Many of us are watching the Olympics and are aware of the recent doping scandal. For the unaware, male ski jumpers allegedly enlarged their penises during suit fittings; the suits are tightly regulated, because any extra fabric adds advantageous lift.
After the initial humour passed, I was struck by how unfunny sex-related scandals in women’s sports are.
Sex-verification tests have targeted female athletes since the 1936 Olympics, following the reveal of an athlete’s intersex condition post-retirement. Between the 1960s and 2000, elite athletic associations, including the Olympics, required sex verification tests on all female athletes. These tests included parading naked in front of doctors, gynecological exams, chromosome testing, and testosterone testing. Athletes could expect tests at every elite competition.
These tests produced false positives and surprised many athletes with intersex diagnoses: Ewa Kłobukowska, Maria José Martínez-Patiño, Nancy Navalta, Edinanci Silva, Annet Negesa, and Caster Semenya all received bans and public humiliation.
More of the same befell Pratima Gaonkar and Santhi Soundarajan, followed by suicide attempts and death.
Most of these women are racialized, and all of them had lived their whole lives as women. (None of these sex verifications ever discovered a man impersonating a woman, by the way.)
Athletic sex-verification policies rely on outdated assumptions: that a test exists that divides people into two distinct sex categories that are imperative to ensure fairness because maleness is an advantage, and that the invasive nature of these tests is justified.
However, there’s no infallible test to measure binary sex. Sexual variation is vast within the categories of male and female, and there is significant overlap.
There are no physiological limits placed on male athletes. If high testosterone levels are genuinely unfair, why aren’t men’s levels regulated? All of the above sex tests have been applied to women.
There is no measurable link between testosterone or chromosomes and athletic performance. The idea that “maleness” is inherently advantageous is sexist.
Sex verifications are not worth the costs. They risk exposure to sexual abuse, have caused at least one death, and have not succeeded in their goal of keeping men from entering women’s sports.
The current transgender athlete panic is intertwined with these misconceptions and incorrectly assumes that trans women will always outperform cis women.
But in order to compete with women, trans female athletes are required to lower their testosterone levels well into the average range for cis women, and trans women aren’t winning that many competitions. Laurel Hubbard, the first trans athlete to compete in the Olympics, failed all her lifts, and swimmer Lia Thomas faced backlash after finishing in sixth place at Yale in 2022.
When trans women do win, the goalposts move. Cyclist Leia Genis legally started and won a race in 2022, but 24 hours later, her medal was revoked and the rules changed.
The impacts of gender policing of elite athletes may seem far removed from your personal life. Trans people make up less than 0.33% of Canada’s population, and less than 0.01% of elite athletes worldwide are trans. But, despite these odds, female athletes are routinely suspected of being trans. Laws are being passed, not just in the USA, but in nearby Alberta, to ban trans girls from all levels of sports. This means that any girl, regardless of age, can be subjected to sex testing.
Who benefits from your fear of trans women? Trans women aren’t dominating sports. These policies cause harms to all kinds of women, and these policies reinforce patriarchy.