room get their cheeks swabbed and take this chromosome test and if you passed it you were given a little card a “certificate of femininity” They were called and then it would say like Certified. Female. Check. Um, and you had to bring that with you to every event you wanted to compete at. But so then in 1999 they dropped that.
And, and they drop it because there has been truly 30 years. I mean, basically since the very beginning. There have been doctors and experts begging the IOC to drop this test because it is not a reliable test of sex or gender. Having a Y chromosome does not necessarily make you a man. There are, some estimates say 1 in 500 women have Y chromosomal material in some or all of their cells.
You or I might have Y chromosomes. We might just not know because why would we know that? And so eventually in 99 they dropped that test and then in 2009 you sort of see this pick up again after Castor Semenya, who some people may know, ran in Berlin and now we’re sort of in this testosterone era where rather than thinking that the chromosome is the core thing, now we’re really focused on testosterone.
So it’s been this kind of I almost like to describe it as like a game of Whack A Mole a little bit, where there’s, everyone is just searching for this one singular test to tell who’s a woman and who’s not, and there isn’t one, and so you just keep kind of hitting the moles as they pop out of the ground, and each one of them is their own kind of weird little test that we try to do, but there’s just no way easily to do this.
Salima Hamirani Ok but why can’t we find one single test to tell us whether or not someone is a man or a woman? Well, because human sex is a beautifully varied complicated thing and there is no easy way to divide the sexes into a binary, no matter how much the IOC wants to. Stay tuned we’re going to dig into what makes a man and what makes a woman, or not….right after the break.
Break – I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia. org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Salima Hamirani welcome back to Making Contact, today we’re talking about sex testing at the olympics. In the first half of the show we talked about the history of gender testing in sports and the incredibly invasive way women, not men, have been singled out in order to prove their gender identities. But while we might have social ideas about what makes a man, and what makes a woman, in the biological realm, there’s no clear binary. And we’re back in the second half with Rose Eveleth, host and producer of the podcast Tested, which you can find links to on our website.
Salima Hamirani Rose, there are many components to human sex that make us a quote male, or a quote female. I’m just curious how common are variations in human sex, how many of us as women have high testosterone for example without even knowing?
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, it’s a great question that’s actually hard to answer, because as you say, most people don’t know, right, their chromosomal makeup, their testosterone level, right? Like, most people just don’t know that. So we don’t really know exactly how common it is, depending on the definition. So, there’s all sorts of things that can vary in human sex biology. You can have XXY chromosomes, you can have XYY chromosomes. men can have XX chromosomes. You know, you can have internal testes, but also have breasts and a vagina.
You can have really high levels of testosterone. Some women have really, really high levels of testosterone, but they have what’s called androgen insensitivity, and so they can’t actually process that testosterone. So there’s sort of a million different variations that can happen here.
Intersex Advocates sometimes call it sort of a symphony, right? That there’s all different instruments that can get played to kind of combine to make whatever your sort of unique biological makeup is. And depending on who you ask and how you define these terms, there are some estimates that say that between one and two percent of the population has some kind of variation in their sex biology.
So this is not a exceedingly rare. It’s not a super uncommon thing. And I think, you know, many people would perhaps be surprised to learn their biology. Actually, I was just talking to a neighbor of mine, and she told me that recently she was diagnosed with high testosterone. And she had no, her whole life, she had no idea. And she was joking. She was like, I’m not good at sports. You know, it didn’t give me any kind of advantage. And so I think this is just actually far more common than people realize.
Salima Hamirani And then, of course, gender and sex are different concepts. You can be assigned one gender at birth, but know yourself to have a different identity than the one you were assigned. The difference between sex and gender didn’t exist as a concept back in the 1920s, 30s. But there have always been trans people. And, there was a consistent fear back in the early days of sports, that if a woman was too athletic, she would spontaneously turn into a man
Rose Eveleth: so, at the time, in the 20s and 30s and even into the 40s, there was this idea called balance theory. And you have to remember, this is before we really know very much about human chromosomes. So, they had this idea that every person was born with basically, like, a little bit of man stuff and a little bit of lady stuff.
And your balance was what sort of made your sex or gender. And so they believed that you could be kind of a 65 percent woman or a 90 percent woman.
And what they worried about is that if you were already kind of maybe a, what they called a borderline case, somebody who was maybe only 65 percent a woman, if you did things that men do, like for example, play elite sports you could actually shift your balance and you could tip over into maleness. Quite literally turn into men. at the time you see local newspapers reporting this where people would allegedly get sick.
Right? Get really sick. And then they would get better and that sickness will have tipped them over. And so you’ll see these sort of amazing articles where they say, you know, Like, Johnny got really sick and now he’s Jane, and that’s fine. And we’re all fine with that because we all know that’s a thing that can happen, is you get sick and it tips your balance and then you become something else.
And so you see these stories essentially of transition happening, but blamed on sickness that kind of balances, tips the balance. And so there was this worry that if you took these again, borderline cases and you allowed these women who were already kind of maybe close to the edge of being men and you allowed them to compete in sports, they would accidentally turn themselves into men and they needed to be protected against that.
Salima Hamirani And yet at the same time, the newspaper articles of people transitioning when I read them, they weren’t as … horrifying as I thought. And in fact, there was almost more of an acceptance of it than there is now,
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, it is always a little bit both incredible and sometimes depressing when you see something like this where you realize that perhaps, you know, 1920s ideas around acceptance of trans people are, maybe we’re in a better place than we are now, you know? Not always great. And, and also, it’s sort of interesting, right, because obviously balance theory is not, like, correct, quote unquote, scientifically.
But in some ways, it’s actually spiritually, or like philosophically, much closer to the realities of human sex biology, right, which is that it is a, it is a spectrum. There are all sorts of variations. It is not this really rigid binary where there is XX, XY, testosterone, and, you know, estrogen. Like, you know, today I think people really have this sense of a very rigid, dichotomous, you know, sex binary, and that’s not true.
And in fact, balance theory, well, certainly not. Accurate is, maybe a framing that is slightly more true in the spirit of the thing in the sense that we have this spectrum that we’re talking about.
Salima Hamirani OK so we have this 1 -2 % gender variation that is possible among all humans. Across all races right? But you mention in your podcast that all of the women you talked to who were pulled aside for testing were black and brown women from the global south. So what’s going on here?
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, I think it’s a huge piece of this conversation. I think there are a couple of reasons why. Um, when it comes to specifically people who are being flagged for what are sort of broadly called DSD, differences of sex development. When we talk about women who are being flagged, flagged and suddenly being told, like, Khelif, saying, like, you don’t look like a woman. We’re going to force you to test. As far as I know, there are no white women who have been in the last, since 2009, who have been flagged in this way.
And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that in most sports, these tests are not Blanket tests. So we are no longer testing every single woman the way that we were in the 60s through the 90s. And so what that means is that there are only certain women who are being flagged as quote unquote suspicious.
And that Accusation often does come down to visuals, what somebody looks like, and there is a really long history of racist assumptions about who looks like a woman and what womanhood looks like, what femininity looks like. There is a very long, well documented history of white supremacy essentially telling people that black women, brown women women.
look like women, that they look actually like men.
Salima Hamirani For example, nonwhite, nonwestern women can sometimes have more body hair. That is enough to get your flagged for gender testing.
Rose Eveleth: There’s also, I think, another element here, which is sort of healthcare disparities. So, in general, on average, these are sort of sweeping generalizations, but Babies that are born in the global north tend to be born in hospital settings and tend to be going to pediatric check ups and kind of have these what they call touch points to care, right? They’re going to the doctor more. And in that case if you do have these differences in sex development you will get flagged earlier on.
Salima Hamirani and they’re “treated for it” which is highly controversial in and of itself. Many women in the global south dont know they have a difference in sex development until they’re suddenly tested by the IOC. But that might be changing,
Rose Eveleth: Because we’re seeing a shift in the ways in which the global north thinks about these kinds of treatments, right? Because often those treatments involve things like genital surgeries to try and make them more like one or the other sex and those are unnecessary and you know in some ways damaging. And so maybe I’ve heard people speculate that in 10 years you’re going to see a bunch of White folks who get into the same position where they’re 18 and suddenly being told, actually you have this thing and actually you need to, you know, know about it or change your body in some ways.
And it will be very interesting to see if that changes the conversation that we’re having right now. But that’s another thing that’s going on. So it’s kind of both things in concert with one another.
Salima Hamirani Yeah, and again, given the variability in humans – why this extreme focus on women? Have men ever been scrutinized? There are probably men with low testosterone or high testosterone, or intersex men competing in the olympics right?
Rose Eveleth: No, no, men do not get questioned. Men can have as much testosterone as they like. Good for you. And that’s fine, and the reason for that, when you ask about this, the reason that you get is that the male category is not a protected category. The women’s category is protected.
And we need to protect the women’s category because if we didn’t, then men would enter women’s sports and they would win everything because men are better at sports than women. And so we need to protect the female category because otherwise it would be unfair to the women who are competing in these groups because if you allow men or people that they call “people with male like bodies” or whatever other euphemism you wanna use here, to compete it wont be fair.
Salima Hamirani ok so I’ve heard this before, so and so is secretly a man and they’re unfairly trying to win medals by competing in the women’s category. So we have to make sure that everyone competing in the women’s category is actually a woman. My question is: Has that actually ever happened?
Rose Eveleth: At the elite level, as far as we know, no. So, you know, obviously there are like road races wherever, you know, who knows. But at the Olympic level, as far as I know, and I’ve been reporting this for many, many years, ten years now, and I’ve talked to as many historians as I can, we have no evidence of any case of a man quote unquote masquerading as a woman.
Now we do have cases of women pretending to be men, To compete, because they’ve been barred from things like the marathon. So we do have cases of the reverse happening, but we do not know of any cases of elite, at the elite level, of men pretending to be women to compete.
Salima Hamirani Ok Rose, so give all of this information. I have one final question for you. The binary in sports seems like it’s very limiting. It also ignores so much of human biology and sexual development. How do we deal with this in the future? Do we get rid of that binary?Or, do we change the way we organize athletes in … i don’t know.. weight class for example?
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, I think it’s a good question, and I think there are kind of different layers to it, right? And so I think the sort of baseline level is that, , if you’re a woman, you should be allowed to compete in the women’s category. And that, to me, goes for trans athletes as well as for, you know, athletes with DSD variations and all of that. ,
Then there’s this question I think of, , non binary athletes, right? And I think there are, in some cases it makes sense to , give a non binary category, right? For example, a couple of marathons and half marathons have opened up a non binary category, and that’s great. That is not something that you should force someone into. I’ve seen people suggest that, you know, these intersex athletes or athletes with sex variation should be just given their own category.And that feels quite Othering, I think, to those women who say, you know, all the women I talk to for Tested, they say, but I’m a woman. Like, they don’t have any questions about their gender. They don’t have gender dysphoria
But I also think that more big picture, when we talk about, like, what is the future of sports. It may be that in some sports we should not have a gender binary and that everyone should compete together. It may be that in some sports we should. Or that maybe we should think about dividing sports by some other category like height or, you know, weight classes like they do in boxing or something like that.
And so I think that there are so many potential ways to think about this that can be really interesting but that are hard to get at because we spend so much of our time debating the human rights of, you know, people who are , don’t fall neatly into these categories. And so, I think there’s all sorts of really interesting things that we could potentially talk about.
But we’re just not there yet because we’re so stuck in this other muddy part.
Salima Hamirani: That was Rose Eveleth, producer and reporter for the podcast “Tested.” There is a lot we didn’t get to cover but if you’re listening and want to know a lot more please visit our website FOCmedia.org, to get links and behind the scenes information.
And because we started the show with Imane Khelif we just wanted to end with an update –
Boxing Match: Sound from match: this is what the years of work is about. This is what the early runs and the late sparring are about.
Salima Hamirani: In the final of the women’s welterweight division, Imane Khelif the Algerian fought Yang Liu of china
Boxing Match: Gold to the winner
Salima Hamirani: And in a unanimous decision from all five judges Khelif won gold.
Boxing Match: Gold medalist and olympic champion… In red from Algeria Imane Khelif.
Salima Hamirani: But it’s not the end of the controversy of her gender
News clips: The Algerian boxer filing a criminal complaint with Paris prosecutors to get to the bottom of the quote, misogynistic, racist and sexist campaign against Khelif, according to her lawyer.
Salima Hamirani Khelif specifically names Elon Musk, JK Rowling and JD Vance. And she doesn’t have to prove her gender in court. This isn’t a defamation hearing. She’s taken them to court for online harassment. It’s a big deal in an era when athletes’ lives can be ruined over social media. And we’ll be following the court case and we’ll bring you updates as soon as the case is resolved.
That’s it for today’s show. I’m Salima Hamirani. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
