Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy. Robyn Ryle
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not surprising that women didn’t compete in the modern Olympic Games until the beginning of the twentieth century. Sports have long been defined as the domain of men (and more specifically, the domain of the white, cis, straight man), a place where the ideal of masculinity can be both created and reinforced. Like many of his time, Coubertin, the father of the modern Games, believed that real women were incapable of participating in sports. The rigor and competition were too much for the fairer sex. This idea, that real woman cannot compete in sports, is one of the core assumptions that underlies the history of gender testing in sports. Women who can compete—and who excel—must not be real women, because real women are not athletes.[6]
Nude Parades and Determining
When a Lady Is a Lady
Though there is anecdotal evidence that gender testing was part of female athletes’ experience as early as 1936, the first documented case of gender testing began formally in 1966 at the European Athletics Championship. The formal testing might have been new, but the concerns about men passing themselves off as women were not. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, American runner Helen Stephens was accused of being a man when she won the 100-meter race. Not surprisingly, these sorts of accusations often fell in line with existing global political tensions played out on the Olympic stage.[7] During the Cold War, female athletes from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries were often accused of being men masquerading as women. Soviet women were depicted in the United States and British media as “muscular” and “hefty,” while their male counterparts were “clumsy” and “working on weakness.”[8] In other words, this gender reversal (manly women and womanly men) was used to demonstrate the inferiority of the Soviet Union as a place and communism as a political system.
At first, the gender testing used by the Olympics organizers and other bodies overseeing international competition wasn’t much different from that of the Greeks in the second century. Female athletes lined up for “nude parades” in front of a panel of three female physicians. In the first year of its use, all 234 of the women passed, though some refused to undergo the test. The same method was used at the Pan American Games in 1967, and American shot putter, Maren Sedler, remembers vividly how traumatic the experience was. Sedler was only 16 years old at the time, and later said, “[I]t was hideous . . . and though I wasn’t afraid of not passing, I just felt that it was humiliating.” The Commonwealth Games in 1966 were even worse, as women were forced to undergo a gynecological exam before they could compete. The women lined up outside an examining room and were not informed ahead of time about what would be happening to them inside, where they underwent what one athlete described as basically a “grope.”[9]
In 1967, the IAAF moved to a “simpler” and “more dignified” test. The IAAF is the international governing body for track and field, and in 1967 switched to a chromosome-based assessment for testing gender. The same test was used at the 1968 Olympic Games. Athletes who passed the test received “certificates of femininity,” which were small, laminated licenses that they had to carry with them to all competitions and submit as proof of their female-ness. No corresponding “certificates of masculinity” were required of male athletes.
The shifting criteria for figuring out who was and wasn’t a woman meant that Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska passed the visual test in 1966 but then had the humiliating experience of failing the chromosomal test in 1967. Klobukowska had no knowledge of her chromosomal condition and so had not set out to cheat. One member of the commission who ruled Klobukowska ineligible explained, “A lady cannot be a lady and not know it.”[10] All of Klobukowska’s previous medals were taken away and, at the age of 21, she could no longer compete at the international level, making her yet another victim of the gender-testing policies.
In 1985, María José Martínez-Patiño forgot to bring her “certificate of femininity” to the World University Games. That she had a certificate demonstrated that she had passed one set of gender tests. But after being subjected to an even more sophisticated test, Martínez-Patiño was informed, much to her surprise, that she was genetically a male. Martínez-Patiño’s case came at a critical moment when a growing number of voices argued against the practice of gender testing in sports. Many members of the international medical community found these tests “grossly unfair” and, as early as 1969, specialists refused to administer the procedures. These medical professionals argued that the tests were both scientifically and ethically objectionable. Five Danish researchers in 1972 released a report stating that the use of gender tests in the Olympic Games should be canceled.[11]
In 1988, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formed a working group to examine the issue. Experts like Dr. Albert de la Chapelle, a geneticist and leading expert on gender testing, took up Martínez-Patiño’s cause and called for an end to gender testing. Still, it wasn’t until 1992 that the IAAF declared it would stop blanket gender testing. The IAAF reserved the right to investigate female athletes in the case of “occasional anomalies.”[12] The IOC continued to use gender testing and in 1992, once again changed the nature of the test. The new test defined a woman not as someone who had two X chromosomes (XX), but rather as a person who lacked a Y chromosome. Once more, these criteria revealed the difficulty in figuring out exactly what they were testing for. As the Danish researchers had said back in 1972, the IOC was essentially making its own definition of sex. Why was it so hard to settle on one definition for who is and isn’t a woman?
The Trouble with Chromosomes
The problem of figuring out who is a woman and who is a man isn’t unique to international sporting organizations. In American society, we mostly take it for granted that there are two types of people—female and male—and that these are real, objective, and discrete categories. This means there are criteria that anyone can use to sort people into one or the other of those categories, but not both at the same time. Prevailing norms tell us that a person can’t be both a woman and a man. If gender really worked this way, determining who is and isn’t a woman for the purpose of competition would not be a problem.
But the reality is much more complicated than that. Take the criteria of chromosomes, which both the IAAF and the IOC have used for gender testing. This type of test operates on the assumption that in men, the last pairing of their 23 chromosomes (what we call sex chromosomes) is XY, while in a woman, that pairing is XX. Initially, the chromosomal test focused on the presence or absence of a second X chromosome, also known as a Barr body. So those with XX chromosomes were considered female, while those with only one X were not.[13]
The problem is that not everyone lines up neatly into XX or XY. Some people are born with more than 46 chromosomes. Individuals with Klinefelter syndrome carry an additional X, so their chromosomes are XXY. Others have fewer than 46 chromosomes, like those with Turner syndrome, who would be XO.[14] Under the initial chromosomal test, female athletes with Turner syndrome would be ineligible to compete as women, since they have no Barr body. Additionally, experts like Dr. de la Chapelle point out that abnormalities in the X chromosome may result in tests that are difficult to interpret.[15] In other words, sometimes it’s hard to determine exactly whether something is or isn’t an X chromosome. In 1992, the IOC switched away from the Barr body test to criteria that instead focused on the presence of a Y chromosome. Now, a woman would be defined not as someone with a second X chromosome but as someone without a Y chromosome.[16] Under these different criteria, those with Turner syndrome would now be considered women, but those with Klinefelter syndrome would no longer pass.
The shifting nature of these criteria are problematic, but as many experts repeatedly point out, they’re also troubling because there is no clear link between chromosomal sex and athletic performance. If the point of gender testing is truly to prevent men from gaining a competitive advantage by passing as women, a chromosomal test of sex provides the least relevant information. For example, Martínez-Patiño failed the chromosomal test because she had androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). This condition affects an estimated one in five hundred athletes and one in twenty thousand in the general population. With AIS, a person’s cells cannot respond to testosterone, the “male hormone.” Genetically, these women seem to