Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport: A History of the Present 2019043298, 2019043299, 9780367313012, 9780429316159

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Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport

This book critically explores the history of gender verification in international sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce “femaleness” and, consequently, the female body as we know it. Tracing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till the present, the book shows how and why medical “sex tests” have been used to “verify” women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have shaped broader social and scientific ideas about femaleness in the process. Exploring how geopolitics, gender, and class and race relations intertwined with scientific ideas about femaleness and womanhood to shape gender verification, the book shows how sports competitions became a battleground where new and old ideas about sex difference collided. By mapping the social, historical, and material instability of sex and gender, it shows why so much investment has been placed in distinguishing femaleness from maleness in sport and beyond. The book will be of interest to researchers and later-year undergraduate and graduate students in a broad range of areas including gender studies, sports studies, social and historical studies of science, and medicine. It will also be relevant to sports policy as it historically and conceptually contextualises gender verification policies. Sonja Erikainen is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests cluster around social, historical, and ethical issues concerning biomedicine and gender. Her publications cover areas including digital health, new and emerging biotechnologies, and gender identity as well as gender and sports.

Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities Series Editors: Yvette Taylor and Sally Hines

Creativity, Religion and Youth Cultures Anne M. Harris Intersexualization Lena Eckert The Sexual Politics of Asylum Calogero Giametta Exploring LGBT Spaces and Communities Eleanor Formby Marginal Bodies,Trans Utopias Caterina Nirta Sexualities Research Critical Interjections, Diverse Methodologies, and Practical Applications Edited by Andrew King, Ana Cristina Santos and Isabel Crowhurst Queer Business Queering Organization Sexualities Nick Rumens Queer in Africa LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism Edited by Zethu Matebeni, Surya Monro and Vasu Reddy Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport A History of the Present Sonja Erikainen For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sociology/ series/RACD

Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport A History of the Present

Sonja Erikainen

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Sonja Erikainen The right of Sonja Erikainen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Erikainen, Sonja, author. Title: Gender verification and the making of the female body in sport : a history of the present / Sonja Erikainen. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge advances in critical diversities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019043298 (print) | LCCN 2019043299 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367313012 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429316159 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Women athletes—Physiology. | Sports—Sex differences. | Gender identity in sports. Classification: LCC GV709 .E85 2020 (print) | LCC GV709 (ebook) | DDC 796.082—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043298 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043299 ISBN: 978-0-367-31301-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31615-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To mum, the first feminist athlete I ever met, for showing me how to tackle life like a judoka.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1

Introduction: gender verification, sex difference, and the body

x xii 1

Writing histories of gender verification 5 A genealogy of the female category in sport 9 Socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender and the body 10 Feminist configurations of sex, gender and the body 16 Structure of the book 20 Notes 22 2

Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s

24

“The peculiar awkwardness of women’s efforts” 25 Sex changes, metamorphoses, and hormonal sex instability 29 Hermaphrodites, monstrosities, and sex borderlines 34 Physical examinations and femininity certificates 37 Conclusion 40 Notes 41 3

Pure and polluted bodies in Cold War sports Cold War geopolitics in international sport 44 Gendered Cold War sporting dynamics 47 Artificial substances and sex abnormality 48 Naked parades 53 Borderline bodies, hybrid creatures, and the feminisation of women’s sport 56 Conclusion 60 Notes 62

43

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4

Contents

Sex screening and diagnosis in the Olympics

63

The medicalisation of the Olympics 64 The medical management of sex abnormalities 65 Naked parades, embarrassment, and further examinations 68 A diagnostic paradigm for sex 70 The impact of on-site gender verification in the Olympics 73 Conclusion 79 Notes 80 5

Gender fraud and masquerade in the 1970s and 1980s

81

Chromosomal disorders and transsexual women 82 Gender masquerade 86 Ferguson-Smith and the male masquerade threat 87 De la Chapelle and the scientific opposition to chromosome screening 90 (Re)defining the aims of gender verification 92 “Man has a penis and a scrotum; a woman does not” 96 Conclusion 99 Notes 100 6

Gendered suspicions at the turn of the millennia

102

Gendered suspicion, excessive bodies, and feminine body aesthetics 103 Objections to the health and gender examinations, and the PCR test 105 Genitals, gendered suspicion and hypermuscular women 107 The “essence of man” 110 The discontinuation of PCR testing 114 Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya 116 Conclusion 120 Note 122 7

The testosterone debate – from hyperandrogenic females to biological males Conceptualising androgens 124 Regulations on female hyperandrogenism 126 Diagnosing and treating hyperandrogenism 130 Debating a testosterone sex gap 134

123

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ix

The Rio Olympics 137 IAAF DSD regulations and the testosterone debate 138 Conclusion 144 Notes 146 8

The past, present, and future of gender verification and sex categories in sport

147

Continuities and discontinuities in the making of the female body 148 Drawing lines in the sand – current delineations of femaleness 151 Beyond binary sex and gender categories? 155 Notes 160 Bibliography Index

161 182

Acknowledgements

Like all book projects, this book is the result of a collective effort and would never have materialised were it not for the support of more individuals and organisations than I can name. The research upon which the book is based would not have been possible without the funding that I received through the University of Leeds 110 Anniversary Research Scholarship and the International Olympic Committee PhD Students Research Grant. It would also not have been possible without the generous assistance of staff at the Olympic Studies Centre, University of Helsinki archives, and University of Glasgow archives, who offered their knowledge and advice without hesitation. Additionally, I am grateful for having been awarded an ESRC postdoctoral research fellowship for the project Sex Binaries, Performance Enhancement and Elite Sport, which enabled me to complete the monograph. During different stages of the project, I have benefitted from the intellectual support of many colleagues who have offered me an invaluable social as well as academic network. I have been fortunate to have two vibrant academic homes at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds and at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh. I thank all of my colleagues and students at both places for making me feel a part of a community. Especially, I want to thank Karen Throsby, Sally Hines, and Anne Kerr for the intellectual nourishment and mentorship they have offered me as well as for their careful reading of and feedback on various versions of individual chapters and the book as a whole. Special thanks also to Sarah Chan for listening to my ideas, even the bad ones, with an open mind, for helping me to develop them, and for teaching me how to be an academic. In addition, I am particularly grateful for the support and friendship of the following colleagues who encouraged me and engaged me in critical discussions at crucial points in the research and write-up process: Ben Vincent, Ruth Pearce, Alexandra Gruian, Katucha Bento, Martyn Pickersgill, Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, Charlotte Jones, Sue Chowdhry, and Emily Ross. I also thank Hugh Torrance, Leap Sports Scotland, and the Beyond2 Erasmus project team for making me think differently about the nature and value of sports participation.

Acknowledgements

xi

Finally, my friends and family have been amazing in more ways than I can account for. Thanks to Michael Kennedy, Hanna Isotalus, Emmi Kuutamo, Laura Seppä, and especially Gaëlle Dumas-Galien for their love and support. Thanks, in particular, to Conny Rhode, without whom I would not be writing this. His intellectual companionship and critical engagement with my ideas during long hours spent mostly in cafes have been more important than I can express. Most of all, I want to thank my parents, all three of them. I thank Peter Koski for believing in me regardless of how outlandish my plans seemed to be and regardless of whether I actually managed to deliver them – you are greatly missed. I thank Jarmo Erikäinen for a lifetime of advice and wisdom which, despite my occasional rebellion, I have taken on bard gratefully and value immeasurably. Finally, I thank Riitta Rihtamo-Koski, to whom this book is dedicated, for giving me a model of endless strength and resilience. Like a foundation stone, this model is the basis upon which I have aimed to build my academic as well as personal life.

Abbreviations

AAHPER American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation ABP Athlete Biological Passport AIS androgen insensitivity syndrome ASA Athletics South Africa CAH congenital adrenal hyperplasia CAIS complete androgen insensitivity syndrome CAS Court of Arbitration for Sports DSD differences of sex development/disorders of sex development FSFI Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale HRC Human Rights Campaign HRT hormone replacement therapy IAAF International Association of Athletics Federations/International Amateur Athletics Federation IAF International Athletic Foundation IOC International Olympic Committee IOC-MC International Olympic Committee Medical Commission NOC National Olympic Committee PAIS partial androgen insensitivity syndrome PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome PCR polymerase chain reaction SAI Sports Authority of India UN United Nations USGA United States Golf Association USTA United States Tennis Association WADA World Anti-Doping Agency WWG Women’s World Games

Chapter 1

Introduction Gender verification, sex difference, and the body

In June 2014, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) received a letter concerning an 18-year-old Indian athlete Dutee Chand, who had recently competed in the women’s Asian Junior Athletics championships. The letter, which was from the Athletics Federation of India, stated the following: It has been brought to the notice of the undersigned that there are definite doubts regarding the gender of an Athlete Ms. Dutee Chand. During [the Asian Junior Athletics] championships, also, doubts were expressed by the Asian Athletics Association regarding her gender issue. . . . In view of the above you may like to conduct Gender verification test of Ms. Dutee Chand . . . so as to avoid any embarrassment to India in the International arena at a later stage. (Athletics Federation of India, cited in CAS, 2015: 4–5) Subsequently, Chand travelled to a SAI training camp, where she was made to undergo medical examinations including blood tests, gynaecological examination, karyotyping, and an ultrasound (CAS, 2015). Chand was assigned female at birth, was identified and was legally recognised as a woman, and had been competing in women’s junior-level athletics since 2007. In July 2014, however, the SAI notified Chand that she would no longer be permitted to compete in women’s athletics because her “male hormone” levels were too high. The medical examinations that Chand underwent had concluded that she had so-called female hyperandrogenism, meaning elevated levels of androgenic hormones in females which, SAI determined, excluded her from the right to compete in the female category (CAS, 2015). This decision was based on the female hyperandrogenism regulations that had been introduced by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) among other sport-governing bodies a few years earlier (IAAF, 2011; IOC, 2012). The regulations established an androgen threshold for athletes’ eligibility to compete in the female category, which Chand had exceeded. Meanwhile, Chand was not the only athlete who was excluded from women’s sport due to a “gender issue.” While American athlete Chloie Jönsson was training

2

Introduction

for the 2013 CrossFit Games, her lawyer received a letter from CrossFit Inc. general counsel Dale Saran, who informed that Jönsson would not be permitted to compete in the women’s CrossFit Games because she had been assigned male at birth. This was despite the fact that she both identified and was legally recognised as a female and a woman, had undergone gender affirmation surgery in 2006, and has been on hormone therapy for many years. Jönsson later published the correspondence between her lawyer and Saran,1 during which Saran stated: We need to get our facts together. . . . Chloie was born, genetically – as a matter of fact – with and X and a Y chromosome and all of the anatomy of a male of the human race. Today, notwithstanding any hormone therapy or surgeries, Chloie still has an X and a Y chromosome. (Saran, 2013) Therefore, Saran concluded, any claims that Jönsson is female were categorically, empirically false. The principle intent of the CrossFit Games is to determine the fittest man and a woman on Earth. What we’re really talking about here is a matter of definition; of what it means to be “female” for the purposes of the CrossFit Games. (Saran, 2013)2 While these two stories are among the more recent controversies centred on “gender issues” in international competitive sports, such issues have a long history dating back at least to the 1930s. Despite their differences, Chand’s and Jönsson’s stories highlight a core problem that has troubled international sportgoverning bodies ever since women’s competitions were included within their remit, namely, what it means to be “female” for the purposes of sport. The vast majority of sports competitions are divided into two separate and mutually exclusive female and male categories, with the exception of a few mixed events such as Equestrian and the recently added mixed Olympic relays in athletics and swimming.3 The core justification for this is so widely accepted that it may seem commonsensical: females have weaker athletic performance potential than males and therefore separate women’s events are necessary to provide female athletes fair competitions. Despite significant changes in how this justification has been articulated over time, the core message has remained the same throughout the history of modern international sport: 1950s observers, for example, noted that a woman “is constitutionally weaker and does not possess the same endurance, nor can she produce the same physical output than men” (Messerli, 1952: 9). In the 1980s, an influential sport official considered that female bodies were afflicted, among other things, with “tiredness, and poor performance, weak muscle and ligament tone [and] hormonal cycles” (Hay, 1988). Medical commentators argued in 2016 that the statement “that men and women are different is a biological reality, and in sport, the difference has obvious performance implications” (Tucker & Harper,

Introduction

3

2016). Despite being articulated at different times, these comments share two principal ideas: firstly, female and male bodies are fundamentally different and, secondly, in sport this difference manifests as female performance inferiority. These two ideas have been and continue to be accompanied, however, with the key problem of defining “female” in sport. As Chand’s and Jönsson’s stories illustrate, what it means to be female is neither self-evident nor is there any clear consensus on how it should be defined. While for Chand, it was her androgen levels that rendered her ineligible to compete in women’s athletics, Jönsson’s exclusion was justified primarily with reference to her chromosomes. Indeed, Jönsson would likely have been eligible to compete in the female category in accordance with the criteria used to exclude Chand, while Chand would likely have been eligible according to the criteria used to exclude Jönsson. What it means to be “female” is thus not only a matter of definition, but the dividing line between “female” and “male” is drawn in different ways in different contexts. Moreover, the core justification used for sex-segregated sport competition – that female bodies have weaker athletic performance potential than male bodies – is not categorically true: some females perform better than some males, and female athletes competing at top levels perform better than most males. Consequently, not only the definition of femaleness but also the primary justification for sex segregated competition is unstable and contested. These “gender issues” are not confined to the sphere of sport. The problem of delineating and regulating the female/male boundary accompanies most if not all sex-segregated contexts where sex categories are limited to the binary two. For example, in 2016, the Human Rights Campaign foundation reported that 29 “bathroom bills” were under consideration in the United States (HRC, 2016). The aim of these bills was primarily to ban transgender people from using bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. A bill proposed in Washington would have required those wanting to use women’s public bathrooms (or locker rooms, showers, etc.) to be able to demonstrate that they have female DNA (House Bill 2782, 2016). This not only appears consistent with genetic “sex testing” as a requirement for bathroom access but would also have excluded many intersex (in addition to transgender) women who have XY chromosomes, or women with so-called differences of sex development, from women’s bathrooms. Since the 1930s, international sport-governing bodies have had in place regulations for dealing with gender issues, resembling the “bathroom bill” attempts to make the sex binary a policy matter. The female hyperandrogenism regulations are among the most recent manifestations of these policies, which have only been applied to athletes competing in the female category. The policies have historically carried many formal and informal names, including “sex testing,” “sex control,” “femininity certification,” “investigations of femininity,” “naked parades,” “tests of sexual chromatin,” “health and gender examinations,” and “gender verification.” The different titles relate to different time periods and different policies, but the policies have all been used to perform two interlaced regulatory functions: firstly, to police the categorical border between “female” and “male” to enable

4

Introduction

sex-segregated competitions based on two mutually exclusive sex categories, and secondly, to draw definitional boundaries around the female category by defining which bodies do and do not count as (appropriately) female for sport. For this purpose, myriad scientific and medical methods to identify sex have been used to investigate both the external contours and internal realities of female athletes’ bodies. In what follows, I will use the umbrella term “gender verification” to denote these policies and related practices, the historical and contemporary manifestations which are the empirical focus of this book. In particular, I focus on IOC and IAAF policies applied since the 1930s till the present, because of the prominent role these two major sport-governing bodies have played in sex and gender policing in sport and society more broadly. Indeed, sport in general and international competitive sports in particular rely on more rigorous sex binary division than most other contexts. As sport historians have extensively documented, there is an enduring, deeply embedded conflation between athletic prowess and male embodiment (Cahn, 1994; Hargreaves, 1994, 2000; Lenskyj, 1986; Mangan & Park, 1987; Osborne & Skillen, 2011; Smith, 1998; Vertinsky, 1990). Sport has been a central social signifier of sex difference, because it is intimately connected with and fundamentally about the body. It expresses the different potential and limits that are seen to accompany male and female embodiment, respectively. This made it a site where the nature of sex difference is manifested, debated, and contested (Hargreaves, 1994; Vertinsky, 1990). While the empirical content of gender verification policies and practices is interesting in its own right, the primary aim of this book is to take gender verification as a lens for exploring broader theoretical questions about the ontology and epistemology of sex difference. In other words, the book takes gender verification as a lens to explore what “sex” means, as a concept and an empirical reality, and how we produce knowledge about it. It offers an exploration into how and why binary female and male sex categories are erected and secured and how the boundaries that are drawn around “femaleness” are defined and shifted over time. Through this exploration, I hope to highlight that the history and contemporary manifestations of gender verification bring to the fore not only that sex categories have no “essence” that we can rely on to decide, ultimately, who is and is not female or male but also that this lack of essence renders sex and gender binaries unstable. This instability, in turn, that makes them subject to reoccurring crisis in the face of socio-cultural, political, and scientific change. It is due to this category instability that the binary line between the sexes tends to incite (ultimately unresolvable) debates and tension in spaces where binary sex categories are presumed and applied. In particular, this happens when our presumptions about sex and gender differences are challenged, especially by subjects who transgress, resist, or fail to conform to them. Firstly, however, this introductory chapter situates the book in relation to the (hi)stories that have already been told about gender verification and places it in the context of the wider theoretical and historical questions about the ontology

Introduction

5

and epistemology of sex difference that the book feeds into. In so doing, I hope to highlight what is at stake when it comes to gender verification, both theoretically and empirically, not only in sport but in society more generally. In the first section, I consider some challenges that pertain to writing histories of gender verification as well as the role that historical narratives play in the present context in which they are articulated. I aim to both problematise existing understandings about gender verification’s past and explain why this book offers a genealogical alternative to them. The second section offers a brief conceptual history of sex, gender, and the body in relation to dominant scientific epistemologies and ontologies to contextualise the 20th- and early 21st-century articulations of female embodiment that are mapped in later chapters. I have titled this section Socio-Scientific Configurations to emphasise the foundational entanglement between scientific and social or cultural ideas when it comes to how sex difference has been conceptualised and knowledge about it produced. I then move to consider feminist ontological and epistemological configurations of sex, gender, and the body to foreground the feminist lens from which I write and the Butlerian theoretical framework that I adopt to analyse gender verification. I hope that the reader will use the introduction to think about what it means, for all of us and not just for competitive athletes, to have a sex and a gender, and why we invest so much cultural weight in being sexed and gendered in the appropriate way.

Writing histories of gender verification The history of gender verification in sport has attracted much scholarly interest mostly since the 1990s, including from historians but especially from scholars outside history in other humanities disciplines, social science, medicine and sport sciences (for a starting point, see for example Pieper, 2016; Simpson et al., 2000; Wackwitz, 2003; Wiederkehr, 2009; Wrynn, 2004). As Vanessa Heggie (2010: 157) has argued, however, “histories of sex testing are difficult to write and research” because of the sensitive nature of the topic, which “has led to the repetition of inaccurate information and false assertions,” to the extent that the history of gender verification has actually been “reinvented, reimagined and reconstructed.” This reinvention, Heggie (2010) argued, has been accomplished through a widespread reproduction of a particular historical narrative that is based on what she called “the canon of gender frauds.” This canon consists of a set of illustrative historical cases of gender suspect or outright male athletes who allegedly committed “gender fraud” by masquerading as women to compete in women’s sports. The canon has been so widely reproduced in academic literature that the cases it encompasses have gained an aura of legend, to the extent that, Heggie (2010) argued, the lines between “history” and “myth” have become blurred. Heggie’s arguments constitute my point of entry into the history of gender verification and raise interesting questions about the role that historical writing performs, both in relation to how and why we tell stories about the past and to how these stories relate to the present context where they are told. If the history

6

Introduction

of gender verification has been reinvented, this raises questions not only about what is “inaccurate” or “false” about the histories themselves, but also about the reasons why particular historical narratives have been so widely mobilised in the first place. These questions pertain to what can be gained or learned if a different approach to historical analysis is taken. Consequently, I reviewed 105 academic journal articles where historical claims about gender verification are made, published between 19694 and 2016, and retrieved via key word searches of journal databases without discriminating by discipline. To understand how the history of gender verification has been narrated, I focused on journal articles because they reveal collective practices of knowledge production more than other modes of publishing. They reflect not only the authors’ views but also those of peer reviewers who flag some aspects of an article as needing more work, while other aspects pass unnoticed (Hemmings, 2005). Indeed, I discovered that most historical accounts of gender verification are written, not by historians, nor for the purpose of taking the history itself as an object of investigation, but as a “preclude” (see Hemmings, 2005) or background story to contextualise authors’ own particular arguments. As such, the widely reproduced narrative that proceeds from the canon of gender frauds can be taken to reflect an accepted or “common-knowledge” understanding of the past: reference to (at least primary) sources almost seems unnecessary as “everyone knows” what happened. I want to highlight here, not only the aspects of this common-knowledge understanding that will be problematised in later chapters, but also the epistemic effects that its widespread reproduction has.5 The narrative path begins with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where at least two cases of “gender fraud” allegedly occurred. The first is perhaps the most infamous. It concerns a German high-jumper competing under the name Dora Ratjen, who is said to have been a male in disguise: “Dora Ratjen (real name Hermann Ratjen) posed as a woman in the women’s event, and then admitted to the ruse” (Ritchie, 2003: 87), as he later “confessed that he was forced under Nazi order to bind his genitals and compete as a woman” (Sullivan, 2011: 403–404). Apparently, this “young man had been forced by the Nazi Party to . . . hid[e] his real sex, to increase the number of German medals” (Ferez, 2012: 278). Ratjen’s story was even made into a feature film in 2009, titled Berlin 36. The film tells the story of Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann who was suddenly excluded from the German Olympic team due to anti-Semitism and replaced by Ratjen (an “Aryan” male) so he would win the gold medal for Germany (which he failed to do, finishing fourth). The second case concerns Polish-American track athlete Stella Walsh, who is sometimes referred to by her Polish name Stanisława Walasiewicz. Walsh’s story begins with her rival, Helen Stephens, who won the 100-meter race while Walsh finished second. Stephens is often said to have been the first athlete made to undergo (ad hoc) gender verification due to accusations from a Polish journalist, which she passed: In the first recorded gender verification test, German officials “examined” Stephens when a journalist claimed she was a man. Ironically it would turn

Introduction

7

out that it was Walsh who would have failed the sex test. Following her death in 1980 . . . an autopsy revealed that Walsh had the sex organs of both a man and a woman. (Wrynn, 2004: 217) While Walsh’s story is usually told as an early example of an intersex athlete in women’s sport, some claim that Walsh, like Ratjen, was a more straightforward case of gender masquerade. One scholar states that the autopsy following her death “revealed that she had been hiding a secret. As it turned out, ‘she’ was a ‘he’. . . . Stella Walsh was a ‘man’” (Jönsson, 2007: 240). These stories are among the most firmly canonised cases of “gender fraud.” They appear in most articles about gender verification, often combined with stories about gender suspect athletes competing in the 1960s, such as Irina and Tamara Press from the Soviet Union, who I will discuss in Chapter 3. These stories, in turn, provide a rationale and explanatory context for the introduction of gender verification: because it seemed that men were “binding their genitals to compete as women” (Amy-Chinn, 2012: 1298), “at its inception, gender verification . . . was envisioned as a way to catch cheaters: men disguising themselves as women to win fraudulently” (Hercher, 2010: 551). According to many historical accounts, the first gender verification policy was introduced in 1966 by the IAAF, to finally put an end to three decades of gender fraud. Indeed, the “canon of gender frauds” seems to provide evidence that “sex fraud may have been systematically perpetuated for political gain dating back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics” (Reeser, 2005: 696). Yet, there are curious problems including temporal inconsistencies in the “common-knowledge” historical narrative that the “canon of gender frauds” supports. Firstly, while the IAAF did indeed introduce a gender verification policy in 1966 – commonly referred to as the “naked parades” policy, which I discuss in Chapter 3 – this was not the first gender verification policy, nor was Stephens even the first athlete to be gender verified. Rather, the first IAAF gender verification policy was introduced in 1937, as I show in Chapter 2. Before this, ad hoc gender verification practices had been conducted as early as the 1928.6 Ratjen’s and Walsh’s alleged “gender frauds” only became known years after the 1937 policy had already been instituted, however: Ratjen’s alleged fraud was first reported in 1957,7 while revelations about Walsh’s sex characteristics were made only after her death in 1980. Despite this, the “common-knowledge” history of gender verification associates Walsh’s and Ratjen’s gender fraudulence with the 1930s context and claims them as examples of gendered transgression at that time. Moreover, some imply that Walsh’s gender was already in doubt in Berlin: one scholar remarks that “if the Poles had suspicions [about Stephen] it was surely because they themselves had doubts about the gender of their own athlete, Stella Walasiewicz” (Bohuon, 2015: 967–968). Others claim that Walsh and Stephens actually “accused one another of being male,” rather than accusations being directed only against Stephens (Tucker & Collins, 2010: 128). I found no

8

Introduction

evidence to suggest that Walsh’s gender was considered any more “suspicious” before 1980 than the gender of female athletes in general who competed in athletics in the 1930s – a point which I discuss in Chapter 2. Secondly, after Ratjen’s death in 2008, investigative journalist Stefan Berg gained access to archival records about Ratjen held at the Kiel university hospital which, according to Berg (2009), tell a very different story about Ratjen: instead of being a fraudulent male infiltrator, Ratjen had been assigned female at birth and raised a girl. His gender was reassigned, and name changed, not to Hermann but Heinrich, only after the Berlin Olympics, actually by Nazi German officials. These officials also returned his medals, but the medals were re-awarded only in 1957 due to confusion caused by the war.8 This version of Ratjen’s story reads less like a Nazi gender fraud plot and more like a story of misidentified sex at birth that was corrected later in life. Thirdly, and relatedly, a notable characteristic of the “common-knowledge” history of gender verification is a disregard for primary sources: some provide no sources whatsoever, and most cite older academic sources, which in turn either offer no sources or rely on a small selection of newspaper stories.9 There are also inconsistencies between different historical accounts and occasional confusions where different gender fraud cases are mixed with each other, or entirely new cases invented.10 What the “common-knowledge” history does, however, is that it narrates a past populated by gender deception and suspicion. This, in turn, supports the idea that the original rationale for gender verification was to prevent gender fraud committed by men who masqueraded as women: “historically speaking, the primary justification for gender testing has been to prevent male intruders from fraudulently competing in women’s sport” (Henne, 2014: 788). When this is understood to be the initial cause and aim of gender verification, the key historical “threat” to the boundaries of the female category in sport appears to be fraudulent gender binary crossings committed by males and men (who presumably had genitalia that needed binding). To be clear, my argument is not that concern over fraudulent male intruders did not exist – in fact, Chapter 5 shows how concern over “male masquerade” became an important justification for gender verification in the late 1980s. Rather, I will argue that this was neither the first nor the most significant concern that motivated the introduction (and continuation) of gender verification (see also Schultz, 2012). The core site of concern has been, instead, social anxieties over sex and gender binary breakdown, embodied by athletes who were categorised and identified as female but who destabilised the boundaries that had been medically and socially drawn around “appropriate” female embodiment. My purpose is also not to produce a “corrective” history of gender verification by separating “history” from “myths,” or by telling the story as it “really” happened. The issue is not, simply, one of omission whereby a more objective account could be built if only the historical record was amended by putting in that which has been excluded or distorted (see Spivak, 1999). Indeed, the reproduction of “common-knowledge” about gender verification’s history is interesting, less because of the disloyalty to primary sources and more because it illustrates how

Introduction

9

particular histories come to be accepted and validated in the present. As scholars, “we make and remake stories about the past . . . which stories predominate or are precluded or marginalized is always a question of power and authority” (Hemmings, 2005: 118). While I tell a different (hi)story – or, alternatively, the same (hi)story differently – I invite the reader to consider my version as a rather than the way to understand the history of gender verification and its broader epistemic and societal implications.

A genealogy of the female category in sport This book offers a genealogy of the female category in competitive international sports and in athletics and the Olympics in particular. It builds on Foucault’s (2000) genealogical approach, which aims to disrupt the “presumed” of the past, such as the previously described narrative path through the history of gender verification, and to provide, instead, a “history of the present” (Foucault, 1991: 31). It is not, in other words, and in the final instance, directed towards the past as such but aims to develop a critical understanding of the present by tracing the events and relations of power that gave rise to it. Genealogy can be understood, in particular, as a critical history of discursive objects. “Discourse” can be defined as “ways of constituting knowledge, together with . . . social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations” (Pitsoe & Letseka, 2013: 24), which can be realised in any form that can be given an “interpretive gloss” including but not limited to written documents (Parker, 1992: 6). Genealogy enables one to trace the (many) historical conditions through which the discursive objects that we uphold today emerged and upon which they still depend (see Garland, 2014), including struggles, conflicts, and exercises of power. The idea is not, however, to analyse the past in terms of the present, nor that the present is rooted in the past in any straightforward way. Rather, genealogy implies a commitment to the idea that there is no “timeless and essential secret” to be discovered about present phenomena but we are faced, instead, with “the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms” (Foucault, 2000: 78). In using genealogy, I foreground the temporal and contextual contingency of the female category and “femaleness” as objects of knowledge (and power) and expose the sexed and gendered body as “totally imprinted by history” (Foucault, 2000: 83). I aim to examine how sex differences and distinctions emerge and what is excluded in their emergence, without presuming categories like “femaleness” to have any cross-contextual reality that would cut across time, place, and circumstance. The focus is instead on the continuities and discontinuities in how femaleness has been discursively constituted. The analysis draws primarily from archival research undertaken at the IOC Olympic Studies Centre archives, the University of Helsinki archives’ Albert de la Chapelle collections, and the Malcolm Ferguson-Smith collections hosted by the University of Glasgow archives and made available by the Wellcome Trust Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics digitised collection. I also consulted IOC,

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IAAF, World Anti-Doing Commission (WADA), and Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) online document libraries and multiple digitised newspaper collections (ProQuest Historical Newspapers, UK Press Online, Time Magazine Online Archives, the Times Digital Archive, Nexis newspaper archive, and Google Newspaper Archive). Building on Foucault (1989) and Jacques Derrida (1995), I reject conceptualisations of archival research as “fact retrieval” whereby the archive would be understood as a “container” for storing facts about past events. Rather, I view archives as cultural phenomena of collective meaning making that embody power relations: archiving, including the choice of what is and is not archived, constitutes the archived events in ways enabling and constraining what information is preserved. The archiving process of inclusion and exclusion is, thus, a process of (re)making, rather than providing direct access to the past. This includes the “sub-archive” that I constructed by bringing together photographs and notes from different collections. The choices I made in delimiting the borders of my sub-archive and the content I have subsequently included in this book reflect my power, as a researcher, to choose what is and is not worthy of note. The next section of this chapter proceeds from the genealogical starting point to offer a contextualising historical background for the book. In so doing, I trace, so to speak, the genealogy of female embodiment prior to the events that subsequent chapters are focused on. My aim in doing so is to provide readers with a historical awareness necessary to make sense of the IOC and IAAF articulations of “femaleness.” This is because the socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender, and the body discussed in the following text both gave rise to and embed the how sex difference has been conceptualised in 20th- and 21st-century international sports.

Socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender, and the body In globally dominant Western and Anglophone epistemologies or theories of knowledge, knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular have been constructed and organised based on a system of binaries. This system enables people to make sense of the world though binary oppositions: a concept or an object of knowledge that is on one side of the binary gains its meaning by being defined against that which is on the other side (V. Kirby, 1997). For example, one of the foregrounding binaries has been the nature/culture binary, where the concept “culture” gains its meaning by being defined against “nature,” so that those things that are not cultural are natural and those things that are not natural are cultural. As Bruno Latour (1993) has argued, these binary divisions, in turn, require that the two sides of the binary are “purified” from each other because binaries only make sense to the extent that the two sides are exclusive of each other (natural things are natural only because they are not cultural). The nature/culture binary forms the basis of many other familiar binaries, including the human/non-human, mind/body, and social/scientific divisions as well as the Anglophone distinction between sex and gender, where “gender” falls

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under “culture” and “sex” under “nature” (Haraway, 1991a). These different binaries are also intertwined with each other. When it comes to the sex/gender distinction, for example, gender has not only been identified with culture but also understood to be a social category and a human characteristic (animals only have sex, not gender). It has been located in the mind, taken to be subject to social and historical change and, as such, an object of social, cultural, and historical analysis. Sex, on the other hand, has been associated with the body, seen as a fixed characteristic that does not change in the face of social and historical developments and as an object of scientific knowledge because it is understood to be a “natural” phenomenon. While sex is additionally internally structured by the female/male binary division, gender is structured by the woman/man (and feminine/masculine) division, which have been understood to exist in a causal relationship to each other. Femaleness and maleness are the foundation based on which individuals are socially classified as women and men, because social gender classifications have been derived from “natural” sex differences. These, in turn, have been associated with the “biological body” (Butler, 1990, 1993). As Foucault (1998) and Thomas Laqueur (1990) have shown, the “biological body” has been the foundation of scientific ways of producing knowledge about the body. The emergence of these scientific epistemologies of embodiment was part of the emergence of the so-called natural sciences focused on living organisms in the 18th and 19th centuries, including biology and modern medicine. Nineteenth-century scientists not only understood sex difference to be a natural biological reality, but also conceptualised it in terms of a dichotomy that rendered the two sexes biologically dimorphic and incommensurable – at least among humans. The binarised framework was re-enforced and shaped by the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the 19th century, which framed the human species as the pinnacle of evolution. It also conceptualised sex dimorphism as a sign of evolutionary progress because sophisticated organisms were seen to demonstrate higher levels of sex differentiation and procreative heterosexuality than less sophisticated organisms (Eckert, 2009). Sophistication was understood to manifest through sex-differentiated reproductive roles between the males and females of a species. The clearest form of this was seen to be the social gender role division between women and men that characterised (19th-century European) human social organisation (Lugones, 2007; Eckert, 2009). In other words, male and female were “purified” from each other, in the Latourian sense, as mutually exclusive biological categories, but this was done in ways foregrounded by evolutionary progress narratives that made pure sex category division a privileged human characteristic. By contrast, unclear reproductive role division and, thus, unclear sex differentiation were associated with “primitive” species lower down on the evolutionary ladder. The effect of these conceptualisations was that among the human species, “the female body,” defined in singular and biological terms, was understood to be “naturally” fundamentally different from “the male body” in ways that also resulted in the medicalisation of female embodiment. In other words, women’s

12

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bodies were framed as a medical problem because women’s reproductive role was understood to be the constitutive condition of female embodiment in ways that made women physiologically weak and fragile. Nineteenth-century theories emphasised that women were vulnerable to ailments such as uterine displacement and pelvic damage that could result from any kind of strenuous physical effort. This, in turn, meant that female bodied were not only ill-suited to physical activities but these activities were outright dangerous for women (Hargreaves, 1994; Vertinsky, 1990). The perception that women were the “weaker sex” also justified curtailing women’s physical activities to protect their (and their offspring’s) health, including by restricting most of women’s socially sanctioned activities to the domestic sphere where their “natural” reproductive roles as mothers and wives were seen to be manifested (Cahn, 1994; Hargreaves, 1994). Biological depictions of the “natural” characteristics of female bodies, such as models of the female skeleton that emphasised attributes like narrow rib cage and wide pelvis (Schiebinger, 2000), were incorporated into anatomy books and clinical practice. They were applied to construct “healthy life” paradigms for women based on curtailment of physical exercise (Hargreaves, 1994; Vertinsky, 1990). Nineteenth-century biological theories about sex dimorphism and women’s bodies were, however, made salient along racial lines in ways that excluded colonised women from the scope of both womanhood and humanity. These theories were not only shaped by Darwinian narratives, but they were also developed and applied in the context of colonial power relations that infused the science of sex difference with a Eurocentric and racialised epistemic and cultural baggage. While “pure” sex dimorphism signalled evolutionary sophistication, what this “purity” entailed was conceptualised in ways that reflected white, middle/upper-class European cultural norms and ideals about appropriate gendered behaviour for men and women. Individuals and groups that did not conform to these norms – most notably, the colonised and racialised “others” of white, western Europe – consequently appeared, to European observers, to be sex(ually) “ambiguous” and thus evolutionarily backward. Colonial imaginaries rendered racialised “others” as pre-cultural embodiments of the kinds of sex(ual) blurring that was seen to belong to human evolutionary past and projected perceived sex(ual) anomalies and deviance onto racialised bodies (Eckert, 2009; McClintock, 1995). Anne McClintock (1995) has shown how racialised women, in particular, were imagined to be militarised (like men) and have monstrously large clitorises bordering on the penis-like. They were seen as failing to exhibit appropriately gendered (human) embodiment and culture and belonging, therefore, to the realm of animality closer to nature. The association of colonised peoples with animality also resulted in imaginaries around the presumed “natural” physicality and “brute” strength of racialised subjects, including women, who were identified with the physicality of the body rather than intellect. This then justified subjecting them to (forced) physical labour to which their bodies were taken to be “naturally” better suited (Miller, 1998). That racialised, especially black female

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bodies seemed suited to hard physical labour appeared to show that “black women clearly did not belong to the weaker sex” (Vertinsky & Captain, 1998: 544). Consequently, the biological theories that medicalised female bodies as frail, vulnerable, and fundamentally different from male bodies in ways that made women’s domestic roles as mothers and wives appear natural did not apply to all females but only to those included under the scope of humanity. Those attributed with a less-than-human status became, in effect, genderless: female and male at best, but not women (mothers, wives, homemakers) and men (fathers, providers, family heads) (Davis, 1981). Colonial imaginaries about racialised people were also associated with and applied to the internal “others” of the colonial metropolis in ways that resulted in a conflation between racial and class difference. The imaginaries through which racialised “others” were associated with physicality and sex(ual) distortion were also applied to the so-called “degenerate” classes of Western Europe, including working classes but also criminals and other socially deviant groups, where “degeneration” was conceptualised in evolutionary terms (McClintock, 1995). Like racialised “others,” the classed “others” of the white European middle/upper-class subject were perceived to be racially atavistic and animalistic “primitives” dwelling, misplaced, at the imperial metropolis (McClintock, 1995). Similarly, racial and sex(ual) “degeneration” theories were extended to the geographic east of Europe, which was considered to be backward, simple, and primitive in contrast with the complex, developed, and cultivated western Europe (Todorova, 1996). These intertwined socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender, and embodiment also foreground how sex and gender binary “hybridity” came to be conceptualised and managed. As Latour (1993) argued, the maintenance of binary distinctions, including those between sex and gender, female and male, and man and woman, require not only binary “purification” to separate the two binary sides, but also the forbiddance of “hybrid” entities that seem to blur the binary. “Purification” implies weeding out the hybrid space where the two sides of the binary merge. Foucault (1998, 2003) has shown how, during the course of the 19th century, biological and medical theories of human sex difference began to conceptualise sex as a problem of “truth.” This means that medical models of femaleness and maleness were geared towards diagnosing individuals’ “true sex” when characteristics of both sexes seemed to be present. These models were built on biological and medical conceptualisations of “normal” and “abnormal,” and “healthy” and “pathological” bodies in relation to sex characteristics, whereby normal and, thus, healthy embodiment was defined as binary female or male, while deviations from this norm were defined as abnormal and pathological. The effect was that “abnormal” bodies could be “corrected” (or normalised) to align with the prescribed binary norms of health, after true sex had been identified and the specific pathology diagnosed. In Latourian terms, this enabled the “purification” of sex categories by conceptualising binary sex as the medical norm and “hybridity” a pathological state that can be “fixed” when needed.

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Introduction

Alice Dreger (1998) has additionally argued that by the late 19th century, medical models located the “truth” of sex in the anatomical structure of gonads, which marked the body in its entirety as either male (through testicular tissue) or female (through ovarian tissue). This so-called Klebsian sex classification system resulted in what Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000: 36–40) called the “hermaphrodite vanishing act” because it eliminated nearly all possibilities of true sex hybridity. It defined all bodies based on gonadal status into one of five categories: the “normal” and “healthy” male or female; male or female pseudo-hermaphroditism; or the very rare true hermaphroditism (requiring both ovarian and testicular tissue), with “pseudo” connoting spurious (or a false) kind of hermaphroditism. In Foucault’s words, henceforth, “everybody was to have one and only one sex” and “as for the elements of other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory” (1980: viii). However, the medical practices of sex category purification were not applied in the same way to all subjects. The Darwinian colonial conceptualisations of sex dimorphism that pre-established some bodies, especially racialised “others,” as inadequately sex and gender differentiated gave rise to what Lena Eckert (2009) called racialised “intersexualization” of colonised (and classed) bodies, which were positioned as (always already) “inter” sex. As Zine Magubane (2014) has noted, scholars have not tended to fully account for the role that colonial discourses played in the medicalisation of “intersex” as an object of scientific knowledge: while an “ambiguously gendered white body needed to be corrected to retain its whiteness,” “an ambiguously gendered black body was seen as confirming the essential biological difference between whites and blacks” (Magubane, 2014: 117, 781). This was because sex and gender role ambiguity was seen as a “natural” signifier of racial difference. During the early to mid-20th century, however, two medical theories emerged that unsettled previous ideas about sex and the body: the hormonal and chromosomal theories of sex. Androgens and oestrogens, seen as male and female sex hormones, respectively, emerged as endocrinological objects of knowledge in the 1930s. They in many ways dislodged sex from specific locations in the body (gonads in particular) and conceptualised it as chemical agency working throughout bodies (Oudshoorn, 1994; Roberts, 2007). While these hormones were initially thought to be sex specific, the discovery that oestrogens were also produced by healthy males and androgens by healthy females led to a shift in dualistic conceptualisations of sex: the failure of “sex” hormones to be sex confined did not destabilise their designation as sex hormones, but it resulted in a new medical model of relative (rather than absolute) sex specificity based on a quantitative system of normal(ised) sex hormone levels for female and male bodies (Oudshoorn, 1994). This enabled the emergence of new pathologies derived from “excessive” or “insufficient” amounts of androgens or oestrogens in females or males, which could be treated based on models of “normal” sex hormone levels defined as healthy and “abnormal” amounts defined as pathological.

Introduction

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While hormonal sex rendered bodily masculinity and femininity fluid and relative, increasing understanding of the X and Y chromosomes by the mid-20th century conversely supported the image of sex difference as unalterably binary. The X and Y chromosomes, conceptualised as “sex chromosomes,” seemed to embody the “hard reality” of sex due to their fixity and stability. They represented what “nature intended” and enabled a genetic conceptualisation of sex where the “intended” sex of ambiguously sexed bodies could be revealed by chromosomes (Richardson, 2013). The chromosomal theory of sex also enabled the consolidation of two great scientific theories of the early 20th century – the chromosomal model of inheritance and hormonal sex model – which in turn enabled the emergence of a new, more comprehensive theory of sex difference. While sex hormones explained how the messages of masculinity and femininity are transported to induce masculinisation or feminisation, chromosomes were established as the initiators and directors of this process. The biological ontology of sex difference was thus erected onto a model that distinguished between genetic sex determination and hormonal sex differentiation (Richardson, 2013). While “normal” female or male embodiment would result if hormones correctly followed chromosomes’ intentions, sex development could go “wrong” due to faulty hormone messaging or genetic “abnormalities.” The new sex development model and concurrent development of related medical diagnostic and treatment frameworks foreground the advent of 20th-century categories of sex abnormality and deviance, still mobilised in diagnostic practice today, each with their own diagnostic criteria and history through which they became “treatable bodies” (Rubin, 2003). “Transsexuality” was recognised in medical literature by the 1950s, distinguishing those seeking gender affirmation surgery from other sex(ual) pathologies. The late 1960s saw the proliferation of clinics offering diagnosis and surgical operations for transsexual patients (King, 1996). Throughout the 20th century, new categories of “hermaphroditism,” to which the term “intersex” was increasingly applied, were also differentiated and defined in accordance with newly identified aetiologies of different conditions. The hormonal and chromosomal sex models enabled their classification into types of (hormonal or chromosomal) abnormality, which were then mobilised to construct treatment frameworks (Feder, 2009; Karkazis, 2008; Karkazis & Feder, 2008). The hegemonic treatment paradigm that emerged by the end of the 1950s reflects and illustrates the normalising system through which pathologies are identified and corrected in relation to norms of “health.” It also illustrates the power of scientific epistemologies in the regulation or “purification” of the sex binary. The paradigm, developed by John Money and colleagues, was based on a desired congruity between external genitalia, the gender of rearing, and gender identity (psychological sense of oneself as woman or man). It prescribed genital surgery at infancy for bodies born with “ambiguous” genitals to “correct” them. This framed surgical intervention as the alteration of “abnormalities” which returns bodies to their “normal” or “natural” state and re-construct (rather than construct) genitalia

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Introduction

that should have been there all along if sex development had taken its natural course (Karkazis, 2008; Kessler, 1998). This paradigm also enabled new diagnostic tools for transsexuality: the key diagnostic criterion and condition for accessing surgical intervention became cross-gender identification, narrated as a sense of being born in the wrong body (Prosser, 1998; Rubin, 2003). In providing a brief history of dominant socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender, and the body in Western epistemologies, I have aimed to historicise sex difference as well as the sex/gender distinction through which sex is positioned as a “natural” or “biological” reality that exists independently of the social and cultural world. The histories I mapped constitute the foregrounding conditions for the 20th-and early 21st-century articulations of sex difference and femaleness that subsequent chapters of this book are focused on. They also show how the “naturalness” of sex difference is, itself, produced through natural scientific discourses that are shaped by the wider social, cultural, and geopolitical context in which science takes place. To theorise these socio-scientific discourses and understandings of sex difference that emerge through them, I build on feminist epistemologies and ontologies of sex, gender, and the body. I map these in the next section, where I also outline the theoretical starting point from which subsequent chapters proceed.

Feminist configurations of sex, gender, and the body The ontology and epistemology of sex difference have been central issues in feminist scholarship, largely because women’s and men’s differently valued social roles and positions have historically been justified on the grounds of presumed “natural” differences between female and male bodies. Since 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir first published the Second Sex, where she argued that “one is not born but, rather, becomes a woman” (2014: 295), the socially constructed reality of gender and, thus, women’s and men’s social positions have been the starting point for much feminist theory and research. For de Beauvoir, women’s historical and social position was not derived from what she called the “biological” attributes of the “human female” but was fashioned socially. To realise her full potential as an individual, de Beauvoir argued that a woman must fight these biological attributes, including menopause, painful childbirth, and the “monthly curse” (2014: 64). In other words, while one might not be born a woman, de Beauvoir seems to have considered that one could, indeed, be born, “biologically,” a female. Despite recognition of the socially constructed realities of womanhood, “femaleness” and the female body have historically occupied central positions in much feminist theory and activism, serving as the unifying theme for women’s emancipation. This has been so particularly in the face of the diverse lived realities that different women actually have, which diverge and intersect around race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other axes of difference in ways that make it difficult to identify what “women” actually have in common socially and politically

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(Crenshaw, 1989). Efforts to ground feminism on female embodiment have resulted in the construction of both conceptual and embodied boundaries around “femaleness” through which shared embodiment could emerge to collate and foreground feminist subjectivities and collectives. As radical feminist Janice Raymond (1994: 110) remarked, “if feminists cannot agree on the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness, then what can we hope to agree on?” The consequence of the construction of these boundaries has been that some subjectivities, collectives, and bodies have been excluded from feminism (Hines, 2010; Stone, 2006; Stryker, 2006). For Raymond, it was transgender women whom she rendered as artificial “others” in opposition to which “authentic” female embodiment could be defined. The aforementioned kinds of Anglophone feminist mobilisations of the sex/ gender distinction have historically sought to resist biological determinism by disentangling social gender classifications from biological bodies to politicise the category “woman” as a cultural one. Yet, the effect of this politicisation, while it may have liberated “women” from biological confines, has been that sex difference and “femaleness” have been left sitting outside the cultural sphere, as “natural” categories to be studied by the natural rather than social sciences. Indeed, when de Beauvoir wrote about the biological constraints of the “human female,” she adopted the language of biology as a scientific discipline without subjecting it to interrogation on its own right. She conflated the material attributes of bodies with scientific discourse about these attributes (Birke, 1999). By the 1990s, however, feminist science studies had formed into a well-established critical endeavour challenging scientific and medical conceptualisations of sex difference as a binary biological reality. Feminist critics demonstrated that gendered and racialised language appears throughout biomedicine, stretching from molecules to organs to conception to the immune system (Birke, 1999; Haraway, 1991b; Hubbard, 1990; Martin, 1991; Oudshoorn, 1994; Spanier, 1995; Stephan, 1993). They showed the world of scientific facts to be “contextual not only in that it depends on who we are and where and when, but also in that it is shaped by where we want our ‘facts’ to take us” (Hubbard, 1990: 15–16). Scientific facts, including about “the biological constraints of the human female,” were demonstrated to be contingent on the scientific discourses through which they were produced – discourses which, in turn, reflect power relations governing how knowledge is produced in the first place. Concurrently, queer, transgender, and intersex scholarship, activism, and social movements had also proliferated and were gaining wider publicity, challenging gendered, sexed, and sexual boundaries. While transgender scholars Leslie Feinberg and Pat Califa had published their Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (1992) and Sex Changes: Politics of Transgenderism (1997), respectively, intersex scholar Cheryl Chase published Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism (1998). Alongside other similar interventions, they called for a re-articulation of culturally intelligible bodies and subjectivities and claimed recognition and empowerment

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Introduction

for sexed and gendered existence transgressing the binary sex and gender system. Relatedly and notably, by the early 1990s, Judith Butler (1990, 1993) had argued that rather than serving to foreground feminism as the foundation, and instead of being the “natural,” “biological” basis from which women and men emerge as socially constructed categories, sex itself is a gendered category. It was not that the state of being female could naturally ground feminism or unify the variously positioned “women” through shared embodiment. Rather, gendered epistemologies, social processes, and practices make the binary female and male categories appear “natural” in the first place: binary sex does not pre-exist as such but is naturalised and materialised, by making it become a material reality. More specifically, Butler (1990) argued that the binary sex and gender system is based on a logic of coherence and continuity between sex, gender, and (sexual) desire: gender is presumed to “follow” from sex and desire is presumed to “follow” from gender, in the sense that females are feminine women who desire men and males are masculine men who desire women. This logic, she argued, begins with the presumption that sexual desire is (dualistically) heterosexual, which, in turn, requires that there be two oppositional feminine and masculine genders, derived from oppositional female and male bodies. Those individuals whose gender seems not to follow from their sex or whose (sexual) desire seems not to correspond with their gender (e.g. trans, intersex, or queer people) consequently appear socially incoherent. Because they do not conform to the logic of continuity, they do not make cultural sense but “appear only as developmental failures or logical impossibilities” (Butler, 1990: 24). Yet, Butler (1990) argued that this “matrix of intelligibility” actually masks the naturalisation of the norms underpinning this logic that regulate gender and sex into a relation of continuity in the first place. Rather than binary feminine and masculine genders being entailed by female and male bodies that exist “naturally,” the social norms that require the existence of two oppositional feminine and masculine genders naturalise sex difference as binary. The binary sex norm, in turn, delimits the kinds of embodiments and morphological possibilities that are socially comprehensible and acceptable. Because sex difference is presumed to exist, naturally and biologically, in a binary female or male state, configurations of sexed embodiment that do not approximate binary femaleness or maleness appear to be “unnatural” or biological anomalies (Butler, 1993). At the same time, the binary norm of sex is, itself, only retained as such because the norm is materialised onto bodies, by being repeatedly “cited” (Butler, 1993). To illustrate, Iain Morland (2001) has argued that the surgical “correction” of intersex genitals requires the existence of norms about “female” and “male” genitals, which can then be “cited” when intersex genitals are re-modelled: one can only mould “ambiguous” genitals to approximate “female genitals,” for example, if one knows what (normal or standard) female genitals look like in the first place. In this way, the female (and male) genital norms are materialised onto bodies by being cited when intersex genitals are surgically (re)constructed. Simultaneously, the citation of binary sex norms in intersex genital surgery suggests that the

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genitals that people in general actually have can only ever be quotations of the ideal archetypes of “male” and “female” genitals that are always already phantasmal: “the endlessly enormous penises, the measurelessly capacious vaginas” and “the infinitely dainty clitorises” based on which surgeons model genital accuracy (Morland, 2001: 365). All genitals quote a normalised genital imaginary (more or less accurately but never fully) which in turn is rendered natural and are modelled in relation to it, sometimes surgically. If one reads with Butler, the citationality of binary sex norms suggests that the normalising medical interventions that have been routinely preformed to “correct” sex “abnormalities” amount to practices of socio-medical sex binary realignment, which are incited in response to embodiments that seem socially incoherent or discontinuous. When an individual fails to embody sex, gender, and desire normatively – by identifying as a woman but failing to appear appropriately feminine or having attributes associated with biological males, for example – her incoherence makes “gender trouble.” However, while the matrix of intelligibility theorised by Butler pertains to continuity between sex, gender, and desire, continuity is also presumed between sex attributes taken to collectively constitute (binarised) female or male embodiment. The chromosomal and hormonal sex models erected by the mid-20th century, combined with Money and colleagues’ congruence paradigm, established a system where hormonally induced sex differentiation is presumed to follow from the instructions provided by “sex” chromosomes. This then results in female or male embodiment accompanied with the appropriate gender identity and genitals. When the “wrong” chromosomes, too high quantities of the “wrong” hormones, or the “wrong” genitals appear on bodies, they incite sex binary realignment practices that may include surgery but also treatments like hormonal therapy intended to bring the bodies back in line with the sex binary. It is, then, not only incongruence between sex, gender, and desire but also sex attributes that appear, inconsistently, on “wrong” bodies, that provoke sex binary realignment. The theoretical basis from which the subsequent chapters of this book proceed builds on and extends Butler’s matrix of intelligibility to centre the gendered logic of continuity and coherence in theorising the aims and implications of gender verification in sport. I conceptualise gender verification as an exemplary sex and gender binary policing apparatus that relies on the presumption that “femaleness” is a natural biological reality from which womanhood and femininity and, thus, athletes’ right to compete in women’s sports follows. This is presumed even though it is the social division of sports into two, mutually exclusive gender or sex categories that requires “femaleness” to be defined in the first place: to verify that athletes competing in women’s sports are actually females, those who undertake gender verification must first have an idea of what “femaleness” amounts to. Because “femaleness” has no natural or biological reality beyond that which is produced through natural scientific discourses, sports regulators must draw from socio-scientific norms around female embodiment – the ideal or archetypical female body – to define “femaleness.”

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Introduction

This suggests that athletes’ gender has been verified based on prevalent and dominant body norms that change over time and are not only gendered but also racialised, classed, and carry colonial legacies. These norms delimit the kinds of embodiments that are socially comprehensible and accepted as “female” enough, which means that athletes competing in women’s sports whose bodies do not approximate “femaleness” in the acceptable way appear incoherent and threaten the boundaries of (normalised and naturalised) female embodiment. By failing to conform, they simultaneously destabilise the boundaries of the female category, the dividing line of the sex binary, and the presumed causal relationship between sexed bodies and the gender categories in which they are positioned. In so doing, they carry an ontological crisis: their failure to embody sex and gender in accordance with the binary system makes visible sex categories’ lack of ontological essence or fixity. Through the upcoming chapters of this book, I will argue that gender verification has been, and continues to be, fundamentally driven by social anxieties over sex and gender binary breakdown that is embodied by these athletes. Gender verification policies and practices erect and secure the boundaries of the female category and, thus, the female/male dividing binary line as a response to the threat of binary instability that the non-conforming athletes represent. They also mandate socio-medical sex binary realignment practices through which nonconforming bodies are “corrected” and the binary norm(s) of sex materialised. The chapters that follow will build on the aforementioned theoretical groundwork to show how the production of binary sex in general and “femaleness” in particular unfold across the history of gender verification. In embedding the book’s arguments within a Butlerian framework, my aim has been to highlight the wider ontological and epistemological questions that the book is engaged with as well as to show what is at stake with gender verification, theoretically and empirically, not just in relation to the sporting context but also in relation to the gendered organisation of society more broadly.

Structure of the book The book moves chronologically from the initiation of gender verification policies to the most recent policies, and each chapter maps the policies, practices, and wider discourses within which they were embedded within a temporal period. While there are important overlaps across the periods, the chapters address different historical developments, providing a contextualising account for each new policy. Individual chapters can thus be read separately as well as together. Chapter 2 charts the 1920s-to-1950s, period when the first gender verification policies were developed and introduced. It shows how these policies were framed by wider cultural and medical norms of femininity that constituted women as the “weaker sex” susceptible to physical “strain.” These norms collided with emerging hormone theories of sex instability, at the same time as women’s athletics was gaining increasing popularity. The bodies of female athletes who excelled in “strenuous” sports were seen as suspiciously male-like or even hermaphroditic,

Introduction

21

while some were understood to be undergoing hormonally induced “sex changes” or “metamorphoses.” These intertwined phenomena motivated the introduction of gender verification, based first on physical examinations in cases of gender “protest,” and later on femininity certification by local physicians. Chapter 3 explores how Cold War geopolitical divisions formed the background for the introduction of compulsory on-site gender verification for all female athletes. It charts the emergence of a discursive separation between “pure” versus “polluted” bodies, which was symbolically mapped onto female athletes’ bodies. While “purity” was associated with Western bodies and politics, “pollution” was associated with communist ones. Suspicions about communist women’s perceived “male-likeness” intertwined with suspicions about state sponsored steroid doping in the Soviet bloc, giving rise to a conflation between political corruption and embodied pollution associated with doping and sex “hybridity.” The IAAF instituted stricter gender verification procedures in 1966 to protect Western notions of “pure” femaleness against alterative possibilities embodied by communist women. These took the form of so-called “naked parades,” requiring female athletes to parade nude in front of medical panels to unveil their bodies’ “naked truth” to IAAF officials. Chapter 4 examines the IOC on-site gender verification program that replaced the “naked parades” in 1968. It was also motivated by Cold War concerns but additionally shaped by an increasingly medico-scientific model of sports, as scientific approaches were becoming integrated into the heart of sport governance. This was epitomised by the creation of the IOC’s Medical Commission tasked with “sex control” and “doping control,” the former of which was built on medical models of diagnosis around sex “normality” and pathology: female athletes’ “sex chromosomes” were first screened and cases with “abnormal” results then sent for further examinations and, if necessary, for corrective treatment to re-align “abnormality” with the medicalised sex binary. This represented a shift towards framing sex categories explicitly as medical categories, with bodies failing to conform to medical norms being conceptualised as pathological. Chapter 5 charts the emergence of “gender fraud” or “masquerade” concerns during 1970s and 1980s sport, and how these resulted into genitalia being centred as the foundation of sex difference by the early 1990s. This was contextualised, firstly, by broader sexual and gender liberation politics. As they speared into sport, transsexual women participating in women’s competitions became a visible and controversial issue. Secondly, scientists were disputing the use of chromosome screening for gender verification, because it could screen out some (intersex) women who have XY chromosomes while enabling some men with chromosomal abnormalities to “pass” as females. These issues became tangled in ways seen to threaten the “authenticity” of femaleness. The threat was associated especially with the possible presence of penises in women’s sporting spaces. A new definition of sex was consequently coined where “a man has a penis and a scrotum, a woman does not,” and the IAAF begun using “health and gender examinations” requiring visual observation of women’s genitalia.

22

Introduction

Chapter 6 examines the move to gender verification performed only on “gendered suspicions” athletes, contextualised by shifting racialised geopolitics of sport during the 1990s. As China became dominant in post–Cold War international sports, old concerns over gender-suspect Eastern bodies were transferred onto Chinese athletes in ways that merged with racialised imaginaries about Asian women. This was re-enforced by concurrent revelations about state-sponsored steroid programs in former East Germany, which seemed suspiciously similar to the Chinese “behind-closed-doors” sports system. Past suspicions about “hypermuscular” female athletes were re-framed and mapped onto Chinese bodies in ways foregrounded by racialised gender norms that pre-established some bodies as more easily gender suspect than others. The consequence was that bodies identified as gender suspicious via suspicion-based gender verification have disproportionately been racialised bodies from the Global South, who became the most significant “other” in early-21st-century women’s sport. Chapter 7 explores how androgenic or “male sex” hormones were erected as the foundational substance for regulating “femaleness” in sport. It examines the motivations for new regulations introduced by the IAAF and IOC in 2011 and 2012, respectively, that established androgen thresholds for women’s competitions. Focused on “female hyperandrogenism,” the regulations implicitly conflated hyperandrogenism with steroid doping and relied on the assumption that androgens are the essence of both sex difference and men’s sporting advantage over women. The chapter charts the scientific controversies that erupted around these regulations’ empirical basis. It analyses the introduction of new IAAF regulations in 2018, which were equally controversial but shifted the exclusive emphasis from androgens to a framework of sex difference that combined hormones with chromosomes. The chapter ends with a consideration of the most recent regulations’ reliance of contested notions of “biological femaleness” to delineate the boundaries of the female category. The concluding chapter returns to the overarching themes and arguments of the book, charting continuities and discontinuities in how femaleness has been defined and gender verified. It shows how defining and regulating binary gender or sex categories based on sex difference is a circular process driven by the unstable and plural nature of sex and gender. The chapter is, however, focused as much on the present and future of gender verification and sex categories in sports as it is focused on the past: rather than constituting an ending point for the making of the female body in sports, it considers on-going debates and developments around gender verification, the possible futures of sex categories in sports, and the future of competitive sports in general.

Notes 1 She published the e-mail exchange via the digital library platform Scribd, which can be accessed online via www.scribd.com (accessed 20 December 2016). 2 The CrossFit Games’ transgender inclusion policy was amended in 2019, after which transgender men can compete with other men as long as their gender is officially

Introduction

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10

23

recognised and matches the gender in which they live their everyday lives. Transgender women must additionally lower their testosterone level below 10 nmol/L 12 months prior to competing and maintain that level as long as they compete in order to be considered for eligibility (CrossFit Inc., 2019). The IOC approved the inclusion of mixed relays in 4 × 400 m running, 4 × 100 m swimming, and the triathlon for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic program (IOC, 2017). The earliest academic journal article I found was published in 1969 (Tachezy, 1969). There are, of course, many articles that do not reproduce the narrative patterns I discuss. Additionally, many articles reproduce some common narratives and cases from the canon of gender frauds but not others. My focus here, however, is on those narratives that are widely reproduced in the relevant literature as a whole. The earliest record of gender verification almost certainly refers to Kinuye Hitomi, who was the only Japanese woman competitor at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. A 1936 Los Angeles Times article discussed a case concerning “a Japanese girl in Amsterdam, where the investigating committee was out two hours before it decided the predominant sex” (“Separate Olympics for Sexes in 1940 Planned,” 1936: A9), implying Hitomi was subjected to (a thorough) gender examination in Amsterdam. The earliest stories about Ratjen’s “gender fraud” occurred in newspapers, which reported that the IAAF belatedly “gave a British woman a world high jump record today – 18 years after the jump – upon finding that the former record holder was a man” (18-Year Error, 1957: C6). In 1966, Time magazine gave a dramatic overtone to Ratjen’s story by claiming that 19 years after setting the record, “Dora turned up as Hermann, a waiter in Bremen, who tearfully confessed that he had been forced by the Nazis to pose as a woman ‘for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany’” (Track & Field: Preserving la Difference, 1966). This Time news article is cited by several scholars as a source for claims that are made about Ratjen. It is also likely to be the reason why the name “Hermann” is repeatedly albeit incorrectly attributed to Ratjen. According to a 1957 news article, the IAAF corrected the Ratjen-related records only in the late 1950s and not “earlier because of confusion caused by the war” (High-Jump She Is a He: So Dorothy Gets a World Record, 1957: 3). There are, of course, exceptions, the most noteworthy of which are Vanessa Heggie (2010, 2014) and Lindsay Pieper (2016). For example, one scholar (Ferez, 2012) confuses “facts” about Stephens and Walsh, implying that it was Stephens who was autopsied, while two scholars tell both the Ratjen “male masquerade” story and another story about “a 1938 world record holder in high jump who was barred from competition when it was discovered that she had both female and male genitalia” (Kirby & Huebner, 2002: 36). The latter seems to be a combination of “facts” about Ratjen and Walsh merged together to create a new gender fraud case.

Chapter 2

Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s

This chapter explores the early history of gender verification in competitive international sports and in athletics in particular, focusing on the 1930s context and surrounding decades where the first gender verification policies were introduced. Building on the historical background that was developed in the first chapter, I here map the medicalised conceptualisations of female embodiment that shaped sport governance during the first half of the 20th century. In particular, notions of women as the “weaker sex” and femaleness as a kind of physical “handicap” susceptible to dangerous physical “strains” endured but were also becoming contested by women athletes who began to participate in competitive sports in increasing numbers. This also coincided with the emergence of hormonal theories of sex instability that rendered binary sex difference ontologically more volatile than before. In the context of women’s sports, and especially in women’s athletics, these phenomena became discursively entangled by the 1930s, which gave rise to concerns that some female athletes were being excessively masculinised to the extent that they appeared to be “abnormal” or even hermaphroditic. Some seemed so masculinised that they were understood to be actually changing or “metamorphosing” into men. While “normal” or “natural” female embodiment continued to be seen as too frail to endure the physical “strains” that sports were presumed to entail, women’s increasing participation in competitive sports in general and athletics in particular meant that it became apparent that some female bodies could (and, indeed, did) bear the strains involved. Against the backdrop of gendered and medicalised body norms at the time, these females disproportionally appeared to be gender suspect and abnormally or unnaturally male-like. This perception was reinforced by the new hormonal theories of sex, which seemed to provide an explanation for the masculinisation of female (athletes’) bodies, by suggesting that it could be hormonally driven. When newspapers reported that some former female track and field athletes were undergoing (hormonally induced) “sex changes” and becoming men, the IAAF decided that a provision should be made for physical examination of female competitors’ bodies in case there was a “protest” concerning gender. This provision was later supplemented by a mandate for “femininity certificates” signed by medical professionals.

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The first part of the 20th century has received much less academic attention in relation to the history of gender verification than later decades (however, notable exceptions include Heggie, 2010, 2014; Pieper, 2016). In what follows, I show not only that gender verification policies have been in place since 1937, but also that the first policies shed important light on how gender verification has, from the beginning, been motivated by concerns over sex and gender binary breakdown. These concerns were embodied by those female categorised athletes who challenged and transgressed the normalised, naturalised, and medicalised boundaries that had been drawn around female embodiment. They represented the broader ontological and epistemological instabilities that were facing binarised sex categories at the time. The result was that bodily constraints around “femaleness” were written into policy.

“The peculiar awkwardness of women’s efforts” The founder of the modern Olympic movement,1 Pierre de Coubertin, built his formative vision of the Olympic Games on ideals of masculine prowess that was demonstrated in sporting competition where success was determined purely by individuals’ “physical superiority” and “muscular potentialities” (de Coubertin, 1956: 53). Such competition, for de Coubertin, was not suitable for women. Rather, the “true” Olympic athlete was gendered male, while women’s role should have been “that of crowning the champions” (1956: 54). Indeed, de Coubertin was adamant that, in the Olympics, women “should not seek the limelight!” (1956: 54). De Coubertin’s ideas about the role of women in sport were shared by many of his contemporaries, and they were foregrounded by broader conflations of athleticism and masculinity. As I noted in the introduction, sport historians have extensively documented the naturalised connection between male embodiment, athleticism, and sporting prowess as well as the association of female bodies with athletic inferiority (Cahn, 1994; Griffin, 1998; Hargreaves, 1994, 2000; Lenskyj, 1986; Smith, 1998; Vertinsky, 1990). Since the beginning of the 19th century, conceptualisations of female bodies as frail and women as the “weaker sex” had been central in navigating the nature and value of women’s physical capabilities (Hargreaves, 1994; Vertinsky, 1990). Medical models of “healthy” exercise for women centred on moderation and curtailment of physical activities, which was motivated by fears over reproductive damage to women’s bodies that was thought to result from “strenuous” physical activities. As Patricia Vertinsky (1987, 1990) has documented, women were understood to be victims of their reproductive apparatus and especially mensuration, which was considered to be a form of reoccurring disability that rendered women not only frail and weak but also “eternally wounded.” However, the frailty and disability that these models presumed connoted white middle- and upper-class women who did not undertake physical labour. Indeed, it was the white, middle- and upper-class female body that was envisioned as the “weaker sex” and made into an object of medical(ised) protectionism (Cahn, 1994).

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This protectionism largely took the form of biological determinism based on reproductive role differentiation, which was enforced particularly strongly in the context of sports that were perceived as especially physically demanding, such as athletics (Vertinsky, 1990). In the words of one late 1930s observer, “science has proved conclusively that girls are unsuited to athletics,” among other things because their “lung power is reduced considerably by tendency for full hips and narrow shoulders,” and “it has been noted by many scientific observers that feminine muscle development interferes with motherhood” (Sharpe, 1938: 29). These ideas endured well into the 20th century (Vertinsky, 1990). As late as the 1950s, one medical observer considered that A woman is built physically different from a man for a purpose, namely childbearing. The trunk of a normal woman’s body is proportionately longer than her limbs; her hips are much wider and amply padded with superfluous fat; her pelvic bones are set at a shallower angle and are loosely bound and consequently are under poorer control – hence the peculiar awkwardness of women’s efforts. The lungs and heart are comparatively smaller, definitely handicapping a woman in exercise requiring speed and endurance. Finally the muscles are shorter, lighter and not built for the strenuous exertions necessary in athletics. (Bilik, n.d.)2 While such conceptualisations of female embodiment were by no means unchallenged, the challenges that were expressed in public discourses tended to underline the importance of preserving female athletes’ heteronormative femininity and the centrality of motherhood for their identities despite athletics participation: “women’s athletics should be an all-feminine affair. Athletic wives know that” (Benham, 1938: 25). During the first part of the 20th century, however, these conceptualisations had also become disputed by some women physicians, women’s sport organisations, and women athletes who were taking part in competitive sport in increasing numbers (Hargreaves, 1994; Vertinsky, 1990). This was especially so in sports perceived to be less strenuous, more “feminine,” and thus more appropriate for women, such as swimming, gymnastics, and tennis, where women’s presence was increasingly tolerated by the 1930s (Hargreaves, 1994). Women’s entry into athletics was more problematic, because it ignited gendered anxieties over the erosion of clearly differentiated physical (and social) male and female spheres of life grounded on naturalised and embodied sex differences. This was because, as Susan Cahn (1994: 114) has argued, athletics had a particularly masculine image. It featured power and speed unmediated by equipment, teamwork or complicated rules. Thinly clad running, throwing, and jumping athletes appeared to demonstrate “naked” athletic prowess as they exhibited their strained faces and muscles for an audience entranced by elemental human exertion.

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In 1922, the Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI), directed by the pioneering women’s sport activist Alice Milliant, begun sponsoring the Women’s World Games (WWGs), which also highlighted international athletics competitions for women (Cahn, 1994; Lenskyj, 2016). The prevailing image of athletics, however, made this appear not only inappropriate but also dangerous and even unnatural for members of the “weaker sex,” who should not have been able to endure the kinds of physical strains involved for athletics. Indeed, this image functioned to largely empty the sport from white middle-and upper-class women. Yet, the WWGs also incited the flow of (limited amounts of) organisational and social support for women’s athletics in both black and white working-class communities, with the result that it gathered some popularity among working-class women especially in the United States (Chan, 1994). This, in turn, had the effect of reinforcing popular perceptions of women’s athletics, and the women who participated in it, as inappropriately masculine both socially and physiologically, in ways intertwined with classed and racialised conceptualisations of working-class women engaged in physical labour as unfeminine (Chan, 1994). This stood in stark contrast with the appropriately feminine “frailty” of the middle/upper-class woman, who was understood to require protection from physical “strain” to safeguard her “health.” The idea of “strain” was central enough to merit elaboration. It was attached, in particular, to what was perceived as “excessive” amounts and kinds of physical efforts seen as “abnormal” or “unnatural” for (appropriately feminine) female bodies. As phrased by one late 1930s observer, when it comes to women, “abnormal exercises of the muscles . . . tend to disfigure . . . to a more or less permanent degree” (Wooldridge, 1932: 15). Another made it abundantly clear that “IF YOU HAVE TO TRY TOO HARD YOU HAVE TO STRAIN. AND STRAIN MEANS DAMAGE” (Sharpe, 1938: 29, original capitals). Combined with the image of athletics as an “elemental form of human exertion,” the medicalisation of “strain” not only made women’s athletics seem inappropriate and unnatural when viewed in the light of medicalised feminine body norms. It also (and consequently) meant that those women who participated in athletics, and especially those who excelled in it, disproportionately appeared gender suspect. They transgressed cultural imaginaries around what “normal” gendered and sexed embodiment was taken to imply for women, because athletics was supposed to be abnormal for the appropriately gendered female body. These women consequently easily came to be perceived as suspiciously “male-like,” which then undermines their status as women in ways that were reinforced by the fact that they were also disproportionately working-class. Concerns over “strain” were also shared by several women’s sport organisations whose politics differed from those of Milliant and the FSFI. The Women’s Division of the US National Amateur Athletic Federation, for example, was strongly opposed to women’s sports competitions in general and the inclusion of women’s competitions within the Olympic program in particular on the grounds that competitive sports offered “opportunity for possible over-strain in preparation for and during the Games themselves” (Women’s Division, 1929). To avoid

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strain, they advocated “adequate medical examination and medical follow-up advice” as a basis of women’s sport participation (Women’s Division, 1929). Similarly, the Women’s Athletics section of the American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (AAHPER) contended that women’s participation “in athletics must depend upon a comprehensive and reliable evaluation of the health status of the participant,” taking into account females’ “general organic normality” (AAHPER, 1937: 4). Relatedly, they argued for “an initial and periodic health examination by a qualified physician” (AAHPER, 1937: 19). These organisations tended to operate under a women-centred frame where “playing girls’ games, under girls’ rules, with women coaches, for the sake of enjoyment of sport” (Women’s Division, 1929) was the overarching objective. They were motivated by politicised aims to construct a separate framework for women’s sport in opposition to “masculine” and male-controlled competitive sport (Hargreaves, 1994; Lenskyj, 2016). Their complicity with the medicalisation of the female sporting body, however, lent support to the normalisation of female embodiment as a physical handicap of disability, whereby the “organic normality” of women’s bodies was constituted not only as always already the weaker sex, but also as being in perpetual danger from strain.3 Social and medical discourses around strain were additionally intertwined with feminine body aesthetics, in turn navigated through Eurocentric, white, and middle/upper-class notions of beauty. The gendered aesthetic hierarchy constructed by sportswriter Paul Gallico in the late 1930s is exemplary. Gallico considered that “unattractive girls are usually comparatively good sports. Pretty girls are not” (1938: 242). Female track and field athletes, in particular, were, in his view, “flat-chested, most of them,” and “can wear those bias-cut shorts and shirts because they are not built or muscled like women” as “only a man can wear a running-suit to advantage – or a woman constructed like a man” (1938: 235–236). Indeed, he concluded, they are a “strange, almost fantastic crew, all right, these muscle molls” (1938: 236). The “ugliness” of track and field female athletes’ bodies was, for Gallico and others, defined through their (presumed) masculinity. Attributes associated with maleness (flat chest, visible muscles, etc.) carried their (hetero)normative unattractiveness, in some cases in the “extreme” so as to render their bodies freak-like in their blurring of gendered boundaries. Comments like Gallico’s drew from a discursive entanglement between social and medical concerns over female strain and over the loss of feminine aesthetics in ways that co-constituted women’s athletics as simultaneously “ugly” or un-aesthetic as well as masculinising and harmful for female bodies. In 1928, mainly as a result of persistent lobbying on the part of the FSFI and Milliat (Lenskyj, 2016), the women’s 800-meter race was included in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic program, and the social anxieties that resulted from this illustrate how medical(ised) and aesthetic ideas around female embodiment were intertwined. After the race, several newspapers reported that the female 800-meter runners had suffered great strain from their efforts to cover this distance, and many had collapsed in exhaustion or burst into tears at the end of the race. Even

Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s

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two decades later, one observer reflected on the event, and on women’s athletics in general, with abhorrence: At . . . the Amsterdam Olympics women were asked to race at the 800 meters. In this instance several of them floundered at the turf in agonizing distress. There is . . . certainly nothing of aesthetic merit in women attempting athletics. Their overall efforts are grotesque to say the least. When the ladies . . . come out to sweat, strain and contort their features into Medusan masks, I frequently left my seat to obtain a soothing cup of tea. (Daley, 1948: 27) Public perceptions of the 800-meter race coupled concerns over “excessive” strain with loss of feminine beauty, in ways that constituted women’s athletics as an abhorrent, gender boundary violating spectacle in need of curtailing. Indeed, after the Amsterdam Olympics, the women’s 800-meter event was cut from the Olympic program, and only reinstated in 1960. It is noteworthy that a member of the IAAF Women’s Commission, Dr Messerli, commented in retrospect that as he “was judging this particular event,” he could “therefore certify that there was nothing wrong with [the athletes], they burst into tears thus betraying their disappointment at having lost the race, a very feminine trait!” (1952: 10–11). Despite this observation, Messerli was opposed to women’s athletics competitions and argued that restricting them is “all for the good, seeing that woman has a noble task in life namely to give birth to healthy children . . . we must avoid everything which can be injurious to her health and harm her as a potential mother” (1952: 16). While noting that female competitors in international athletics were endowed with “physique slightly masculine” (1952: 11), Messerli considered that even women who were not “handicapped by too full a bosom” should not be allowed to take part in events like long distance races as “these feats of endurance” are “too strenuous for women” (1952: 13). The medicalisation of female bodily capability and its coupling with feminine beauty ideals foregrounded and contextualise the emergence of gendered social and medical anxieties around “strenuous” women’s sports, and those who participated in them, in the first part of the 20th century. In the 1930s, cultural and medical imaginaries around female track and field athletes as abnormally masculinised or even “freakish” became intertwined with emerging endocrinological theories around hormonal sex fluidity. This fluidity seemed to enable some female athletes to undergo hormonally induced “sex changes” or “metamorphoses.”

Sex changes, metamorphoses, and hormonal sex instability The previously described cultural and medical imaginaries around women in sport also became entangled with the emergence of the hormonal model of sex difference, which rendered bodily masculinity and femininity more unstable than before

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Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s

in ways that were both popularised and re-interpreted by the press. As I discussed in the introduction, in the 1930s, pioneering endocrinologists introduced a quantitative theory of sex and the body which implied relative rather than absolute sex specificity (Oudshoorn, 1994). “Femininity” and “masculinity” as binary characteristics of “female” and “male” were no longer seen as mutually exclusive. Rather, female bodies could have or develop masculine or male-like characteristics and male bodies feminine or female-like characteristics due to fluctuations in so-called “internal secretions,” which later came to be termed “hormones.” According to hormonal theories of sex, it was the relative quantities of what were conceptualised as “sex hormones” that determined the predominance of masculine and feminine characteristics on bodies (Oudshoorn, 1994). This, in turn, enabled the emergence of new medical realities like the hormonally masculinised or “virilised” female, which were used to explain masculine characteristics on females. The hormonal model gave rise to what Lennox Broster (1939), a prominent specialist in endocrine surgery at the London Charing Cross Hospital, called the “clinical study of sex changes.” By the early 1930s, Broster had studied “several cases of women in whom male secondary sexual characteristics have appeared,” including broadening of the shoulders and increased muscle development (1931: 743). Based on his studies, he concluded that these kinds of “sex changes” “more commonly occur after puberty, when the secondary sex characteristics appear,” which suggested to him “that the cause remains inherent but latent, and can be activated in later life during times of endocrine stress” (1939: 925–926). He also surmised that “the masculinization of the female is a far more common event than the feminization of the male” due to “the comparative instability of the female sex” (1939: 925). It is important that the idea of sex change, as it was understood and applied by Broster and his contemporaries, did not have the connotations of transgender/ sexuality to which the term attaches today (see also Meyerowitz, 2002). Indeed, it would be misleading to project the concept’s later uses to describe the 1930s context. Rather, the notion of sex change referred to a form of “latent” masculinity or femininity that lay dormant but could be initiated by hormonal “stresses” that incited a change of sex. The change in question was disproportionately associated with the masculinisation of female bodies and it was portrayed as arising, almost spontaneously, from within the body itself, which held bisexual potentiality due to hormonal sex instability. The hormonal theories around sex difference were not confined to the scientific circles, but they were also popularised and (re)interpreted by the press, including by sports journalists. According to the American Physical Culture magazine, for example, All the old landmarks are going, nothing is static, everything flows. Old dreams and old nightmares become realities. . . . Sex is no longer immutable . . . No man is 100 percent male, no woman 100 percent female. . . . Each sex carries within itself the potentialities of the other. (Wickets, 1937: 16)

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Building on but adding a sensationalising tone to scientific depictions, 1930s newspapers portrayed ideas about latent masculinity in female bodies as a potentiality which could occasionally break through or be brought to the surface by (hormonal) disturbances. It could “sometimes [happen] that a normal girl suddenly begins to acquire virile features” because “there is no such thing as absolute sex . . . being male or female is not a matter of one element completely excluding the other, but rather of one element dominating the other” (“Medicine: Change of Sex,” 1936). This was taken to mean that “the slightest variation, the slightest derangement, may, consciously or unconsciously, anatomically or psychically, affect the direction of the sex instinct and constitution” (Wickets, 1937: 83, 16). Notably, new stories about sex change cases disproportionately involved former female athletes. Indeed, Physical Culture added that “recently the astonishing news made the rounds that science had actually succeeded in changing the gender of two female athletes” (Wickets, 1937: 83, 16). This story was part of a series of similar 1930s news stories that appeared in British and American newspapers, reporting spectacular(ised) cases of “sex changes” involving women athletes suddenly changing into men (see also Oram, 2011; Tebbutt, 2015). The same stories were covered by multiple newspapers and were often described as “metamorphoses” in ways that connected the sex changes with the new theories around sex instability, whereby a process of sex metamorphosis arising from the body itself was complemented or completed with surgical assistance. While these stories often mentioned that some (usually unspecified) surgical operations were performed for the sex change cases, such operations tended to be portrayed as supporting a change that was already underway anyway. The stories nearly always made reference to the metamorphosing athletes’ sporting careers, particularly in relation to masculinity-connoting sports like athletics in ways that offered athletic participation as a contextualising feature of the metamorphoses. The effect was that these narratives associated the metamorphoses with women’s sport and athletics in particular, in ways that suggested that the “stresses” involved might initiate the surfacing of latent masculinity. This association, in turn, made sense in the 1930s context where women who participated and excelled in masculinity-connoting sports were seen as already abnormally “male-like.” The most widely reported sex change stories concerned British athlete Mary/ Mark Weston and Czechoslovakian athlete Zdeňka Koubková/Zdeněk Koubek, both of whom had competed in women’s athletics. In 1936, newspapers reported that Weston, who had won several women’s titles and represented Britain in the Olympics and the WWGs, had experienced a “metamorphosis into masculinity” and changed their name to Mark (“Medicine: Change of Sex,” 1936). In an interview for the Reading Eagle, said Weston: I always imagined I was a girl until 1928. Then, competing in the world championships at Prague Czechoslovakia, I began to realize that I was not normal and had no right to compete as a woman. But I only had the courage

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to see a doctor this year, when a London specialist said I ought to undergo two operations. (“Girl Who Became Man Tells of Metamorphosis,” 1936: 5) According to newspapers, the London specialist in question was Broster, who had performed the operations “to complete Mary Weston’s metamorphosis into masculinity,” apparently to supplement a pre-existing sex change process that had already been underway (“Medicine: Change of Sex,” 1936). Koubek, on the other hand, had won the women’s 800-meter race in the 1934 WWGs and set the 800-meter world record in 1934, which, according to the IAAF, was later “stricken from the record book after it was determined that Koubková was a man” (Hymans & Matrahazi, 2015: 264). Coinciding with Weston’s story in 1936, several newspapers reported that Koubek had experienced a sex change aided by “operations which converted her from a slender twenty-one-year-old woman athlete into a young man” (Reunter, 1936: 8). Newspaper depiction of Weston’s and Koubek’s sex changes reflected the broader narratives of sex instability, and nearly all made reference to their backgrounds in athletics, sometimes accompanied with pictures of them performing sporting feats that showed their athletic bodies in full swing. This emphasis on athleticism worked to contextualise the metamorphoses in ways that made their athletic backgrounds appear as an explanation for the masculinisation. It gave the impression that masculinisation had been incited by participation in athletics or that this participation had “awakened” masculinity which was now surfacing in response to related physical “stress,” which in turn was framed by contemporary discourses of athletic prowess being both unnatural for female bodies and itself a masculine sign. Especially pertinent is Koubek’s success in the 800-meter race, which was considered to be so strenuous for female bodies that it had been cut from the Olympic program after the Amsterdam Olympics. Athletic prowess and interest in sports was also taken by clinicians as a supporting characteristic for access to surgical aid to complete the sex change process: for Broster, Weston’s desire to “play men’s games, such as football” and him having “competed in the Olympic Games, throwing the discus” was evidence of masculinisation intense enough to justify surgery (1938: 48).4 Depictions of the metamorphoses were also connected with late 19th and early 20th century theories of “inversion” advanced by prominent sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. The notion of “inversion” in relation to female categorised individuals did not separate gender identity and sexual identity but rather co-constituted masculine identification, masculine behaviours, and sexual desire for women as (pathological) inversion of sexual and gendered instincts. Athleticism and aptitude for masculinity connoting sports was often included among “inverted” behaviours for female categorised subjects (Taylor, 1998). Notably, news about Weston’s metamorphosis were supplemented with news about his marriage to Alberta Bray, “who for years has been his particular friend” (“Man Who Was Once a Girl,” 1936: 20). Weston’s attraction to her was also cited by Broster (1938: 48) as evidence of Weston’s underlying “male sexual instinct.”

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Furthermore, albeit decades after Koubek’s sex change, a medical report was published about an athlete patient who is very likely to have been Koubek (Tachezy, 1969).5 This report used the case of the said patient as an empirical basis to argue against the participation of “abnormal” individuals in women’s sport competitions. It considered the patient’s “physical efficiency” as abnormal for a female body and took the patient to be proof that the sporting prowess of female “individuals of markedly masculine type” is “conditioned, as a rule, by sexual glands of the other sex, the hormonal influence of which modifies, in course of life, the organism towards the other sex arrangement” (Tachezy, 1969: 119). Thus, it concluded that “the performances attained in contest by such individuals cannot be regarded as criteria for top performances of normal healthy women” (Tachezy, 1969: 119). This implied that the high performance levels of athletes like Koubek were out of reach for “normal” women and explained, rather, by pathological embodied masculinity induced by “male” hormones. This explanatory framework not only emerged out of, and supported, the broader discourses that constituted female bodies as constitutionally too frail for “strenuous” sports, but it also endured for decades after the stories of Koubek and Weston were first reported. While most of the sex change news were published in the late 1930s, some cases appeared as late as in the 1950s. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1952 that Lea Caurla, “French champion girl sprinter,” had transformed into Leon: “the transformation of Lea, who was born apparently a girl, to Leon happened over a period of years until in 1948, he learned that he was in fact a man. . . . Ultimately he had an operation that made the change of sex final” (“Athlete, 25, Changes Sex,” 1952). The sex change stories in general and those about Weston and Koubek in particular due to their wide distribution by multiple newspapers reached the awareness of influential sport regulators. The most notable of them was the president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, who later became the president of the IOC. Brundage learned about the sex change cases through the press and considered them deeply troubling, to the extent that he used them as a justification to argue for the introduction of physical examinations for female athletes in the Olympics. Such examinations, he considered, were needed to ensure that athletes competing in women’s sports were completely – that is 100% – female. In August 1936, newspapers reported that Brundage had recommended that all women athletes entered in the Olympics be subjected to a thorough physical examination to make sure they were 100% female. Reason: two athletes who recently competed in European track events as women were later transformed into men by sex operations. (“Sport: Olympic Games,” 1936) Such reference to percentages of femaleness or femininity only makes sense in a context of sex flexibility where femaleness (and maleness) can manifest in degrees across bodies. Indeed, Weston’s and Koubek’s own descriptions of their

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sex changes in many ways lent support to this idea. Weston noted to a journalist, for example, that he had begun to realise that he was “not normal and had no right to compete as a woman” and that he had begun “withdrawing from athletics” because he felt that his participation in women’s events “was unfair to women competitors, who undoubtedly were 100 per cent feminine” (Bronner, 1936: 8). Weston’s sense of himself as having no right to compete with women as well as Brundage’s recommendations for physical examinations are centrally contextualised by the discursive opposition between “normal” (i.e. feminine and frail) female embodiment and “abnormal” or sex binary blurring embodiment, viewed through the lens of hormonal theories of sex. The sex-metamorphosing athletes embodied abnormality as “excessively” high degree of masculinity that was surfacing to the extent that females were perceived to be actually changing into men. It was not, however, only cases of fully fledged sex change that signalled troubling masculinisation of female athletes’ bodies. The popular perception that some women athletes “looked more like men” was taken, in combination with the sex change news stories, to imply that there was a “man-woman problem” in women’s sport (“Women Athletes Tackle the ‘Man-Woman’ Problem,” 1936: 7). Sport regulators and observers also made reference to the presence of “borderline” bodies in women’s competitions, some of whom appeared to embody sexed borderlands to the extent that they seemed to be “hermaphroditic.”

Hermaphrodites, monstrosities, and sex borderlines In June 1936, Brundage sent a letter to the IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour to support his recommendation that physical examinations should be introduced for women’s Olympic competitions. Brundage’s letter had been provoked by a correspondence he had received from an American sports observer. Wrote Brundage: The following letter recently received by me prompts me to write to you on a subject which seems to me to require the attention of the I.O.C. as well as the various federations involved: “As an interested sports fan and one who upholds the participation of feminine athletes in athletics I feel – [name removed] has been allowed to take part in a field where she (?) doesn’t belong. I saw and spoke to her when she took part in an exhibition meet here. Her deep bass voice, her height and 10½ inch shoes surely proclaim her a border-line case if there ever was one. I feel she has never put forth her best efforts in the events because if she did, the entire public would take a great deal more notice. Judging from her past performance she will, without a doubt, be a member of the United States Olympic team and if this is permitted the normal American girl will certainly be misrepresented. Something should be done to prevent this and rules should be made to keep the competitive games for normal feminine girls and not monstrosities.” I don’t know whether hermaphrodites are as common today as they evidently were two thousand years ago judging from the many statues which

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appear in museums of classical art, but I do know that the question of the eligibility of various female (?) athletes in several sports has been raised because of apparent characteristics of the opposite sex. (Brundage, 1936, parenthesised question marks in original) Brundage was not alone among sports officials in his concern over the possible presence of borderline “hermaphroditic” bodies in women’s competitions. During a late 1940s meeting among international sport officials concerning women’s participation in the Olympic Games,6 a participant named Norman Cox made the following remark: One thing the fathers of the Olympics overlooked was making provision for competition among hermaphrodites. . . . Certainly the “child-bearing” type of woman – large or largeish breasts, wide hips, knocked knees, and so forth – is under a handicap when up against the hermaphrodite, even in swimming. And how normal women are to be protected against such handicap except through the institution of anatomical examination is beyond me. (“Competitions for Women,” n.d.) Cox’s remark had been preceded by another participant suggesting that “the participation of feminine competitors should be restricted to sport essentially feminine” as spectators “would be spared the unaesthetic spectacle of women trying to look and act like men” (“Competitions for Women,” n.d.). While these comments about “hermaphrodites” are significant, it is important to note that what exactly this term should be taken to imply is not immediately obvious. Historically, the “hermaphrodite” as a figuration has embodied the blurring of sex and gender category boundaries in various different ways that have constituted the “hermaphrodite” as a liminal figure of boundary violation. As Dreger (1998) demonstrated in her history of the hermaphrodite, what “hermaphrodite” implies is ontologically open and temporally variable: it has connoted myriad subjects of fixed, mistaken, and doubtful sex and gender in different contexts. It has been applied not only to bodies born with “ambiguous” sex anatomies but also to what have more recently been called homosexuals or gay, lesbian, and queer people, transvestites, transsexuals and transgender people, and feminists, among others. As I discussed in the introduction, the “intersexualisation” (Eckert, 2009) of bodies has also been governed by gendered, racialised, and classed histories through which some bodes (including the working-class bodies that female athletics competitors disproportionately represented) have been more easily attributed with sex binary blur than others. In the temporal context where Brundage and Cox articulated their concerns over hermaphrodites, what blurred (or, indeed, hermaphroditic) sex and gender implied was governed by medicalised conceptualisations of women as the fragile “weaker sex” in accordance with white, middle/upper-class notions of femininity. To the extent that “normal women” were defined, in Cox’s words, as

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the “childbearing type” with large breasts, wide hips, and knocked knees, those women who failed to embody such attributes more easily appeared insufficiently feminine or insufficiently (normatively) “female,” both socially and physiologically. In other words, they appeared insufficiently physically “handicapped” to be fully female. Consequently, they were more easily regarded as “abnormal” in relation to physical characteristics considered appropriately “womanly.” Athletic, more muscular female bodies with lower fat percentage that were trained for physical performance were, in particular and from the outset, gender transgressive in the confines of early 20th-century gender norms. At times, they were transgressive in such a pronounced way as to render them potentially “hermaphroditic” within cultural imaginaries. The female athlete at the centre of Brundage’s letter was depicted to be not only hermaphroditic but also monstrous. The monstrosity of her body was delineated against the bodies of the “normal feminine girls,” which she distorted. She was explicitly positioned as a “borderline-case,” where the border in question was that of binarised sex and gender difference, and it was her transgression of this border that rendered her monstrous. As Foucault (2003) has argued, “monstrosity” attaches to and arises at the boundaries of classification systems: “monstrous” is that which transgresses category boundaries and thus makes explicit the volatility of these boundaries themselves. It is possible that the athlete who was the focus of Brundage’s letter was Helen Stephens,7 whom I discussed briefly in the introduction. Stephens epitomised many of the concerns that were expressed over female bodies in athletics at the time. She was one of the most successful athletes of the 1930s, and her achievements included a gold medal in the 100-meter race at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where she defeated Stella Walsh. After her victory, some American journalists reported that a Warsaw-based newspaper had published accusations that Stephens was actually a man. According to the Los Angeles Times, a Polish journalist had voiced “indignation against the United States for having assertedly permitted a man to run in the women’s race,” claiming that “Stephens should have been running with . . . American male stars” (“Polish Writer Calls Helen Stephens ‘Man,’” 1936: A9). Furthermore, the Time magazine reported that German Olympic officials actually “had foreseen the dispute, investigated Sprinter Stephens before the race,” but “found her throughgoing female” (“Sport: Olympic Games,” 1936). The sports writer Gallico claimed that even “before being permitted to board the boat to uphold the honour of the U.S.A. as member of its Olympic team the Olympic Committee had had La Stephens frisked for sex” (1938: 234). To understand these accusations and remarks, it is important to place the concerns that were expressed over Stephens’ gender in the context of the 1930s ideas about women in athletics and especially in the context of related worries over the masculinisation of female athletes’ bodies, some of whom seemed to be metamorphosing into men. In the words of Gallico, There has always been something faintly ridiculous about the big-time lady athletes . . . Miss Helen Stephens, a big, rangy schoolgirl from Mississippi,

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out-galloped all the best women sprinters of the word. . . . The Poles . . . immediately accused Miss Stephens of being Mr. Stephens. There had been two cases, one in Czechoslovakia and one in England, where a masculine lady had, with the aid of a surgeon, succeeded in transforming herself into a not too feminine gentleman. The Poles thought they had spotted number three. (1938: 233–234) Similarly, Brundage concluded his letter to de Baillet-Latour by noting that recently considerable publicity was given in the American press to the case of an English athlete who after several years of competition as a girl announced herself (?) to be a boy. Perhaps some action has already been taken on this subject; if not, it might be well to insist on a medical examination before participation in the Olympic Games. (Brundage, 1936, parenthesised question mark in original) In fact, nearly all newspaper accounts about the accusations made against Stephens also contextualised the issue with explicit reference to sex change stories like those of Weston and Koubek.8 The concerns that were voiced about Stephens and the gender of other seemingly “hermaphroditic” athletes competing in women’s sport in general were thus also intertwined with the 1930s discourses around sex instability that gave rise to the possibility of (hormonally induced) female masculinisation. Stephens’ gender transgressive body was made sense of by placing her in the context of sex change stories like those of Weston and Koubek, which seemed to show that masculineappearing female athletes may not be, merely, masculine females, but they might be so masculine that they transform into full-blown men. It was also these intertwined concerns in the context of the broader 1930s ideas about gender, sex, and the female body that foregrounded the institution of the first formal gender verification policies in international sport.

Physical examinations and femininity certificates Upon receiving Brundage’s letter to de Baillet-Latour, the IOC Congress discussed the concerns that Brundage had raised under the agenda title “abnormal women athletes” (IOC, 1936: 10). The IOC decided not to institute a blanket physical examinations requirement across all women’s Olympic sports at the time. They did, however, decide to pass the problem of “abnormal women” on to the International Federations of Sport. They forwarded Brundage’s letter to all federations “in which feminine participation is allowed” (IOC, 1936: 10) so they could make their own decisions about whether or not to institute physical examinations. Some months later, newspapers reported that the IAAF had decided to follow Brundage’s recommendation and to require henceforth that “all women athletes must

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‘submit to competent medical examination’ should any protest regarding their sex be made formally within two hours after any event” (“Man-Woman Athletes Test Decision,” 1936: 2). Accordingly, the IAAF rulebook issued in the following year was updated with a new addition to the rule regarding “protests.” The rule stated: If the protest concerns questions of a physical nature, the organization responsible for the carrying through of the meeting shall arrange for a physical inspection to be made by a medical expert. The athlete must submit to the inspection as well as to the decision taken in consequence thereof. (IAAF, 1937: 40)9 This rule, applied on an ad hoc basis under the framework of protests and using “physical inspections,” was, to my knowledge, the first gender verification policy instituted by an international sport governing body,10 and it was in force at least until 1946.11 The 1937 IAAF policy marks the beginning of the period of formalised gender verification in women’s international sports. However, the historical record of gender verification policies and practices during the early years of women’s participation in the Olympics and other sports governed by IOC-affiliated international sport federations is sparse and fragmented. Apart from the sources that I have drawn from the aforementioned, information about the governance of women’s sport and about female athletes themselves is very limited, especially in the IOC records, until 1966 (which is when the IAAF introduced on-site gender verification, which I will discuss in the next chapter). In many ways, this reflects the power relations that are embedded within the archival records themselves: the collections that I consulted mirror the histories and priorities of those who complied them, and the IOC archives in particular reflect the IOC’s male-dominated history. The records that were chosen for preservation can be understood as a kind of (selective) externalised memory of the past (Hedstrom, 2002), which is written in the voice of those in power. The incomplete historical records about women in sport reflect the absence of women’s voices in sport decision-making in general and in decisions that were made about them in particular. It is, nonetheless, certain that after 1946 but before 1964, the IAAF introduced a new policy requiring female athletes to provide “femininity certificates,” which were medical certificates signed by their local medical practitioners that verified their female status. The femininity certificate rule was later discussed in official meetings and correspondence, including during a 1981 IAAF meeting where the IOC Medical Commission president Alexandre de Merode noted that this rule had been enforced until 1964 (IAAF, 1981). When, exactly, it was introduced is unclear, however,12 as is the policy’s exact content. The earliest mention of it that I found was made by a forerunning historian of women’s sport, George Pallet. Pallet (1955: 68) noted that a new rule was accepted by the IAAF Congress in 1948 stating that women’s competition entries “should be accompanied by a medical certificate as to sex, as should applications for world and continental records.”

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There is also some evidence to suggest that the femininity certificate requirement did not replace the IAAF 1937 gender protest policy but was used, rather, concurrently and in combination with it, not only in women’s events overseen by the IAAF but also in the Olympics at least in athletics. A 1960 Times magazine news article, for example, reported that “two countries had challenged the sex of one of the British women competitors in the Olympic Games,” probably in accordance with the ad hoc protest rule, to which the secretary of the British Amateur Athletic Board commented, “We require of every woman before an international competition that she supplies us with a certificate signed by her own medical practitioner” (“Olympic Women ‘Have Medical Certificates,’” 1960). The methods based on which femininity certificates could be issued were not clarified by sport regulators and, because there was no systematisation of this process, likely varied between different local medical practitioners. While Pallet noted that “it was recognised that doubtful cases would have to be dealt with by the I.A.A.F” (1955: 68), he did not provide any further detail about what such “doubtful cases” were taken to imply and how they were handled when they arose. One might suspect, however, based on the concerns that were expressed by Brundage and others over “apparent characteristics of the opposite sex” on female athletes (Brundage, 1936), that it was these kinds of characteristics and general “masculine” bodily appearances that medical practitioners would primarily have been looking for. Indeed, there are some retrospective mentions about what was involved in the related examinations that suggest the overarching aim was, as the name suggests, to certify (embodied) femininity. Olympic official Monique Berlioux, herself a former competitive athlete, noted in the late 1960s that “formerly, at sports competitions or during medical tests carried out by local associations, one simply did a brief morphological test in order to determine sex” (1967: 1). Berlioux (1967: 1) added that “gynecological tests were never used.” On the other hand, track athlete Sylvia Cheeseman’s recollections of examinations she underwent in relation to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics suggest that in some cases an athlete’s femaleness could be “certified” through a mere glimpse at her body, at least when such a glimpse seemed to reveal appropriately feminine embodiment. In a meeting with two doctors, Cheeseman recalled that one doctor “pointed to me and said ‘man or woman’ and the other doctor looked appalled and then this doctor said ‘This is ridiculous, I’m not going to examine you,’ and he signed the certificate” (cited in Moon, 1997: 294). It is worth underlining that the use of femininity certificates based on medical examination of female athletes’ bodies was embedded within the broader medicalised regulatory framework that surrounded women’s sports, not only at international competitions but across levels of participation, during the first part of the 20th century. The first gender verification policies in international sport – the 1937 protest rule as well as the femininity certificates – were introduced and applied at a time when women’s sport participation continued to be framed as a medical issue needing curtailment, including through regulation. The protectionist and gender-normative imaginary that constituted “normal” female bodies as frail,

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weak, and physically “handicapped” foregrounded the idea that athletes’ right to compete in women’s sports could be established through “femininity certification.” To the extent that “normal” women were appropriately feminine socially and physically, those who failed to embody femininity in the “normal” (frail and physically “handicapped”) way challenged the cultural and medical norms around what female embodiment does and should amount to.

Conclusion The first gender verification policies in international sport were, then, motivated (not by fears over explicit gender fraud committed by men binding their genitals to compete as women, as many have suggested, as discussed in the introduction, but) by social anxieties over the perceived masculinisation of female athletes’ bodies. The context in which these policies were instituted was characterised by early to mid-20th-century white upper/middle-class gender and body norms. These norms were, moreover, medicalised in ways that rendered “normal” female embodiment as frail, “eternally wounded,” and susceptible to dangerous physical “strain” to the extent that femaleness was perceived to be a physical “handicap.” The increasing levels of (disproportionately working-class) women participating in masculinityconnoting sports like athletics clashed with these norms, as female track and field athletes seemed to be demonstrating physical prowess that should have been unachievable and even dangerous for female bodies. Concurrently, the emergence and popularisation of hormonal theories of sex difference in the 1930s was destabilising rigidly dualistic conceptualisation of sex difference. It also gave rise to the possibility that female bodies could be hormonally masculinised, sometimes in such an extreme way as to incite sex changes or metamorphoses into masculinity and manhood. In the late 1930s, these already-intertwined discourses merged together in the context of international sport to give rise to social anxieties around the presence of borderline, “hermaphroditic,” or even monstrously gendered bodies in women’s sport, some of whom were actually changing into men. The first gender verification policies were introduced in this context by the IAAF, which implemented a physical examinations rule in cases of gender protest in 1937 and mandates for femininity certification by local physicians in the 1940s. These policies were motivated by concern over sex and gender binary breakdown, carried by female athletes who seemed to exceed the normalised and naturalised boundaries that have been socio-scientifically drawn around female embodiment. The figures of the sex-changing and “hermaphrodite” athletes in women’s sports embodied the instability and volatility of sexed and gendered boundaries in the 1930s context where hormones were crossing sexed borders and women were entering the realm of competitive sport (and especially athletics) that had previously been exclusively reserved for men. Their “excessively” masculine or masculinised bodies represented the breakdown of fixed sex classification systems in sport and beyond, making them appear abnormal to the extent that they gave rise to imaginaries of monstrous or freak-like liminal boundary

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figures that threatened the presumed gendered reality and fixity of “femaleness.” These boundary-contaminating athletes were visual examples of the instability of binary sex difference, and they incited doubt about the extent to which female athletes more generally were, indeed, 100% female. By verifying this through examining athletes’ bodily morphology, the first gender verification policies erected formalised (albeit ill-defined) bodily constraints around femaleness in ways that worked to restrict the embodied configurations that were possible for female athletes: “femaleness” was conceptualised in ways that delimited female embodiment as “feminine” embodiment in opposition to the masculinised bodies that challenged existing feminine body norms and were consequently excluded from the scope of femaleness proper. The next chapter discusses how these early gender verification regulations were developed into a paradigm of on-site gender verification in the late 1960s, in ways that combined previous fears over sex binary contamination or “pollution” with newly emerging geopolitical concerns.

Notes 1 De Coubertin founded the IOC in 1894 and the first modern Olympic Games were organised in Athens in 1896 (IOC, 2013). 2 The exact year and date of publication for this newspaper clipping, which is part of the digitised Avery Brundage collection at the IOC archives, is not available, but the folder within which it is included implies that it was published in the 1950s. 3 For an in-depth discussion of women’s sport organizations like the Women’s Division of the US National Amateur Athletic Federation, and the principles of their opposition to women’s competitive sport, see Cahn (1994) and Hargreaves (1994). 4 While Broster does not name Weston in the medical report from which these quotations are extracted, it is obvious that the report refers to Weston. This is because it includes a picture of the patient from which Weston (depicted nude in the objectifying fashion common to medical images at the time) is clearly recognisable, despite a white “block” superimposed over his eyes. 5 There are some discrepancies between the description of this patient’s life history and descriptions about Koubek’s life given elsewhere, but the notable similarities make it probable that the person being referred to is Koubek. The patient is given the pseudonym “Z.K.” (Koubek’s initials), was born the same year as Koubek, and is described as the 800-meter world record holder, although it is stated that the record was attained at the age of 18 (i.e. 1931), while Koubek attained his at the age of 21 (i.e. 1934). However, the only 1931 800-meter world record was attained by Marie Dollinger of Germany (Hymans & Matrahazi, 2015: 264), and it is not possible that the person described in the report is Dollinger, who later married a man with whom she had a child. 6 Neither the organiser nor the exact year of the meeting is made explicit, but the folder within which the source document is included implies the document is from the 1940s. No organisational affiliations are provided for Cox, but it is likely that this was an IOC meeting, because the topic of discussion was women’s participation in the Olympics and because some participants are identified as representatives of National Olympic Committees. 7 The description of the athlete’s bodily attributes (deep voice, unusual height and large feet) coincide with contemporary newspaper descriptions of Stephens. In addition to Stella Walsh, Stephens was also the most well-known American female track athlete at the time due to her exceptional level of success, which meant that many people were aware of her appearance. However, because athletic female bodies were, in general,

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9 10

11 12

Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s considered un-feminine, the athlete being referred to in Brundage’s letter could have been almost any American female track and field athlete. For example, one journalist asked readers to recall that “in May of this year Mary Edith Weston, noted English girl athlete, was formally proclaimed a man after undergoing two operations in a London hospital and assumed the name of Mark Weston” (Polish Writer Calls Helen Stephens ‘Man’, 1936: A9). Another pointed out the “two recent and very flagrant cases . . . one British and one Czechoslovakian. Mary Edith Weston, who became ‘Mr. Mark Weston,’ and Fraulein Zdenka Koubkove [sic], who is now Zdenka Koubka [sic]” (The Sports Parade, 1936: 13). My thanks to Anne-Marie Garrigan from the IAAF documents library for providing me remote access to IAAF rulebooks from the 1930s and 1940s. There is evidence that some spontaneous “physical inspections” were carried out before this date, including the well-documented Stephens case and that of Kinuye Hitomi at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games (see Chapter 1, footnote 6), but I did not find any evidence of written rules by international sport-governing bodies having existing before 1937. I did not have access to IAAF rulebooks after this year. Heggie (2010: 159) and Pieper (2016: 31) claim that the policy was introduced in 1946, and the source Heggie provides to support this claim is IAAF 1946 rule 17 paragraph 3 (Pieper’s source is Heggie). This rule, however, concerns amateur status, not medical certificates. Indeed, the IAAF 1946 rulebook does not include any regulations about medical certificates – nor other new rules – that could have been intended for gender verification purposes. It does, however, include the protest rule that was introduced in 1937 (IAAF, 1946: 27).

Chapter 3

Pure and polluted bodies in Cold War sports

During the 1950s and 1960s, the context and politics of international sport became engrossed by the broader geopolitical tensions of the Cold War between the two post–World War II superpowers: the United States and its allies (i.e. the “Western bloc”) and the Soviet Union and its satellites (i.e. the “Eastern bloc”). The deeply engrained political, economic, and cultural differences between the capitalist, largely liberal democratic Western bloc and the communist, largely totalitarian Eastern bloc became the basis of a geopolitical partition between the East and the West. The partition, in turn, was epitomised by the symbolic as well as the material boundary of the “Iron Curtain.” While the Soviet Union blocked itself and its dominions from open contact with the West, they nonetheless formed a National Olympic Committee and requested to join the Olympic Games in 1952. This fuelled politically motivated suspicions and scepticism from Western observers and international sport regulators who were largely allied with the politics and values of the West. In this chapter, I focus on the implications of these Cold War power dynamics in international sports and examine how they gave rise to a politics of “pure” versus “polluted” bodies. The gendered undercurrents of the politics foregrounded the introduction of more rigorous on-site gender verification policies by sport governing bodies. The Cold War split between the East and the West was centrally characterised by an “us” versus “them” division, which had a constitutive gendered dimension: Western Cold War rhetoric and nation-building projects not only framed communist politics as corrupt and perverted, but also imagined communist social relations to be “polluting” the appropriate boundaries between men’s and women’s bodies and behaviours. This gender category “pollution” was exemplified and embodied by female athletes from the Eastern bloc who were both highly successful and perceived as inappropriately muscular and masculine by Western observers. In contrast to their gender “hybrid” bodies, Western bodies and (heteronormative) gender relations were conceptualised as “pure” in ways that became intertwined with the Olympic ideal of “purity.” This ideal was simultaneously associated with the “purity” of athletes’ bodies from gendered category blur and from “artificial” (i.e. doping) substances and with the purity of the Olympic movement from “polluting” political intervention. In this context, the international sporting landscape

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became structured by a politics of “pure” versus “polluted” bodies, where “purity” was identified with the Western bloc and pollution with the Eastern bloc. In what follows, I show how the Cold War context fuelled a climate of distrust and suspicion that motivated the introduction of on-site gender verification policies concerning all female athletes, first by the IAAF and then by the IOC. These policies were, nonetheless, principally targeted at safeguarding the sex binary against “hybrid” bodies from the East who threatened Western (white, middle-class) norms of appropriately feminine female embodiment. As I discussed in the introduction, it has been argued that the first on-site gender verification policies were introduced to prevent males from masquerading as female athletes. Here, however, I show that the explicit motivation for these policies was to dissuade “hybrids” from participating in women’s competitions and to offer them medical aid to re-integrate them within Western delineations of binary sex and gender difference.

Cold War geopolitics in international sport I broadly follow Benedict Anderson’s (2006) conceptualisation of nations as “imagined (political) communities” to contextualise the importance of national rhetoric and nation-building projects during the Cold War in relation to international sport. “Imagined” here does not mean fictional but refers to a shared construction of and identification with an extended collective.1 The construction of such collectives requires that the inside of the community be separated from the outside, or that “us” is separated from “them.” This entails active construction of not only collective unity but also the “purification” of collective boundaries from “otherness” (Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, 2002). The imaginaries of sport lend themselves particularly well to this project as sports tend to be used to represent the character of collectives. By forging a link between national identity and sport, collective identifications can be built through affective connections to “our” national teams and athletes (Rowe, McKay, & Miller, 1998). The athletic bodies displayed in international competition embody the state of the nation in particularly powerful ways because they exemplify the fitness of the collective, which is required for an effective and stable “body politic” (Schaffer & Smith, 2000). This imaginary is especially powerful during international competitions like the Olympic Games because the competitions pit not only physical bodies but also imagined national bodies against each other, opposing “us” against “them” in both material and symbolic ways. The Olympic movement has historically been characterised by a tension between the IOC’s claim to politically neutral internationalism and the constitutive embeddedness of nationalisms within the Olympic imaginary. The Olympic Games may appear to be situated within the “placelessness” of the global but they are centrally about place and national identification: athletes not only wear national uniforms, national flags, and listen to national anthems, but the meaning that is attached to their accomplishments and failures is embedded within nationalistic signs (Stevenson, 2002). The Olympic movement, however, has claimed

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autonomy from “outside” influences including political intervention and declared for itself not only extraterritoriality but also a form of supranational sovereignty in sport. This has been accomplished through the construction of Olympic ideals which have been positioned as immutable. Especially pertinent is the ideal of the “purity” of the Olympics, which encompasses political neutrality (Toohey & Veal, 2007). The ideal of purity is embedded throughout IOC rhetoric and translates into the notions of the “pure Olympic athlete” and “pure Olympic sport” (see Lenskyj, 2000). Yet, it has been argued that during the Cold War, “international sport in general, and, arguably, the Olympics in particular, provided the most immediate, confrontational and viscerally resonant points of nationalist engagement” despite the IOC’s claims to political innocence (Wagg & Andrews, 2007: 3). Indeed, Olympic competition functioned in many ways as metaphoric or surrogate warfare between nations, because international sporting competitions came to “serve as psychological substitutes for armed conflict” and “a non-military means of waging Cold War battles” (Hunt, 2011: 39). Dominant Western Cold War ideologies were structured by demarcations of “good” versus “evil.” These demarcations took shape through imaginaries of “same” versus “other,” where the otherness of Soviet or Eastern bloc nations was identified with the communist totalitarian system that was considered to be the locus of their evil (Dimeo, 2007). East/West binarisation in the construction of European internal borders has a longer historical precedent: older Western beliefs derived from colonial imaginaries had long identified the geographic east of Europe as “backward” and “primitive,” including in social relations, contrasted against the “developed” West (Todorova, 1996). These racialised power divisions gained new politicised dimensions during the Cold War: the political world was imagined along a split between the “good” West and “bad” Eastern bloc, and the internal differences between the “Eastern bloc” and “the West” were collapsed into a reified binary split. This kind of homogenisation has been central to the West’s delineation of its various “others” from itself, as the “others” have been differentiated from the “self” through polarised conceptions of sameness versus difference (Hall, 1992). In the Olympic Cold War context, these binary constructs separated the Eastern bloc from the West via the boundary of the Iron Curtain and became central for the 1950s and 1960s sporting rhetoric. The Soviet Union entered Olympic competition in 1952 and first took part in the Helsinki Olympics of that year. While IOC president Sigfrid Edström was initially hostile towards the possibility of Soviet entry, he eventually considered it important to “have the USSR Olympic Committee recognized, as we otherwise will have the athletic world divided into two big sections – East and West” (Edström, 1951). His desire to unify the East and West (under IOC jurisdiction) can be seen to reflect the IOC’s aspirations for authority and control over international sports. Soviet leaders had previously made efforts to organise international sporting associations such as the Red Sport International (Sportintern), which had co-ordinated international meets among sport organisations with Soviet allegiances (Parks, 2007: 29).

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However, the entry of the Soviet Union into Olympic competition incited concern among many Olympic officials and Western observers over what they perceived as a threat to the purity of the Olympic movement. This was crystallised by intertwined worries over amateurism, political intervention, and the deflation of Western authority and superiority. One journalist, for example, commented: The conception of sports and athletics on the other side of the Iron Curtain is totally different from the democratic countries. . . . The players who represent a totalitarian country in a sporting event are regarded as agents of the government and are expected to carry out in every respect their government’s instructions. . . . They . . . are actually trained and appointed . . . to act as Communist agents. (“Russia Aims at 1952 Olympics,” n.d.) Another journalist remarked that “the Russians intend to become sports leaders in the world” and “certainly will demand full voice in all international sports questions – including the Olympics,” adding that their objective was to “gain world records on a large scale” (“Tennis Body Urged to Drop Soviet Satellites,” n.d.). As these kinds of ideas were reproduced and circulated, athletes from the Soviet bloc came to be imagined not only as un-agentic cogs of government interest but also as embodiments of the threat that the communist “other” posed to “our” democratic political system. Their perceived intrusion into Olympic sport was perceived as a polluting force that undermined “our” shared values, particularly as they would demand a political voice in the international sporting landscape. At the same time, Western political commentators who expressed worries over communist political influence claimed with sincerity that their aim was not to advance their own political agendas, but merely to prevent a “totalitarian” mixing of sports and politics (Keys, 2012). The entry of the Soviet Union and its satellites into the Olympics was also perceived by some Olympic officials to threaten the IOC’s claim to autonomy and purity from outside influences. Reporting his impressions of Soviet sport organisation on the eve of their Olympic entry, Swedish sport official Tage Ericson expressed his view that in the Soviet Union, “sports is a tool of the State . . . to carry on political propaganda” (1950: 1). He considered that while Soviet sports programmes “will bring forth extremely good athletes of all kinds,” it will “not be easy for the democratic countries, where the sport is carried on for play and for the joy of living, to compete with these specially trained and developed [Soviet] Russian athletes” (1950: 3). Ericson’s comments exemplify the broader intertwined concerns over the loss of amateurism and the Olympic movement’s political independence. Firstly, central to the IOC’s conceptualisation of “purity” was the amateur status of athletes. Olympic sport participation was imagined and regulated as free from monetary incentive. The state-run Soviet sport system was, however, constructed around the development of specifically trained athletes, which incited concerns over material rewards being given to athletes who demonstrated high

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potential. Secondly, the perceptions of Soviet sports as propaganda aimed at demonstrating political superiority raised concerns over the infusion of the Olympics with political motives. Relatedly, the Soviets’ entry into the Olympics and the years that followed until the end of the Cold War were characterised by (Western) social anxieties over the fragmentation of Olympic “purity” due to hostile or “polluting” political forces, where pollution was identified with the East. These anxieties were also structured, however, by gendered dynamics that infused the Cold War context.

Gendered Cold War sporting dynamics Nation-building projects have historically been erected upon the institutionalisation of gender difference. They tend to build on gendered imaginaries derived from reproductive roles that naturalise the family as an institution that secures the nation’s continuity (McClintock, 1993). Women, through their role as mothers, are often seen to reproduce the national collective by birthing and rearing future members, and women tend to be imagined to embody the continuity and stability of the collective. Consequently, their bodies often connote the borders that signify the nation’s boundaries. The (sexual) purity of “our” women and a derived purity of the collective are often discursively secured through an imagined same/other or us/them duality in relation to women’s bodies and behaviours, which can become objects of border “sanitation” (Yuval-Davis, 1997). To the extent that national imaginaries figure women within these terms, the material bodies of women can come to stand as symbolic of the national continuity and purity that they represent. Western Cold War political imaginaries constructed the “us versus them” boundary in ways that had a constitutive gendered dimension: firstly, white hegemonic masculinity was framed as anti-communist and discursively mobilised as a marker and repository of Western political superiority. This provided a framework for nation-building projects based on vigorous male bodies potent to combat the perceived threat of communist “penetration” (Montez de Oca, 2007). Secondly, women’s perceived role within the national project was constituted with reference to white and middle-class heteronormative femininity, exhibited through reproductive responsibilities, marriage, and domesticity. This normative femininity was mobilised as a stabilising force in the face of Cold War instabilities, whereby the nuclear family (embodied by women’s heteronormative and feminine domesticity) was made into the symbol of national stability (Pieper, 2016). In the international sporting landscape, these imaginaries became inscribed onto the bodies of female Olympic athletes who represented their nations: their bodies and behaviours were representative of the gendered and sexual purity of Western nations. By contrast, the communist political systems of the Eastern bloc were imagined in popular depictions to be perverting the appropriate boundaries of gendered embodiment. The bodies and behaviours of communist female athletes were perceived to be inappropriately gendered and profoundly “other” to Western normative femininity. It was implied that their gender perversion was the result of a

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political system that aimed (unduly) to make everyone the same: the Soviet Union and its dominions were imagined as one huge “human sausage machine,” a grim consequence of what lay behind the Iron Curtain – women looked like men (Wagg, 2007: 101). This imaginary coincided with and was enforced by a changing model of women’s athletic training at the time, which was beginning to more closely mirror men’s top-level training. Communist sporting establishments largely encouraged this training model for their female athletes. They consequently brought to international sport competitions new kinds of unapologetically muscular, strong, and successful female athletes who seemed to be visual examples of the polluted nature of communist gender relations. Their bodies and performances clashed with and were juxtaposed against Western femininity norms. At the same time, Western nations mobilised “a super-heterosexualized Cold War family ideal” as a “fortress against the fear of communist aggression from without, and communist intervention from within” (Beamish & Richie, 2007: 19). Consequently, not only communism but also “non-traditional” or inappropriately gendered women were weighty threats associated with the gendered boundary blur of the “other” and the threat this posed to Western politics and values. Against this backdrop, the inappropriately “masculine” bodies of female athletes from the Eastern bloc came to embody not only the boundary “pollution” of the “other” but also the “pollution” of the very communist system of the “other.” Because women and their bodies tend to represent the nation’s continuity and security, the perceived masculine bodies of Eastern bloc female athletes represented the polluted nature of communist nations and their political systems. The Western heteronormative model of gender differentiation secured the purity and superiority of Western Cold War nations, but it was imagined in opposition to the perceived gender category pollution embodied by communist female athletes: their “masculine” bodies symbolised the (gendered) “perversion” engrained at the heart of communist states. Social fear of this category pollution came to foreground sport regulators’ efforts to police gendered and sexed boundaries in sport in ways that intertwined with the policing of athletes’ bodily purity against artificial substances, namely, doping.

Artificial substances and sex abnormality Concerns over “doping” have been expressed since the beginning of modern international sport and some rules banning the practice existed as early as the 1920s.2 Among the most foundational and enduring challenges around doping has been, however, the problem of how “doping” should be defined. In the late 1970s, IOC official Arthur Porritt provided an illustrative description of how the meaning of doping has largely been historically conceptualised: Doping is an evil – it is morally wrong, physically dangerous, socially degenerate and legally indefensible. . . . To define doping is . . . extremely difficult, and yet everyone who takes part in competitive sport or who administers it

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know exactly what it means. The definition lies not in words but in integrity of character. (Porritt, 1978) While sport-governing bodies had been aware of doping practices for decades, the issue became more pertinent during the 1950s. There were increasing reports of amphetamine use by endurance athletes around the same time as a new anabolic steroid, trademarked Dianabol, was developed (Hunt, 2011). Anabolic (androgenic) steroids are synthetic androgenic hormones that mirror the effects of endogenous androgens, that is androgens produced internally by the body. Androgens have anabolic or muscle-growth-promoting effects as well as androgenic effects, which regulate in the development of “male” secondary sex characteristics. Dianabol retained the anabolic benefits while producing fewer androgenic effects, and it was rumoured to be used by weightlifters especially in the Soviet Union to induce muscle and strength gains (Hunt, 2011). The IOC’s first official anti-doping efforts took place in the early 1960s and were characterised by attempts to determine the scope of the problem and come up with a definition of “doping” (see also Hunt, 2011). While doping was “unanimously condemned” and considered morally impermissible, most IOC officials had no scientific training and were ill-equipped to approach the issue from the scientific perspective it was seen to require (IOC, 1964: 76). The “doping problem” was consequently delegated to a medical sub-commission. The formation of this sub-commission represents the IOC’s first attempt to take a formally scientific approach towards bodily “purity.” The IOC collaborated with the Federation Internationale de Medicine Sportive to construct their first definition of doping in 1964: The administration to, or the use by, a competing athlete of any substance foreign to the body or of any physiological substance taken in abnormal quantity or by an abnormal route of entry into the body, with the sole intention of increasing in an artificial and unfair manner his [or her] performance in competition. (Barnes, 1980: 22). This definition largely corresponded to the first internationally recognised definition of doping which had been formulated by the Council of Europe a year earlier (IOC-MC, 1972: 33). The most significant implication of these definitions was that they functioned to demarcate the “natural” or un-doped and therefore pure body as a bounded entity from which “foreign,” “artificial,” or “abnormal” substances could be separated. The pure body was then conceptualised as the “fair” sporting body while the doped and thereby polluted body was conceptualised as “unfair.” The effect was that athletes were conceptually differentiated into two, normatively opposed categories of sporting bodies: pure and fair versus polluted and unfair. The task of doping control was to police this conceptual border.

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However, a core practical problem pertained to the separation of the pure from the polluted by detecting the presence of “artificial” substances, especially anabolic steroids. While IOC officials both condemned and expressed concern over steroids throughout the 1960s, no reliable methods existed to detect them at the time. IOC medical officials were unable to fix an average or “normal” rate of (endogenous) androgenic hormones and consequently also unable to determine an “abnormal” rate that would indicate exogenous steroid use, that is use of steroids originating outside the body (IOC-MC, 1969: 5). Despite the fact that sport regulators had erected a boundary between the pure and the polluted body conceptually, they were unable to erect this boundary in practice when it came to steroids. This meant that steroids were not added to the IOC prohibited substances list until methods to detect them were developed in the mid-1970s. Consequently, the “steroid athlete” roaming free was a troubling figure for many sport observers throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. In retrospect, one medical observer noted that the “first widespread reported use of synthetic anabolic steroids by strength athletes came about the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games” (O’Shea, 1977: 1). While these reports were “based on rumors and hearsay,” “world records in strength events such as Olympic lifting, discuss, hammer and shot put were broken and rebroken with remarkable regularity” (O’Shea, 1977: 1). This perceived over-advance in strength-based sports not only suggested artificial substance use but also had a constitutive political character pertaining to doping in the Cold War context. Discussing the “problem of doping” in the late 1960s, IOC medical advisor Ludwig Prokop noted that in many cases the athlete is no longer able to influence doping measures any more, these being undertaken from a so-called “national indication” point of view, because some national trainers believe any means to be justified, as in war, to achieve a victory for their own country. . . . It is often . . . intended [as] a documentation of the superiority of the political or economic system of the country. (Prokop, n.d.) In the Cold War climate where success was apparently being pursued by dubious means, IOC officials were concerned about an “underlying ‘national tendency’ to increase competitive performance so that victory of one’s own country can be attained at any price” (IOC-MC, 1972: 30). These kinds of suspicions were directed especially at athletes from the Eastern bloc and had a gendered dimension. Exemplary are Western newspaper representations of the Soviet sisters Irina and Tamara Press, who were highly successful in women’s athletics in the 1950s and 1960s but widely perceived as excessively muscular and masculine by Western observers. The Daily Mirror, for instance, interpreted the success of these “mistresses of muscle” as an example of “how Russia takes promising young prospects and molds them through specialized training” into dominant athletes under the “all seeing State eye” (“Russia’s Golden Gloom,” 1960: 19). Remarks like this reflected concerns over the totalitarian state

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being willing to forego women’s well-being and femininity, as they “moulded” women’s bodies just to attain sporting glory. Communist governments’ dubious means of success in women’s sports were perceived to be taking two intertwined forms: using anabolic steroids to boost female athletes’ performance levels and deliberately entering “abnormally” sexed athletes into international competitions. In Chapter 1, I noted that androgenic hormones carry a gendered legacy through which they have been conceptualised as “male” hormones, while Chapter 2 discussed 1930s contextual concerns over sex binary breakdown, incited by androgens’ ability to “awaken” masculinity in female bodies. In the Cold War context, the emergence of synthetic androgenic steroids that could be exogenously consumed by females provoked new worries over exogenously induced female masculinisation. These worries were structured by a conflation between the anabolic and androgenic effects of these hormones: because androgens (including synthetic ones) have been conceptualised as “male” hormones and because androgens can incite muscle and strength gains, their anabolic as well as androgenic effects were gendered “male.” This gendering was embedded within the association of superior sporting prowess with male bodies. In other words, the anabolic effects were imagined themselves to be androgenic even when they occurred on female bodies, and the muscle and strength increase in females on steroids were associated with “maleness” in ways that made anabolic steroid use by female athletes seem to be a gender boundary crossing. Lack of control over steroids in sport relatedly enabled the maturation of a gendered form of the “steroid athlete” threat in the 1960s, which persists as a threatening boundary figure today. One journalist, for instance, contemplated “the horrifying thought that it may be possible to take a 10-year-old girl who shows athletic promise and make her more masculine and thus a better athlete” by giving her “a prolonged course of male hormones” (Brasher, 1966b: 1). Similarly, Monique Berlioux, who later became the IOC director, wrote a newsletter speaking “frankly and openly” about the subject of “femininity” in Olympic competition. Discussing the possibility of “sexual mutation,” she argued, It has unfortunately been proved that certain medicasters have not hesitated to render women champions, who already possess exceptional physical qualities, more virile in order, that during international competitions, they may achieve results which are over and above their normal capacities. The system adopted is relatively simple: the woman’s menstruation is stopped by means of medical substance. In addition, injections of male hormones are given and these have the twofold effect of increasing physical resistance and of fortifying the muscular tonus. From then on, certain secondary masculine characteristics may begin to appear: breaking of the voice and the development of hair growth. (1967: 1) Claims that Olympic female athletes from the Eastern bloc in particular were given male hormones to boost their performances were also made in reputable

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scientific journals (Beamish & Richie, 2007). Such accounts of female athletes’ “male hormonalisation” not only legitimated sport officials’ concerns but also “transformed a rumour into an apparent medical fact” in ways that made steroids into a symbol of “the immoral and unpredictable use of science to further totalitarian goals without concern for human consequences” (Beamish & Richie, 2007: 15–16). However, there was also a different albeit related form of suspected cheating in women’s sport. Observing that steroid doping, as concerning as it may be, does not alter “basic sexual characteristics,” Berlioux (1967: 2) directed attention to the possible abuse of “abnormally” sexed bodies that needed to be guarded against: Nature can play some funny tricks and, in good faith, a baby can be declared of masculine or feminine sex at birth because its physical structure is such that it is possible to make an error. With the passing of the years secondary sexual characteristics assert themselves and it is the duty of everyone to make sure that the situation is not abused. For, being strictly logical, one feels sorry for the “unfortunate” girl . . . but is there a voice raised against the person responsible for such cheating? . . . Nothing is more prejudicial to female sport that this charlatanry; nothing can kill it more surely. Berlioux’s and others’ concerns over this “charlatanry” were reinforced by the publication of stories about earlier cases of “abnormally” sexed bodies in women’s sport. These stories were published by some newspapers and physicians in the 1960s, including sensationalised versions of the Koubek and Weston stories discussed in Chapter 2. Time magazine, for example, published an article about Koubek and other gender-suspect athletes of the past, noting that such “incidents – and what to do about them – had been bothering the International Amateur Athletic Federation for years” (“Track & Field: Preserving la Difference,” 1966). A medical report was also published which included details about an athlete most likely to have been Koubek.3 The report not only claimed that Koubek was a “hermaphrodite” whose performances had been “abnormal” but also argued that such abnormal performances should not be set as a standard for “normal” sportswomen (Tachezy, 1969). It concluded that it was, consequently, “important to impose a general somatic examination upon all sportswomen” to reveal any “defects” (Tachezy, 1969: 119). These older examples of gender-transgressive bodies in women’s sport provided precedent cases as “proof” of the legitimacy of sport observers’ gendered concerns in 1960s. However, concerns about these past cases were re-contextualised in the Cold War climate and (re-)directed towards the possible abuse of similar “abnormal” bodies in the present by dubious governments to further their nations’ sporting aspirations. While it is noteworthy that the use of these older stories shows continuity of worries over “hermaphroditic” bodies in women’s sport, it is also important to underline that how such bodies were imagined in the 1960s was re-framed in relation to Cold War geopolitics.

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The dual concerns over “artificial” hormone substances and “abnormally” sexed bodies became entangled in a context where muscular and masculine-appearing communist women like Irina and Tamara Press were dominating women’s sport in strength-based events, especially athletics. The gendered East/West opposition between pure and polluted bodies also structured Berlioux’s concluding remarks in her “open and frank” discussion about femininity: coming to defend women’s sport against the masculine aura carried by some (communist) female athletes, Berlioux reminded that sport does not exclude femininity or necessarily “deform” the female body. Rather, “consolation can be taken from the fact that . . . there is a large number of extremely feminine female champions” (Berlioux, 1967: 2). As examples, she listed British long jumper Mary Rand, French swimmer Christine Caron, and Czech gymnast Věra Čáslavská, all of whom embodied Western white and middle-class femininity. It was clearly this form of feminine embodiment that she considered to be under a threat from the “virile” hormone-doped body and the “abnormally” sexed body possibly abused for sporting glory. In the Cold War context, then, the unconventional female bodies of the Eastern “other” carried simultaneously several kinds of threatening category blur. They carried the fragmentation of binarised gender upon which Western Cold War–era nation-building projects were built, where the fragmentation was identified with the “perverted” political system of the “other” as exemplary of the polluted character of communist nations. They also carried the perceived intrusion of political motives into the Olympic context as corrupt communist sport leaders were thought willing to sacrifice the bodily purity of their athletes for sporting success in the name of communism. Both implied the confusion of categorical boundaries and thus the pollution of category purity upon which Olympic ideals had been erected, including the definitional boundaries erected around doping. The notion of bodily pollution attached to female bodies especially in profoundly gendered ways, as polluted female bodies also contaminated the purity of categorical sex and gender differentiations by disturbing the categories’ borders. Both the hormone-doped and the alleged “abnormally” sexed bodies in women’s sports were not only athletically enhanced in a male-like way in relation to “natural” female capacity but their presumed athletic prowess was also subject to abuse by unscrupulous governments. These contextual social anxieties over categorical boundary fragmentation, disproportionately embodied by and mapped onto female athletes’ bodies from the Eastern bloc, foregrounded the introduction of new on-site gender verification policies by the IAAF and the IOC.

Naked parades While ad hoc gender verification and femininity certificates had previously been required in international athletics, the IAAF introduced a new policy in 1966 which required that all female competitors’ gender be verified on-site at competitions by IAAF elected medical experts. In addition to retaining the older rule requiring women to bring “a certificate as to sex, issued by a qualified medical

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doctor, recognised by the National Association” for smaller events, the IAAF also instituted the following rule for high-stakes events: In the case of all Area Games or Championships . . . women’s entries shall not be accompanied by a medical certificate, but the Organising Committee shall appoint a panel of three women medical doctors and all participants in women’s events shall appear before the panel, who will be required to certify that they are qualified to compete in such events. (IAAF, 1967) This rule was first applied at the 1966 Jamaica Commonwealth Games (Porritt, 1966). While the IAAF did not make explicit why an on-site gender verification policy was instituted, remarks made by sport regulators and observers at the time shed some light on this. Commenting on the existing rules that relied on femininity certificates signed by local physicians, IOC medical official Guiseppe La Cava noted that “this method does not permit a sufficiently strict control since such certificates are often very easily obtained” (IOC-MC, 1967a). The Washington Post, on the other hand, explained that while previously “women competitors had only to produce a chit from their doctor confirming their sex, . . . more rigorous testing was established to prevent ambitious selectors turning a blind eye to possible abnormality and giving their teams an unfair advantage” (Doyle, 1967: K26). Additionally, IOC medical official Arnold Beckett noted some years later in discussing the introduction of on-site gender verification that rumours had been circulating that “the not completely female was competing in women’s sport” and that “some World records . . . were held by such persons” (Beckett, n.d.). He considered that the “countries concerned were probably aware of the doubts about the female characteristics of some of the competitors they were allowing to represent them but such was the pressure in International competitions that firm International action was required to deal with the problem” (Beckett, n.d.). Such comments highlight the significance of concerns over unscrupulous governments in motivating the introduction of on-site gender verification in the Cold War context. The presence of athletes from communist states and the suspicion that they used dubious methods to achieve sporting glory rendered in doubt the reliability of the femininity certification system: the old policy left gender verification to the discretion of local physicians, some of whom were working under untrusted (communist) systems of government. The certificates were consequently vulnerable to being mishandled and a possibility was left open for “ambitious selectors” to intentionally enter “abnormally” sexed bodies into women’s sport. The new on-site gender verification rule transferred the gender verification process to IAAF appointed experts and thus enabled the IAAF to assume direct control over the policing of the sex binary in high-stake events. This policy, unofficially called “naked parades” by athletes and sport observers because it required women to “parade” unclothed before the IAAF medical panel, was the first onsite gender verification method in international sport.

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While the change that the “naked parades” represented is significant, it would be somewhat misleading to characterise it as a paradigm shift. The new policy was in many ways a continuation of the precedent femininity certification system, which was now relocated on-site due to distrust of locally signed (Eastern bloc) femininity certificates. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the procedures based on which femininity had previously been certified by different local practitioners were not systematised. This was also true for the “naked parades” and there is evidence that different methods were used by different medical panels. British athlete Mary Peters, for example, provided one retrospective account about her experience of the “naked parades” at the Jamaica Commonwealth Games. She described it as the most crude and degrading experience I have ever known in my life. I was ordered to lie on the couch and pull my knees up. The doctors then proceeded to undertake an examination which, in modern parlance, amounted to a grope. Presumably they were searching for hidden testes. They found none and I left. (“Ladies Didn’t Run Until 1928: Now They Face the Sex Test Hurdle,” 1978: 9) Peters’ description suggests that the panel likely targeted gonadal and genital characteristics, which were investigated through gynaecological means. Such gynaecological examination would have localised “femaleness” onto gonadal and genital attributes, and the presence of the appropriate organs in Peters was clearly taken to verify her right to compete in women’s events. By contrast, American athlete Maren Sidler’s retrospective description the “naked parades” at the Winnipeg Pan American Games suggests that different IAAF medical panels applied different criteria of “femaleness.” Sidler remembered the Winnipeg “naked parades” as follows: They lined us up outside a room where there were three doctors sitting in a row behind desks. You had to go in and pull up your shirt and push down your pants. Then they just looked while you waited for them to confer and decide if you were OK. While I was in line I remember one of the sprinters, a tiny, skinny girl, came out shaking her head back and forth saying. “Well, I failed, I didn’t have enough up top. They say I can’t run and I have to go home because I’m not ‘big’ enough.” (Larned, 1976: 8) This description suggests that the Winnipeg medical panel used largely visual criteria of appropriate femininity rather than gynaecological examinations, probably evaluating secondary sex characteristics and the visual appearance of external genitalia. It suggests that Sidler’s femaleness was verified based on the medical panel members’ subjective assessments of appropriately feminine embodiment. Moreover, Sidler’s story also suggests that an athlete may have been considered insufficiently female based on “insufficient” breast size.

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Peters’ and Sidler’s memories, relating to different IAAF events and almost certainly to different medical panels, illustrate that whether an athletes’ body was taken as sufficient proof of her femaleness would have depended on the panel members’ views on what appropriate embodied femininity looks like. While an athlete might have been “passed” as female by one panel, the same athlete’s femaleness might have been questioned by another; indeed, I discuss this problem in Chapter 4, where I discuss an example of such a case. Yet the IAAF’s use of the unsystematised “naked parades” system demonstrates faith in “expert opinion” when it came to delineating femaleness and sex and gender appropriateness, reflecting a belief in the authority of medical “expertise.” Despite their differences, both Peters’ and Sidler’s descriptions of the procedures they underwent indicate that IAAF medical officials targeted the “naked reality” of the sexed body as that based on which femaleness could be verified. This is also suggested by the very label “naked parades.” This focus was, in turn, centrally contextualised by the late 1960s geopolitical landscape in which the policy was introduced. It was a context where “inappropriately” masculine female athletes from (communist) countries with corrupt politics and gender relations were dominating women’s athletics. Their suspiciously gendered bodily contours (and performances) stood in opposition to (appropriately feminine) female embodiment as it was conceptualised in relation to Western gender norms, rendering their claim to be female in doubt. The “naked reality” of the body was thus unveiled to the gaze of credible (IAAF-appointed) experts who in turn applied Western femininity norms to ascertain bodies’ femaleness, albeit in diverse and subjective ways. Shortly after on-site gender verification was instituted, it was reported that several successful Eastern European female athletes who were described as “borderline” bodies had withdrawn from international competition. The consequence, according to many observers, was the feminisation of women’s athletics.

Borderline bodies, hybrid creatures, and the feminisation of women’s sport The “naked parades” policy was in force at the time of the 1966 IAAF European championships in Budapest. During and following the competitions, several newspapers reported that some successful Eastern bloc female athletes had failed to attend the championships, including the Press sisters Irina and Tamara. Time magazine stated that “the absence . . . of several leading Russian women athletes from the championships” had “caused a great deal of discussion . . . on the subject of physiologically ‘borderline cases’ in women’s athletics” (“European Championships: Medical Tests for Female Athletes,” 1966: 3). It was implied that the athletes had declined to participate to avoid undergoing the new on-site gender verification procedure because they had “borderline” sex characteristics that might have caused them to “fail” gender verification. It is notable that the speculations accompanying these athletes’ withdrawal in many ways mirrored the concerns over “borderline” cases in women’s athletics

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already expressed in the 1930s, which I discussed in Chapter 2. In particular, newspaper reports emphasised the absent athletes’ physical prowess in ways that conflated their sporting success with implied sex abnormality. For example, one reporter not only noted that the Romanian athlete Iolanda “Balais held the [high jump] record since 1958, and no other girl has come near to equalling her,” but also claimed that Balaș had “declined to attend the medical examination now required by the organizing committee to determine the sex of competitors in women’s events” (Brasher, 1966a: C6). Comments like this suggested that the success of athletes like Balaș was caused by embodied borderline sex characteristics that conditioned their prowess in relation to “normal” women (here infantilised as “girls”). Some news accounts also claimed that female athletes’ bodies had been masculinised with “male hormones” or steroids. The New York Times commented that there “were four notable absentees – Tamara and Irina Press and Tatyana Schelkanova of the Soviet Union and Iolanda Balais of Romania” who “would not have passed the sex test because they had been taking male hormones to increase their strength” (“Sex Test Disqualifies Athlete,” 1967: 28). This not only implied that these athletes’ sporting prowess was the result of externally administered “male hormones” but also conflated gender verification with concerns over steroid doping. It intertwined the dual concerns over “borderline” sex and exogenously induced hormonal masculinisation of female athletes, both of which centred on sex and gender category pollution carried by powerful and successful female athletes from the Eastern bloc. Indeed, the introduction of on-site gender verification and the concurrent withdrawal of perceived “borderline” bodies like the Press sisters and Balaș appeared to many observers to be translating into the feminisation of women’s athletics. One reporter, for example, considered that the female members of the Russian team . . . were far more feminine than before – slimmer, prettier and with natural womanly instinct for lipstick, rouge and hair-dos – and not the husky mannish types such as the Press sisters, Tamara and Irina, who won three gold medals at Tokyo. The Press sisters and some other husky Russian athletes have reportedly refused to take the sex test. (Daley, 1968) The apparent replacement of these “husky mannish types” with prettier feminine women who had “natural womanly instincts” suggested that on-site gender verification had enabled the blossoming of appropriately feminine bodies and gender performances in women’s athletics – in accordance with Western white and middleclass body and behaviour norms. That behaviours like wearing “lipstick, rouge and hair-dos” were taken as a natural instinct for women is illustrative when placed in the context of Western representations of Cold War period Eastern bloc female athletes like the Press sisters. These athletes came to embody the “ugliness” and danger associated with female athletes’ masculinisation in ways that endured for decades.

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Exemplary is a news article proclaiming “why you WON’T look like Tamara if you take up sporting life” (O’Flaherty, 1975: 2, original capitals), which was written a decade after the Budapest championships by a reporter who took up the task of celebrating feminine women in sport in the 1970s. The reporter contrasted pictures of what he saw as beautiful 1970s female sporting bodies against a picture of “giant” Tamara Press’ strong body in full swing, showing her grimacing with effort. This “uglyfied” image of the Press sisters and other Eastern bloc athletes coupled with their withdrawal from competition provided legitimacy for on-site gender verification both in the 1960s and retrospectively. The on-site system appeared to be feminising or (gender) purifying women’s sport and it seemed that female athletes’ femininity could be regulated through bodily means of (medical) control. One year after the IAAF introduced “naked parades,” the IOC decided that onsite gender verification was also necessary for the Olympics. The methods the IOC chose for this purpose differed markedly from the “naked parades:” the IOC instituted a chromosomal screening paradigm, which I discuss in Chapter 4. Nonetheless, they followed the IAAF in mandating gender verification for all female athletes from 1968 onwards. Reflecting on the rationales for this, IOC Medical Commission member Jacques Thiebault, who was responsible for gender verification at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics, where the IOC on-site system was first trialled, remarked: It is useless to discuss at great length the reasons which crystallized this question [of the need for on-site gender verification]; most of the press and unfortunately the scandal-rags, have for a large part made themselves the echo of these so-called women, built like navvies and breaking records. It is inevitable that sooner or later, the representatives of the weaker sex should feel persecuted and ask that the feminine records be awarded to them. (1968: 1) Thiebault’s comments bring starkly to the fore the foregrounding social anxieties over masculinised bodies in women’s sport, contrasted against normal(ised) femaleness or womanhood. Indeed, Thiebault defined the latter not only as feminine but also as the “weaker sex” almost by definition, thus delineating the boundaries around appropriate female embodiment through presumed femininity and frailty. Thiebault (1968b: 16) outlined two explicit aims for on-site gender verification: he noted, firstly, that “our task in Grenoble was to . . . dissuade the hybrids from participating in the Games.” Secondly, he noted that “the moral means of the Medical Commission of the IOC should be employed to help such an ‘indetermined’ creature to become aware of its true situation and of the eventual therapeutics.” For Thiebault, the gender-suspect bodies at the heart of the gender verification question – labelled “hybrid,” “indetermined,” “creature,” and “it” – carried gender and sex binary pollution to the extent that their status not only as women but also as human was rendered in doubt. Their relegation as “it” and “creature” rubbed the suspect bodies off human identity and rendered them “hybrids” who disrupted the purity of Olympic bodies by carrying polluting category blur. Here, it is central that, as Butler (1993) has argued, one’s status

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as human is itself delineated and conditioned by gender attribution because the attribution of gender sustains and delimits that which qualifies as human proper. In other words, “to be human is to be physically sexed and culturally gendered” (Reis, 2009: xi), which is illustrated by subjects who fail to be appropriately sexed or gendered: “it is their very humanness that comes into question” (Butler, 1993: xvii). The task of on-site gender verification, for Thiebault, was to dissuade such category-disrupting bodies from participating in Olympic competitions to secure the femininity and gender purity of women’s Olympic records from sexed and gendered pollution. It was also to offer medical “therapeutics” for such bodies so that they may be re-integrated into the sex binary. It should be underlined that Thiebault’s and many of his colleagues’ rhetoric was foregrounded by pity and a demeaning kind of sympathy for the hybrid bodies that needed medical aid and kindliness from the IOC’s medical men, presumed to hold superior understanding about sexed “truth.” The stated objective was not to punish but “merely . . . to establish a lapse of nature on creatures to be pitied who will all their life remain inadapted” (Thiebault, 1968b: 2). Sport regulators were given a moral duty to identify and offer empathy and aid to the hybrids, namely, to bodies that failed to conform to normalised ideas about what female bodies were supposed be like in accordance with gendered, classed, and racialised body norms, whether such hybridity was known to those who had it or not. In a Latourian (1993) sense, binary sex and gender categories needed to be purified from hybrid creatures that could pollute category boundaries. Such hybridity was in turn seen as pitiful and made into an object of binary realignment through medical therapeutics. After the Grenoble Olympics, Thiebault observed that the IOC’s core aim of “hybrid dissuasion” appeared to be working. He considered this to lend legitimacy to the on-site gender verification procedure: “before the Olympic Games we learned through the press that two athletes, a Soviet Russian and a Bulgarian girl, had preferred to retire from the Grenoble Games,” which “seems to prove that our aim of dissuading has already been attained” (1968b: 7). The withdrawal of these Eastern bloc athletes constituted proof of the worthwhile character of onsite gender verification, as hybrid bodies from the East retracted and thus facilitated the feminisation of women’s Olympic sport from (their presumed) gender indeterminacy. The identification of gendered category pollution with the retracting bodies of the “other” not only dehumanised “their” hybrid bodies (as “it”) but also secured the differentiation between “their” (socially and politically corrupt) gender-polluting bodies and “our” (socially and politically superior) gender-pure bodies. Similarly, some years later, a journalist reported that the IOC president Brundage also considered on-site gender verification to have been an effective deterrent against hermaphrodites, who were believed to hold five out of 11 women’s world records before the tests were initiated. “They are more feminine now,” [Brundage] says. And he is right. This year’s Olympic roster will bulge with beauties. . . . The Olympics [will] look like beauty pageant gone athletic. (Dosti, 1972: W20)

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In ways closely mirroring his earlier 1930s concerns over hermaphroditic bodies in women’s sport, Brundage seems to have taken on-site gender verification as an effective deterrent mechanism through which the feminine gender appropriateness of women’s sport was secured. It is, of course, not coincidental that feminine purity was identified with the beautification and (hetero)sexual appeal of women athletes. Finally, the centrality of feminine embodiment as (proof of) “true” femaleness is exemplified by Thiebault’s (1968a: 1) reflections on the most appropriate label for gender verification: as gender verification was “meant solely for the feminine sex,” “I prefer the term ‘investigation of femininity.’ This has the advantage of . . . bringing in the term femininity, which represents a group of characteristics peculiar to women without, for as much, crudely bringing to mind precise anatomical characteristics.” That Thiebault side-lined anatomy and centred “femininity,” defining it (ambiguously) as “characteristics peculiar to women,” suggests that he wanted to emphasise feminine (bodily) presentation and performance, which he saw in terms of appropriately gendered appearance and behaviour. Thiebault, at least, thus explicitly advocated femininity as the site of policing and as the object of gender verification: the aim was to “investigate” athletes’ femininity to verify that they were feminine enough to merit status as female. On-site gender verification was taken by Thiebault and others, then, as a successful policing measure because it seemed to be feminising women’s sport by deterring hybrid bodies who represented the breakdown of sex and gender boundaries by inhabiting sex category borderlines. “Hybridity” was not only identified with the bodies of the Eastern bloc “other” but what hybridity itself implied was constituted in relation to the geopolitically framed Cold War gendered imaginaries around embodied as well as political “purity” and “pollution.”

Conclusion The Cold War East/West division and the related geopolitically framed “us” versus “them” differentiation formed constitutive conditions for the emergence of new social anxieties over “pure” versus “polluted” bodies in international sport. While political as well as embodied purity was associated with Western values and bodies, pollution was associated with the values and bodies of the communist Eastern bloc, whose presence in international sports was perceived by sports officials and Western observers as a politically polluting force. The bodies of female athletes and Eastern bloc female athletes in particular became one focus for the “purification” of sports from pollution. International sports competitions were a setting where the ideological and cultural Cold War battles were waged between the East and the West. The bodies of athletes in general and female athletes in particular were symbolic of their nations’ body politic, and Western imaginaries of communist politics and gender relations as corrupt or contaminated were mapped onto the bodies of female athletes from the Eastern bloc. Their “masculine” bodies and “male-like” performance levels

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were a negative and potentially dangerous contrast to Western (white middleclass) femininity ideals, in turn constructed around binarised gender relations and (hetero)norms. The effect was that un-apologetically muscular and powerful female athletes from communist countries disproportionately appeared to Western observers as gender suspect or “borderline.” This was intertwined with increasing concern over doping and anabolic steroids in particular, and these concerns were articulated against the backdrop of the Olympic ideal of purity not only in relation to embodiment but also in relation to political intervention. Perceptions of communist politics as corrupt incited suspicions that unscrupulous governments were polluting the Olympic ideals with their dubious political agendas as well as their athletes’ bodies with artificial substances. This included suspicions that female athletes were being hormonally masculinised with steroids. The gendered concerns that arose against this political context became entangled in ways that incited a change in the gender verification policy. International sport regulators aligned with Western values and were concerned that corrupt governments were intentionally sending “abnormally” sexed bodies and bodies that had been artificially masculinised with “male hormones” into women’s competitions to achieve sporting glory. They consequently assumed control over the policing of the sex binary by instituting on-site gender verification undertaken by selected medical officials. The “naked parades” instituted by the IAAF unveiled the “naked truth” of female athletes’ bodies to the expert gaze of medical specialists elected by the IAAF, who used subjective, Western-centric criteria of appropriate femininity to evaluate whether athletes’ bodies carried sufficient femininity to prove their femaleness. That some “hybrid” and “borderline” athletes from the Eastern bloc retracted from competition after on-site gender verification was instituted was taken as evidence that the on-site system was working: it appeared to be feminising women’s sport, in accordance with Western norms of appropriately feminine embodiment and behaviour. The shift from locally conducted femininity certification to on-site gender verification was driven, then, by the entry of unconventionally strong and gender transgressive (communist) female bodies into international sports – bodies that challenged and threatened Western Cold War constructs of normative female embodiment. Their femaleness was consequently rendered in doubt and in need of verification by medical officials like Thiebault, who considered Western medical men to hold superior understanding of their gendered predicament. He imagined gender-suspect female athletes’ bodies as not only potentially “hybrid” but also pitiful, in need of sympathy and medical “therapeutics” to bring them back in line with the Western binary sex and gender system. In the next chapter, I discuss how the medicalising rhetoric advanced by Thebault and others was used by IOC medical officials to construct a chromosomal screening-based onsite gender verification paradigm. Through this paradigm, the hybrid or abnormal bodies identified through gender verification became objects of medical sex binary realignment.

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Notes 1 That collective imaginaries are shared does not imply they are homogeneous. Rather, national imaginaries may be dynamic, relational, and unevenly distributed along socioeconomic and socio-demographic lines. What matters for my analysis is the hegemonic imaginaries that gain dominance within specific contexts in cultural productions such as newspapers and the media more generally despite being contested from within. 2 The IAAF 1931 rulebook (the earliest rulebook I consulted) includes a rule stating, “Doping is the use of any stimulant not normally employed to increase the power of action in athletic competition above the average . . . any person knowingly acting or assisting as explained above, shall be excluded [or] suspended for a time” (IAAF, 1931: 20). A document available via the IAAF website states that the IAAF actually instituted this rule as early as 1928, thus becoming the first International Sporting Federation to introduce anti-doping regulations (IAAF, n.d.). 3 See Chapter 2, footnote 5.

Chapter 4

Sex screening and diagnosis in the Olympics

Two years after the IAAF had instituted the “naked parades” policy, the IOC followed suit and introduced an on-site gender verification policy also for the Olympic Games. The IOC policy differed, however, remarkably from the “naked parades.” Instead of relying on the “naked truth” of women’s bodies’ external contours, the IOC introduced a diagnostic paradigm for sex that was intended as a multi-stage framework to identify and treat sex “abnormalities.” The paradigm was based around a chromosomal screening system: all female athletes were made to undergo screening to confirm the presence of the second X chromosome and the absence of the Y chromosome in order to establish that they had a “female” (i.e. XX) chromosome constitution. In cases where chromosome screening produced “abnormal” results, the IOC could require athletes to undergo a cluster of further medical examinations in order to discover the final “truth” of sex and to diagnose and treat (or normalise) any sex pathology. In many ways, the IOC’s on-site paradigm represented an attempt to move beyond (subjective) assessments of feminine embodiment, vaguely defined, such as those the IAAF had relied on. The IOC aimed instead to move towards a more modern and scientific delineation and definition of “femaleness,” taken to be verifiable through sophisticated medical examination methods. In this chapter, I focus on the chromosome screening system that the IOC implemented, which embedded within broader changes in the relationship between sport, science, and medicine that resulted in intensified medicalisation of the Olympics Games. This was embodied by the creation of the IOC Medical Commission (IOC-MC), which encouraged the expansion of scientific and medical approaches to athletic embodiment not only in the Olympics but across the sporting world. The IOC-MC erected a medical control paradigm over athletes’ bodies that made them objects of widespread and compulsory scientific surveillance. This infused Olympic values with scientific epistemologies, including medicalised policing of the sex binary that drew from broader 1960s medical theories around the management and treatment of sex pathologies. Despite the rhetoric of scientific sophistication, the IOC’s on-site gender verification paradigm continued to be centrally targeted at purifying the female category in sport from sex binary hybridity carried by “abnormal” bodies. This purification

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was, however, now achieved by using more sophisticated diagnosis and treatment technologies, which enabled the IOC-MC to not only detect sex “abnormalities” but also integrate them into broader clinical treatment frameworks. Treatment would, in turn, “correct” the abnormalities and, in so doing, realign the previously abnormal bodies with the sex binary. Alternatively, athletes could also be excluded from women’s sport due to their failure to embody “female” chromosomes, or “femaleness” more generally, normatively.

The medicalisation of the Olympics The years leading up to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics were, as Alison Wrynn has observed, “the beginning of [a] modern relationship between science, medicine and Olympic competition” (2004: 211). During the 1960s, human athletic performance was increasingly conceptualised in scientific and medical terms. The IOC not only sought to collaborate with external scientific organisations such as the Fédération Internationale Médicine Sportive, but it also changed its own organisational structure to better integrate scientific approaches into Olympic governance. Along with the International Cycling Union, the IOC was the first sport organisation to form a medical commission (IOC, 2015). The creation of the IOC-MC “was perhaps the event that foreshadowed the future direction of the Olympic Movement” (Wrynn, 2004: 215): under the leadership of Prince Alexander de Merode of Belgium, the IOC-MC designed and directed a medical surveillance framework over the Olympics and Olympic athletes’ bodies in particular, infusing the Games with scientific epistemologies. The IOC-MC re-configured the foundational values of Olympism in ways that made them compatible with scientific pursuits (Henne, 2015). The core value of Olympic purity in relation to bodily purity, in particular, was conceptualised as something that could be secured using science. The most important decision that was made during the first IOC-MC meeting was to supplement the Olympic Games’ entry form with a new mandate: all participating athletes were now required “to undergo any examination thought necessary in the interest of both his [or her] health and future” as dictated by the IOC-MC. This made Olympic entry conditional upon submission to medical control (IOC-MC, 1967b). One year later, the IOC-MC ruled that athletes had to undergo testing at least “for doping and sex,” and “by signing the entry forms, [athletes] waiver their rights to protest” (IOC, 1968: 5–6). The IOC-MC thus integrated scientific methodologies within the Olympic value system by mobilising medical control as a tool for the surveillance of Olympic values, which meant that athletes’ bodies became the objects of compulsory medical scrutiny. This institutionalisation of medical control medicalised the kinds of bodily “pollution” that were associated with sex category blur and artificial substances: it enabled a conceptualisation of bodily “purity” as a medical or scientific problem that could be managed through on-site gender verification and doping control. Key to this was the institution of what can be conceptualised as medical

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examination apparatuses: IOC-MC instituted a cluster of scientific and medical examinations that were targeted, firstly, at protecting the “purity” of binarised and normalised sex categories against pollution carried by “hybrids” or sex abnormalities. Secondly, they were targeted at protecting the “natural” or “pure” body against pollution carried by “artificial” or “unnatural” (doping) substances. The effect of this medical control framework was that athletes’ bodies were placed “in a situation of almost perpetual examination,” in Foucault’s (1991: 186) words. They were required to submit both the boundaries and interiors of their bodies to medical scrutiny, which imposed upon athletes’ bodies “a principle of compulsory visibility” (Foucault, 1991: 186). Foucault (2003) has argued that such examinations function principally to place the subjects that are examined in a field of surveillance against the medical norm, at the same time as medical experts take responsibility over the control and management of that which diverts from the norm (i.e. the “abnormal”). Through this “normativity of medical knowledge” (Foucault, 2003: 42), medical examination apparatuses place bodies under (medical) discipline. Individual deviations from the norm can be identified by combining continual surveillance and normalising judgement. The IOC-MC thus worked to protect Olympic values by rendering visible the boundaries and interiors of athletes’ bodies, and it then used medical norms as the standard against which these bodies were evaluated. The institution of compulsory medical examinations meant that athletic embodiment was now more firmly than before conceptualised as an object of science and medical intervention, but it also reinforced the idea that athletes’ bodies were, always already, suspect. The publication of gender controversies and doping violations in sport during the 1960s seemed to support the idea that “suspicious” bodies were infusing international competitions. By erecting a systematised medical control paradigm to protect the Olympics from such bodies, the IOC-MC effectively institutionalised bodily suspicion as part of the Olympic regulatory framework. As Kathryn Henne (2015) has argued, the use of medical methodologies as regulatory tools provides a seemingly objective and legitimate basis for justifying or rationalising suspicion aimed at athletes’ bodies. While the concerns around doping and gender verification were intertwined in many ways, as I have argued previously, here I focus on the medicalisation of the sex binary in the Olympic context. Firstly, however, I need to map the prevalent 1960s ideas about the science and medicine of sex difference and pathology, because they foreground the medical framework that was erected around the sex binary in the Olympic context.

The medical management of sex abnormalities In the 1950s, John Money and colleagues, Joan and John Hampson, formulated a medical model for gender assignment that became the hegemonic scientific framework for understanding sex and gender variance, as I discussed in Chapter 1. While medical experts on sex difference had disagreed on which elements were

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most significant for sex determination, there had for decades been a general consensus that several needed to be taken into account in final sex assignment (Reis, 2009: 137). The paradigm formulated by Money and colleagues was built on this consensus. It based gender designation, not on any individual sexed or gendered element, but on a desired congruence between psychology, gender presentation, and bodily configuration. Money and colleagues considered congruence imperative, because they believed that it was vital for all subjects to live un-ambiguously gendered and sexed lives: they considered that if an individual’s sexed bodily characteristics were inconsistent with their gender identity and gender of rearing, this would result in severe negative psychological consequences (Karkazis, 2008; Kessler, 1998). In effect, however, the congruence model enforced a conceptualisation of sex abnormality where “inconsistently” sexed bodily attributes, such as “ambiguous” genitals, were seen to require “correction” or normalisation (through medical treatment or surgical intervention) to maintain overall gender and sex congruence. That is, “inconsistently” sexed and gendered bodies were seen to require realignment with the sex and gender binaries. Central to the medical management of many sex binary non-confirming bodies under Money and colleagues’ model was a medicalised language of deformed or mal-developed sexed organs, where mal-development was defined against “normal” development, in turn understood as natural. In other words, the medical treatment of sex “inconsistencies” or abnormalities was conceptualised as “natural because such intervention returns the body to what it ought to have been if events had taken their typical course. The nonnormative is converted into the normative, and the normative state is considered natural,” and the natural state is binary sex and gender (Kessler, 1998: 31). IOC-MC officials’ ideas about sex difference and abnormality were embedded within these medical discourses, and the officials adhered to the imperative of realignment so that people might live their lives un-ambiguously gendered. The international sporting context was also centrally defined by the need for rigorous sex binarisation, motivated by the mutually exclusive female and male competition categories. As I discussed in Chapter 3, during the 1960s, sport officials’ gendered concerns were targeted at hybrid or excessively masculinised bodies in women’s competitions. They were especially concerned about the presence of “excessive” amounts of androgenic hormones in female bodies, including synthetic steroids. These hormones seemed capable of transgressing the boundary between “male” and “female,” influencing not only bodily sex characteristics but also female athletes’ performance potential in ways seen to threaten the clarity of binarised sex in sport. While hormones may have seemed to render the sex binary volatile, Richardson (2013) has argued that chromosomal sex nonetheless “remained intact as the kernel or foundation of the biological sex concept. The X and Y chromosomes came to represent the necessary alter ego of gender fluidity, because chromosomes were conceptualised ‘as developmentally prior’ to hormones, representing what “nature intended” (Richardson, 2013: 9). It was, indeed, chromosomes

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which came to be foregrounded by the IOC-MC when it came to sex difference. The key gender verification method they chose was the buccal smear for the Barr body, or what was also called “sex chromatin,” which indicates the presence of a second X chromosome. The discovery of the Barr body in the late 1940s was a significant scientific event because it seemed to allow “scientists and clinicians to ‘see’ something that was otherwise effectively invisible” (Miller, 2006: 460). With the buccal smear test for the Barr body, which involved scraping cells from inside the mouth, “trained observers could see the presence or absence of a dark spot within a cell nucleus, and by proxy, the presence or absence of a female sex chromosome constitution” (Miller, 2006: 460). Barr body examination thus seemed to unveil a sexed reality previously hidden, enabling a visual penetration beneath the sexed or gendered appearances of bodies, into a reality carried by cells within. Since its discovery, Barr body testing has been used in the medical interpretation of sex and gender “ambiguous” bodies. It “offered practical support to the clinical and cultural demand for a sexually dichotomous world” (Miller, 2006: 462). In the context of international sport, the possibility of chromosome-based gender verification seemed, for some, to offer a solution to sexed and gendered concerns by providing a simple gender verification method in the face of “indeterminate” bodies. The IOC first adopted Barr body as a gender verification method in 1968. By 1972, they added a fluorescent body test for the Y-chromosome, which indicates the presence of the Y chromosome and also involved a buccal smear (IOC, 1972). The distal part of the long arm of the Y chromosome – if the Y chromosome was present – could be made visible to trained observers, showing as bright fluorescence when stained and examined under ultraviolet light. The addition of this test was notable, because as the Y chromosome is conceptualised as “male,” female bodies could now be revealed to carry a hidden “male” reality located on a cellular level and exposed by laboratory examination. Such male reality, if present, functioned as proof of a troubling internal sex inconsistency that amounted to abnormality. To be verified as females, the IOC’s chromosome-based tests thus required athletes to embody the presence of the Barr body (and therefore the second X chromosome) and the absence of the fluorescent body (and therefore the Y chromosome). However, while the IAAF also adopted a chromosome screening system in 1968, it only carried out Barr body testing and not fluorescent body testing (IOC, 1988a). Some sport observers and officials saw chromosome testing as an incontestable gender verification method in ways that built on conceptualisations of chromosomes as unalterable “truth” of sex. For example, editorial commentators writing for the British Medical Journal noted the following in relation to gender verification: the “appearance of the body and external genitalia [are] largely determined by hormonal factors” and, therefore, “genetic males may resemble females” – however “the ‘true sex’ is readily confirmed by chromosomal testing” (“Sex of Athletes,” 1967: 185). For these commentators, chromosomes embodied “true

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sex” to the extent that hormonally induced attributes amounted to mere appearances. True sex could be revealed from underneath these appearances by using chromosome testing. Such genetic determinism was likely foregrounded by a desire to maintain binary sex as a “natural” reality, even in the face of bodies who carried sexed binary blur. As IOC official Belioux concluded adamantly, “it has been scientifically proven that hermaphroditism does not exist. One is born a man or a woman and one remains of that sex” (1967: 1), as the Klebsian model of sex classification discussed in Chapter 1 had determined. Yet, Murray Barr, who first encountered the Barr body and was the leading scientific authority on the subject, had from early on issued cautions about the status and significance of his finding. Barr argued that Barr body testing should not outweigh clinical judgement about appropriate gender assignment for individuals. He “pledged for the utmost in caution and diplomacy in the use of such expressions as . . . ‘genetic female or genetic male’ when applying [the] tests of sex clinically” (1956: 47). Rather, he preferred to see less committal expressions used in the clinic to avoid deterministic interpretations. These warnings reflected the broader medical consensus on the desirability of sex and gender congruence, whereby patients should be managed in ways enabling them to live sex-un-ambiguous lives. The aim of Barr’s warnings was to “avoid placing a psychological burden on patients of a truth about their sex that their physical condition might not approximate” (Miller, 2006: 473). Notably, Barr’s cautious approach was shared by the IOC-MC officials who were responsible for developing the IOC on-site gender verification paradigm. While genetically deterministic ideas about chromosomes were expressed by some IOC official (like Belioux), it is important that the IOC-MC officials who designed the chromosome-based gender verification system did not conceptualise chromosomes as deterministic. They did not envision chromosomes as the sole criterion that proved femaleness. Rather, they built on medical models of sex and gender normality, abnormality, congruence, and corrective treatment at the same time as they needed to divide sports into binary sex categories. Before I move to discuss the IOC-MC paradigm itself, however, an account of the limitations and complexities of the precedent IAAF on-site gender verification system is necessary.

Naked parades, embarrassment, and further examinations While the IAAF’s “naked parades” principally involved women parading nude in front of a medical panel that assessed the “naked truth” of their bodies, there is also evidence that in some cases, the IAAF required athletes to undergo “further examinations.” These examinations were used to corroborate “suspicious findings” made during the naked parades. The clearest example of this concerns the Polish athlete Ewa Klobukowska, who had been a 400-meter relay gold medallist at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1967, newspapers reported that Klobukowska had

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“failed” a gender verification test during the IAAF Kiev European Cup, where the “naked parades” policy was applied. However, it was not the “naked parade” itself during which she reportedly failed. Rather, she had failed a chromosome test. According to The New York Times, “following the medical examination, the doctors reported . . . that Miss Klobukowska had ‘one chromosome too many’ to qualify as a woman” (“Sex Test Disqualifies Athlete,” 1967: 28). While all news reports about the incident emphasised that the examination Klobukowska failed was chromosome-based, what exactly this examination consisted of and why a chromosome test was carried out is not clear. Moreover, it was reported that Klobukowska had actually previously passed the IAAF naked parades during the 1966 IAAF European championships in Budapest. Time magazine noted that Klobukowska had “paraded naked before three women doctors . . . and was passed as a woman without question,” but “irked by complaints that previous nets had not screened out all contestants of doubtful femaleness, the I.A.A.F. ordered chromosome tests for European Cup competitors at Kiev” (“Genetics: Mosaic in X & Y,” 1967). Interestingly, this would suggest that all female athletes in Kiev were submitted to chromosome tests, but the accuracy of this claim is questionable. Official documentation of IAAF gender verification methods indicate that the IAAF applied chromosome-based testing for all female athletes for the first time only in 1968, after the IOC had adopted their chromosome-based tests (Holt, 1983). Albeit writing many years after the events surrounding Klobukowska, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith and Elizabeth Ferris (1991: 18) suggested that Klobukowska was likely submitted to and “failed” a chromosome-based test because the naked parades in Kiev had rendered her body suspicious. They suggest that “further investigations” involving chromosome analysis were only subsequently carried out. Whichever version is correct, two conclusions can be drawn from this. Firstly, while the IAAF mandated naked parades as their official on-site gender verification policy from 1966 till 1968 in high-stakes events, decisions about eligibility in the last instance were not always made based on the naked parades alone. That the IAAF used chromosome analysis to verify Klobukowska’s gender foreshadowed the IOC-MC’s decision-making in relation gender verification. It also suggests that at least some IAAF officials recognised that determining an athlete’s sex sometimes required the analysis of multiple sex attributes, rather than just observation of external embodied “femininity.” Secondly, that Klobukowska first passed the naked parade in Budapest but was then rendered gender “suspicious” based on the same gender verification method in Kiev exemplifies the subjective nature of the naked parades system. As I noted in Chapter 3, this primarily visual assessment of athletes’ embodied femininity was based on the medical panel members’ subjective criteria of appropriately feminine embodiment. In cases where such assessments incited doubt about an athlete’s gender, it seems that further examinations could be mandated to verify or discover the athlete’s final truth of sex. The discovery of another “abnormal” Eastern bloc female athlete in 1967 – only a year after the suspicious withdrawal of several prominent Eastern European

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women like the Press sisters from international competition – came at a sensitive gendered time for international sport-governing bodies. However, the Klobukowska affair also coincided with uncomfortable commentaries that were being directed at the IAAF naked parades method: some observers perceived it as a degrading and humiliating practice of compelling women to strip naked. The Observer, for example, stated that “girls stripping and parading in front of a panel” was a “very embarrassing procedure” (Brasher, 1966b: 1). The Times quoted a coach, who had commented that “some girls . . . would simply not feel happy about undergoing [physical] examinations – it is a difficult matter psychologically and there may be a few who would prefer not to compete . . . for fear of embarrassment” (“Medical Test for Female Athletes,” 1966: 3). While these critiques were targeted at the IAAF, the IOC-MC was aware of them. Indeed, some IOC officials explicitly worked to distance the IOC-MC from accusations of gender verification being humiliating for female athletes. They did this by emphasising the apparent neutrality of the IOC chromosome-based gender verification method when contrasted against the IAAF system: IOC medical official Thiebault, for example, argued that the IOC’s laboratory-based system avoided any possible psychological difficulties, because there was “nothing shocking” about undergoing a mere buccal smear (1968b: 7). After the first round of IOC on-site gender verification had been conducted in Grenoble, Thibault noted that while many “young women were very tense upon their arrival,” as “soon as they understood the method that was to be used they relaxed and were visibly relieved that they did not have to undergo anatomical examination” (1968b: 7). The IAAF naked parades can thus be seen to have been a stimulus for the chromosome screening paradigm: the critique directed at the naked parades also supported the use of laboratory-based examinations, which seemed more neutral, scientific, and less problematic in comparison. Key to the IOC on-site paradigm was the IOC-MC’s claim to medical expertise and sophistication.

A diagnostic paradigm for sex The IOC on-site gender verification paradigm was first trialled during the 1967 International Sport Competitions in Mexico City and implemented for the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics. While IOC medical officials balloted at random 50 female athletes to be gender verified at Grenoble (Thiebault, 1968b: 7), by the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics all athletes registered as female were subjected to chromosome screening on-site. To avoid repeating the screening tests, the IOC-MC gave “all women athletes a medical certificate which will be valid for all their future competitions” (IOC, 1968: 3). This certificate, which mirrored the older femininity certificates that I discussed in Chapter 2 but was now authorised by the IOC-MC, was named “certificate of tests of sexual chromatin.” However, while the on-site gender verification paradigm was based on chromosome screening, it was not designed to exclude athletes based on chromosomes alone. Rather, as it was originally designed and envisioned by IOC-MC

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officials, the buccal smear for the Barr body was, indeed, just as a screening test. If suspicious findings were obtained from the screening, athletes were to be subjected to further examinations. In Thiebault’s (1968b: 3) words, gender verification was to be “carried out by progressive phases, in order to confirm the diagnosis completely” and if the number of chromosome indicators “counted is insufficient, investigations must be continued and care be taken not to make a hasty diagnosis.” The “progressive phases” for diagnosing the possible presence of sex “abnormality” and establishing the final truth of sex involved, firstly, a karyotype test or complete chromosome mapping. Then, if “the diagnosis is still doubtful, . . . a complete hormonal check-up of the athlete” was to be carried out, including “the study of the menstrual cycle” and “the athlete’s anatomical and physical structure” (Thiebault, 1968b: 3). Moreover, an article in the Olympic Newsletter discussing gender verification at the Mexico City Olympics noted that the “medical service will not only take note of such things as attitude, social conduct and dress, but will also make intensive examinations – including psychiatric tests – to determine primary and secondary sexual characteristics” (“Medicine and Sport,” 1968). The article emphasised that chromosome findings should not be used for the purposes of final sex determination especially because among “the varied examples of human pathology caused by abnormalities of the sex chromosomes, one of the most interesting – from the viewpoint of sex determination in the athlete – is that of male pseudohermaphrodite, since if he competes, he should do so as female” (“Medicine and Sport,” 1968). “Male pseudohermaphroditism,” in accordance with the Klebsian classification system, referred to individuals with female or “feminised” secondary sex characteristics and genitalia who also have testes and a Y chromosome. The recognition that such “males” (despite the inaccurate gendering) should compete as females show that IOC officials were aware that chromosome were not the sole determinant of sex. The gender verification paradigm designed was motivated by the broader medical discourses around sex abnormality during the late 1960s, and it illustrates the medicalised approach taken towards “abnormal” sex more generally. Rather than imagining the sex binary as manageable (merely) through chromosomal determinism, the IOC-MC constructed a diagnostic model with several phases of sex identification that incorporated multiple components that could be separately analysed to “confirm sex diagnosis completely” for each body under investigation. By drawing from medical discourses, the IOC applied medical norms of health and pathology to “diagnose” athletes’ femaleness (or lack thereof). At the same time, those who were diagnosed as abnormal could be subjected to intervention (or “correction”) to realign them with the (normalised) sex binary through medical intervention. The (rhetoric of) sympathy that Thiebault expressed for the “hybrid” bodies that gender verification was designed to identify is illustrative of this. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the IOC-MC’s explicit aim was not only to dissuade hybrid bodies from participating in women’s competitions, but also to offer medical

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treatment for sex “indeterminacy.” Thiebault argued that a “hybrid discovery” during Olympic competition, especially if made at a young age, was likely to have a positive outcome. This was because “all therapeutics can still be applied” and “it is not too late to do something about psychic reintegration into the true sex, if necessary” (1968b: 8). Thiebault considered IOC-MC officials to have a moral duty to provide medical aid for the “hybrids” identified through gender verification: Above all other things – even the Olympic Games – we should place our duty as physicians and, should we come across such hybrid creatures, prescribe medical treatment if possible, or at least help them to accept their fate, as we try to do when we discover any other infirmity. (Thiebault, 1968b: 2) Thiebault’s and other IOC-MC officials’ views in the late 1960s, then, largely corresponded with the medical consensus of sex and gender coherence. Indeed, medical commentators during this period imagined binary non-conforming bodies to constitute a medical and psychological tragedy, to the extent that freakhood would be their fate if their cases were improperly medically managed. Ambiguous sex was framed as a “tragic event which immediately conjures up visions of a hopeless psychological misfit doomed to live always as a sexual freak” if the “freakness” was not normalised (Dewhurst & Gordon, 1969, cited in FaustoSterling, 2000: 47). Thiebault’s remarks mirrored his contemporaries’ belief in the idea that “good medical decisions” are based on interpretations of “real sex” (Kessler, 1998); at the same time, overall sex and gender congruity should be enabled via medical normalisation to after the real sex had been identified, for the person’s own good. The rhetoric of sympathy was, however, foregrounded by more implicit social anxieties over the breakdown of binary sex and gender categories. The IOC-MC gender verification paradigm and the (normalising) medical treatments centrally functioned as tools for sex category purification, by screening out or re-aligning binary polluting sex “abnormalities” through medical means if necessary. The paradigm functioned, in other words, to detect and purify category pollution that made the boundary between binarised sex unstable. As such, it exemplifies the medicalisation of the Olympic value of bodily purity. Central to enabling this was the construction of an examination apparatus that exposed not only bodily boundaries but also bodily interiors to the medical gaze: by examining bodies to detect sexed abnormalities, IOC medical experts could control binarised sex by placing bodies under medical discipline. Chromosome screening carried other implications as well. Previously, athletes’ “femaleness” had primarily been verified based on the external contours of their bodies’ “naked truth,” whereby suspiciously masculine external appearances would have incited doubt about their sex. Chromosome screening, however, was capable of inciting suspicion also about bodies that appeared “normal” or appropriately feminine. As all female athletes had to undergo the screening as a

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condition of eligibility to compete, even appropriately feminine bodies could now reveal a suspicious or “abnormal” sexed reality present within bodily interiors, located at a cellular level. This was particularly so with fluorescent body testing for the Y chromosome, because normatively feminine bodies could reveal (a sex-inconsistent) “male” chromosomal reality, visible not from external bodily contours but from cells unveiled by laboratory examinations. The introduction of chromosome screening thus matured a conceptualisation of gendered suspicion where “innocent” appearing bodies might hide an internal sex uncertainty, which could now be exposed by observing chromosomes. It was no longer just masculine or masculinised bodily contours that signalled gender trouble but also the “male-like” interiors of female bodies that failed to show an appropriate chromosome count. As Henne (2015: 148) has noted in relation to doping control but equally applicable to gender verification, the IOC’s paradigm of body surveillance perpetuated an enduring “cycle of suspicion” that reminded elite sport officials and observers also “to be suspicious of the bodies that may look ‘normal.’” Yet, despite being originally envisioned as a complex diagnostic paradigm for sex and sex pathology, the practical consequences of the IOC on-site gender verification system were varied for two key reasons. Firstly, since the late 1960s, gender verification was practiced not only by IOC-MC officials but also by smaller international and local sport organisations to “pre-screen” athletes’ Olympic eligibility. Consequently, the application of gender verification was from the outset escalated outside the IOC’s direct control. Secondly, despite the original aim, which was to arrive at a complete sex diagnosis for athletes identified as suspicious during the chromosome screening, this aim was often not carried through, even by the IOC itself. The effect was that ineligibility and suspect gender status were the practical consequences for some athletes “caught” in the chromosome screening net. The rest of this chapter considers these issues and highlights how far sport officials and medical professionals were willing to go to obtain their sex diagnoses.

The impact of on-site gender verification in the Olympics Only a year after the publication of Klobukowska’s story, newspapers reported another gender verification controversy, this time concerning Austrian women’s downhill skiing world champion Erika Schinegger. Newspapers conveyed that Schinegger “had to withdraw from [the Grenoble] winter Olympics because of difficulty in proving total femininity” and added that, afterwards, Schinegger announced that “she will resume her racing career next winter – this time as a man” (“Ski World Loses a Queen as Erika Becomes ‘Erik,’” 1968: 17). It was reported that Schinegger had “changed her sex in a series of operations” and that the treatment “was begun after the skier developed male characteristics” (“Austrian Girl Skier Changes Her Sex,” 1968: 13). There are remarkable similarities between these late 1960s news stories about Schinegger and news stories about athletes like Weston and Koubek published

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in the 1930s, which I discussed in Chapter 3. While stories about Schinegger place a stronger emphasis on medical and surgical technology, the language of internally incited sex transformation (albeit no longer described as a metamorphosis) continues to frame the late 1960s and early 1970s news stories. Like their 1930s counterparts, these stories described a process of masculinisation that was begun due to pre-existing male potential. The continuity is noteworthy in particular because by the late 1960s, other interpretative frames would have been readily available for reporters due to the existence of more refined understandings of both intersex and transsexuality (Meyerowitz, 2002). Importantly, however, as Schinegger’s “masculinised” body was identified through gender verification, his story seemed to support the idea that abnormally sexed bodies were indeed being identified and then medically treated or corrected because of the new gender verification paradigm. This was especially because Schinegger, who changed his name to Erik, had every intention and also the performance level required to continue competition in the men’s category, even while he may have initially carried “abnormal masculinity” unwittingly. Two years after the publication of his “change of sex,” newspapers reported that Schinegger aimed to qualify for the Austrian men’s team. Among other things, he had “won the [men’s] giant slalom race at Kaprun, Austria, beating his teammate, David Zwilling, who will compete for Austria in next week’s world championships” (“Erika Becomes Erik, Makes Skiing Comeback,” 1970: C1). While Schinegger never accomplished in the male category the kind of success he achieved in the female category, this former female competitor’s ability to compete against men at advanced level was noted by observers. Indeed, like Weston had, Schinegger himself came to believe that his previous success in women’s competitions was undeserved: in 1988, he handed his 1966 women’s world championships gold medal to the second-place finisher, commenting that “I won the race as a woman, but, without realising it, I was a man. That’s why the medal doesn’t belong to me” (“Sport in Brief: Skiing,” 1988: 17).1 Throughout many interviews spanning several decades, Schinegger continued to emphasise that he had believed – mistakenly – himself to be a woman, and it was only the gender verification conducted prior to the Grenoble Olympics that had corrected this belief. As late as 2005, he maintained that “I believed I was a girl, I thought I was a lesbian,” and he added that his gender verification results had “turned out to be a blessing:” “I was very lucky. If I did not become world champion, and did not undergo those tests, . . . I would have carried on being a man living as a woman” (“Film Tells the Story of the Man Who Was the World’s Female Ski Champion,” 2005). This conviction corresponds with Thiebault’s ideas about the benevolent aims of gender verification as a form of corrective medical aid provided for “indeterminate” bodies so that they may become “aware of their true situation” and, if necessary, receive therapeutics for “psychic reintegration into the true sex.” Schinegger’s story also illustrates, however, the dispersion of the late 1960s medical examinations of sex outside the IOC’s direct control, and the lengths to which medical sex testing could be taken when “indeterminate” cases were

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identified. Schinegger’s story is among the most widely documented cases of gender-suspect bodies in women’s sport,2 and there exists a relatively detailed documentation of the events surrounding his gender verification, including his personal experiences. In 1967, the Austrian women’s skiing team was taken to the Innsbruck University Hospital for gender verification in preparation for the Grenoble Olympics. After multiple examinations had been carried out on him, Schinegger was called back by the gender verification team and informed that he had not passed the examinations because “internal male sex organs” were discovered (Broadbent, 2009). Building on extracts from his autobiography, The Los Angeles Times conveyed that the doctors responsible for carrying out the examinations put Schinegger “through extensive medical and psychological testing” and proceeded to “opening his lower torso area” (“Man Who Won ’66 Women’s Downhill Gives Up Medal,” 1988: B15). That these examinations were conducted not by the IOC but under local Austrian authorities shows, as the IOC-MC official Beckett (n.d.: 3–4) later noted, that the introduction of mandatory on-site gender verification in the Olympics meant that “immediately most countries took greater care in their own selection of competitors for women’s events.” Such “greater care” evidently took the form of local pre-screening of female athletes. As one prominent gender verification critic noted two decades later, “many national and local sports clubs . . . started screening young people. . . .What goes on at large international games [is] just the tip of the iceberg” (de la Chapelle, 1987a). The diffused pre-Olympic gender verification practices carried out by national authorities and smaller sport organisations were neither systematised nor even properly recorded by the IOC. This meant that there was no centralised regulation over these practices. Illustrative of this are comments made by IOC-MC officials responsible for gender verification during a working group meeting that took place as recently as 1988. From the meeting minutes, it is clear that IOC-MC officials did not know which international sport federations were performing gender verification, nor which methods were used for this purpose (IOC, 1988a), demonstrating a remarkable lack of record keeping. Similarly, while IOC-MC officials were aware that female athletes were gender verified in several national contexts, it is apparent that no official record of such practices was kept. For example, while the IOC-MC’s gender verification expert Hay was aware that gender verification was carried out in the United States and France, he was “unaware as to which test was used” (IOC, 1988a). The lack of systematisation and oversight implies that various criteria could have been used in different contexts as grounds for excluding athletes from women’s sport, despite the IOC-MC’s official aim of avoiding “hasty diagnoses” about sex without comprehensive examinations. The institution of on-site gender verification in the Olympics thus incited scattered sex binary policing practices erected across different contexts and levels of sport participation, which in turn infused high-level sports with bodily scrutiny of sex. The array of examinations performed on Schinegger also demonstrates the extent to which these examinations could be taken in cases of suspicious findings

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as well as the integration of “indeterminate” bodies identified during gender verification in sport within broader clinical treatment paradigms. While Schinegger’s gender verification was carried out by local medical officials, the management of his case did largely mirror the diagnostic model drawn by IOC-MC officials for complete sex analysis. From the outset, IOC-MC officials intended to integrate the management of “hybrid” bodies identified through gender verification into the broader clinical context. Thiebault (1968b: 3) observed that when it came to the final phases of gender verification, the application of necessary “‘expert’ evaluation at the Olympic Games, by its complexity and its perspective which embraces the entire human personality, proves to be utopic.” Therefore, it was “necessary to contact each team’s doctor and plan coordinate action.” The full management of abnormal sex was thus delegated outside the direct realm of IOC-MC accountability and integrated into the broader medical(ised) therapeutic framework. For instance, in 1981, Hay gave an example of the protocol that was followed when a “complete study” of sex was conducted and abnormal findings made during a physical examination: If the physical and gynecological examination reveals a case of a pseudofeminine hermaphrodite with gynecoid [sic] and no apparent masculine physical constitution, the athlete will be permitted to compete. Such a case has been presented and the possibility of an ovo-testis was diagnosed. Surgical intervention was recommended. The [IOC Medical] Commission received acknowledgement from the N.O.C. [National Olympic Committee] involved of the surgical treatment performed afterwards which corroborated the diagnosis. (Hay, 1981) In this case, a diagnosis produced under the IOC-MC authority resulted in surgical interventions carried out in a local clinical context, under the involvement of the National Olympic Committee (NOC). The integration of sex abnormalities identified through gender verification into broader clinical contexts demonstrates the entanglement of sport medicine and clinical decision-making about medical treatment connected with sex variance. It also highlights the possible consequence that could ensue if one was caught in the gender verification screening net, which could include surgical interventions even in cases where eligibility to compete was granted. Furthermore, in addition to the Schinegger affair, a case reported by Sakamoto and colleagues (1988) detailing the examinations performed on another athlete illustrates the intensity of the medical probing that could result from a failure to pass the initial chromosome screening. Sakamoto and colleagues’ report outlined “further examinations” performed on an athlete who was identified as suspicious based on chromosome screening for gender verification during the 1985 Universiade Games in Kobe. To completely ascertain the athlete’s femaleness, she was made to undergo, among other things, a physical examination of her body frame including body hair examinations and

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nipple and areola measurement; a genital examination including internal examination of the vagina; a rectal examination of internal genitalia; a vaginal smear; hormone analysis; and ultrasonography (Sakamato et al., 1988). While the athlete was verified to be female “enough” to compete in women’s sport, the prospect of such a range of intrusive examinations, combined with the reality of having one’s gender questioned, likely discouraged several athletes from pursuing the “complete study” of their sex. Relatedly, despite the fact that the IOC-MC objective had been (at least formally) to provide a complete sex diagnosis for athletes identified as suspicious, this aim was often not realised in practice. This was because, as Hay (1981) explained, in cases of “abnormal” chromosome findings, the medical officer of the team involved and the Chief of Delegation . . . have the choice of withdrawing the athlete from the competition. . . . Various excuses may be offered for the non-participation of the athlete a training accident, fracture, ligaments, etc. Usually the athlete, the Chief of Delegation and the team doctor prefer not to go ahead with the complete study which involves blood tests and physical examination. This has occurred in about a dozen cases since the inception of the medical controls. The most well known of such cases is Spanish hurdler Maria Martínez-Patiño’s, who was set to compete at the same 1985 Universiade Games in Kobe. She had, however, forgotten to bring her certificate of tests of sexual chromatin, which she had been granted previously during the 1983 Helsinki World Championships. Consequently, Martínez-Patiño was made to re-take the screening, but this time, the screening produced “abnormal” results. Without being offered the option to undergo further testing, the organising officials at Kobe in collaboration with her team doctor decided that she was to fake an injury and withdraw from competition, which she did. Afterwards, the president of the Spanish Athletics Federation informed her that she would have to permanently withdraw from competition. This resulted, among other things, in her sport scholarship being revoked and her being expelled from the national athletic residence, amounting to the loss of her main source of income and stability (Carlson, 1991). After being ruled ineligible to compete, Martínez-Patiño consulted an endocrinologist and other medical professionals to gain information about her “abnormal” result. She was consequently diagnosed with androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) – a diagnosis which, if further examination had been conducted at Kobe, would actually have verified her eligibility to compete according to IOC medical guidelines (Carlson, 1991). This is because women with AIS present with female phenotypes (implying “no apparent masculine physical constitution”) due to a genetic mutation in the androgen receptor gene. This mutation makes one insensitive to androgenic hormones despite her having XY chromosomes. Martínez-Patiño’s story evidenced not only that the further testing was not always undertaken (nor did the IOC have control over how gender verification

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was carried out outside the Olympics, or over the related consequences), but also that women who should, according to the IOC, have been eligible to compete were being excluded from women’s sport. Martínez-Patiño’s story also highlighted that chromosome screening was subject to errors and not always carried out by competent medical personnel: despite her XY chromosomes, Martínez-Patiño had passed chromosome screening in Helsinki in 1983, been issued a certificate as proof, and was only re-tested at Kobe because she forgot to bring this certificate along. That she passed the screening in Helsinki was, in the words of Finnish gender verification critic Albert de la Chapelle, an “illustration of the inadequacy of the . . . screening” and an example of “a serious mistake” because Martínez-Patiño’s “chromatin should be ‘abnormal’” (1988a, original emphasis). In Helsinki, due to the unavailability of competent medical experts,3 gender verification had been performed by a pharmacologist (de la Chapelle, 1988b), showing that sport officials sometimes used inadequately trained staff, which increases the likelihood of erroneous results. When it came to fluorescent body screening, the possibility of testing errors was brought to the fore by the case of American swimmer Kirsten Wengler, whose screening results had been “abnormal,” showing “male chromatin.” Wengler was informed by her team leader that she should abandon her swimming aspirations without being offered the option of further examinations. Yet her “male chromatin” was later shown to have been the result of a testing error – a misinterpretation which de la Chapelle later argued to “occur in between 6 and 15% of all women, depending on the experience of the observer” (de la Chapelle, 1987b). Despite the official aim to avoid “hasty diagnoses,” then, athletes could be and were withdrawn from competition based only on the chromosome screening results, even though Hay acknowledged the possibility of further examinations revealing “no apparent masculine physical constitution” even when the screening results were suspect. Indeed, in 1988 Hay remarked that during the Los Angeles Olympics, three athletes identified as suspicious had “not turned up for further investigations and were therefore automatically disqualified” simply due to their absence, apparently without any attempt to pursue the question of their eligibility further (IOC, 1988a). This was despite the fact that during the same Olympics, three other cases that had been examined further “had been male pseudo-hermaphrodites, with no advantage for competition” and had thus been verified as eligible to compete (IOC, 1988a). Even though IOC-MC officials had expressed caution around genetic determinism, many athletes exited women’s sport simply due to apparent “abnormal” chromosomal characteristics. There were thus important practical as well as conceptual issues with the application of the IOC-MC diagnostic paradigm. The un-systematised and locally and organisationally dispersed pre-screening gender verification practices as well as the IOC-MC’s failure to live up to its own objectives meant that chromosome tests indeed were the final arbiter of sex for many athletes. When athletes did undergo further examinations, the extensity and intensity of the examinations medicalised their bodies in ways that rendered them objects of scientific exposure, probing,

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and penetration (sometimes literal) by medical professionals, who considered them to be medical crises needing study and intervention.

Conclusion The introduction of on-site gender verification for the Olympic Games was part of a broader shift in the relationship between science, medicine, and Olympic sport, epitomised by the creation of the IOC-MC. The IOC-MC integrated scientific epistemologies within the Olympic governance system as well as applied normative medical knowledge as a framework based on which the Olympic value of “purity” could be secured: the purity of category boundaries and athletes’ bodies could now be safeguarded against both artificial substances and sex category blur through more sophisticated (and seemingly neutral) scientific and medical means. Central to safeguarding binary sex categories was the construction of a medical examination apparatus for gender verification that unveiled both the boundaries and interiors of athletes’ bodies to medical scrutiny, enabling the IOC-MC to detect and “correct” bodies that failed to conform to medical norms. Drawing from broader medical discourses of the period which conceptualised sex variance as “abnormal” and as a medical and psychological crisis, IOC-MC officials established a “sex chromosome” screening system accompanied by a collection of medical tests intended to identify both sex pathologies and the final “truth” of sex. This IOC gender verification paradigm illustrates not only how normalised medical models for sex difference and pathology were used to safeguard the sex binary against category blur, but also how the notion of sexed and gendered coherence underlay the demarcation of “femaleness” that was applied. A central aim of the IOC gender verification paradigm (at least formally speaking) was to detect and diagnose “abnormal” bodies so that their “true sex” could be identified, their abnormalities accordingly normalised and the congruence between their sexed bodies and gender status maintained. While the apparent rationale was to avoid the negative psychological consequences that were presumed to accompany sex and gender incongruence, the integration of suspect bodies identified through gender verification into clinical treatment contexts was centrally foregrounded by anxieties over the sex binary fragmentation that these bodies carried. While the IOC-MC did not (formally and originally) intend the chromosome screening system to function as the final arbiter of athletes “femaleness,” the introduction of the screening in the Olympics incited a cluster of un-systematised pre-Olympic gender verification practices across contexts and levels of sport participation. The IOC had no control over these practices, nor did the IOC-MC itself always live up to its aim to offer further medical examinations after chromosome screening had produced “abnormal” results. The consequence was that many athletes were excluded from women’s sport based on their chromosome test results alone, while those who did undergo further examinations to corroborate the results faced intense medical scrutiny and interventions. Schinegger’s story seemed to support the legitimacy of these practices, because the examinations had in his

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case enabled not only the identification of an “abnormal” athlete with apparent “male-like” potential, but also the re-integration of this athlete into his “true sex.” The IOC chromosome screening system additionally extended the scope of gendered doubt, enabling hidden “abnormalities” or “male” realities to be unveiled from beneath even “normal”-looking feminine bodies. This meant that gendered suspicion could potentially extend to the bodies of any (or all) female athletes. A broader effect of the introduction of on-site gender verification in the Olympics was that formal sex binary policing became a part of advanced level sport more generally. The IOC on-site gender verification paradigm represented a shift towards more scientific methods of gender verification. It was built on scientific epistemologies and medical models rather than on subjective evaluations of feminine embodiment, as previous approaches, including the IAAF “naked parades,” had been. The medicalised framework that was first formally erected in the late 1960s has irrevocably structured gender verification in sport ever since – indeed, medicalisation has been perhaps its most enduring thematic. However, since its inception, the IOC’s chromosome screening paradigm incited critique from scientific experts. The next chapter focuses on the unfolding of these critiques and maps the emergence and maturation of concerns over the possibility of gender fraud or masquerade in women’s sport.

Notes 1 It is noteworthy that some years later, the second-place finisher and Schinegger’s friend, Marielle Goitschel, gave the gold medal back to Schinegger, most likely as a reflection of their friendship and perhaps also reflecting a belief that Schinegger deserved his medal. Schinegger was never officially stripped from his title (Erik Schinegger, the Man Who Was Women's Ski World Champion (2013, 17th of June). Deutsche Presse-Agentur.). 2 Schinegger’s story was made into a documentary titled Erik(a), and he published an autobiography titled Mein Sieg Ueber Mich (Victory Over Myself). He has also provided multiple interviews for journalists, spanning across several decades. 3 The unavailability of competent medical personnel was the consequence of the Finnish medical community’s rejection of chromosome screening as an appropriate method for verifying gender, due to which practically all Finnish experts had refused to conduct the screening. I will discuss the medical community’s rejection of chromosome screening in more depth in Chapter 5.

Chapter 5

Gender fraud and masquerade in the 1970s and 1980s

While both the IOC and IAAF continued to use the chromosome screening system for gender verification for decades, the system did not go unchallenged. Indeed, it began to attract criticism especially from scientists immediately after it was introduced. The most prominent and vocal of these critics were two specialists in genetic sex differentiation: Scottish geneticist Malcolm Ferguson-Smith and Finnish geneticist Albert de la Chapelle, both of whom argued that chromosome screening was wholly inappropriate for sex identification and should therefore not be used for gender verification purposes. In arguing against the chromosome screening tests, Ferguson-Smith, de la Chapelle, and their colleagues initiated what became a notable dispute between scientists and sports regulators that lasted for many years. It eventually involved much of the relevant scientific community standing in opposition to the IOC and IAAF, demanding that chromosome screening be abolished. In this chapter, I discuss the emergence of this scientific opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. I show how it formed the backdrop for the emergence of concerns over explicit gender fraud or masquerade in women’s sport, which came to be perceived as a central threat to the boundaries of the female category. This, in turn, motivated sport regulators to coin a new definition of “femaleness” for sport. Many scholars have claimed that the gender masquerade issue was the original rationale for gender verification, as I discussed in Chapter 1. Here, however, I will show that the prevention of fraudulent gender masquerade in women’s sport was recognised as important and established as the rationale for gender verification by IOC and IAAF officials only in the 1980s. Concerns over gender masquerade emerged and became important in the 1970s and 1980s context, when new kinds of controversial embodiments were gaining visibility in women’s sport. Scientists like Ferguson-Smith and de la Chapelle directed attention towards the existence of male individuals with chromosome disorders who would (at least theoretically) be able to “pass” the IOC and IAAF chromosome screening tests because they had dual X chromosomes. At the same time, some women who should be eligible to compete with other women would be screened out because they had XY chromosomes. By the 1980s, these ideas became intertwined with the increasing visibility of transsexual women who were taking part in women’s sports, which

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incited concern over the “authenticity” of the female sporting category. The result was the emergence of a “gender masquerade” imaginary, where males and men were feared to be masquerading as females and women to reap the benefits of their presumed superior male prowess in women’s competitions. Unlike the “hybrid” or “indeterminately” sexed bodies that had been the focus of gendered concerns during previous decades, the problem bodies of the 1970s and 1980s were understood to be males in “truth” who were making a fraudulent claim to femaleness and womanhood. There was a shift to an emphasis on a deceptive kind of category crossing across binarised sex and gender, committed by men who were masking their “true” sex and “passing” as women, or trespassing in women’s sport. This emphasis, in turn, resulted into a new definition of “femaleness” that was directed specifically at ensuring that there were no male infiltrators in women’s competitions – a definition centred on genitals as the ultimate expression of sex.

Chromosomal disorders and transsexual women To contextualise the debates between scientists and sports officials over chromosome screening in women’s sport, it is important to offer some background on two kinds of controversial embodiments that shaped the emergence and influenced the nature of these debates. Firstly, the disputes were centred around chromosomal disorders of sex development embodied by subjects whose phenotypic sex – that is the sexed appearance and characteristics of their bodies – did not match their “sex” chromosomes. Secondly, concerns over the possible presence of these inconsistently sexed bodies coincided with social anxieties over male to female transsexual athletes1 in women’s sport. Two kinds of chromosomal disorders in particular became the focus of disputes, because both destabilise(d) the presumption that XX chromosomes imply femaleness and XY chromosomes imply maleness in relation to phenotype. Women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), such as Maria Martínez-Patiño, whom I discussed in the previous chapter, break down the presumption that XY chromosomes imply maleness. This is because they have female phenotypes, meaning that their bodies are normatively female in appearance, despite their having XY chromosomes. They consequently undermined the presumed coherence between sex attributes and were screened out as “abnormal” through chromosome screening in sport because they seemed to embody “male” chromosomes and, thus, sex discontinuity. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, debates emerged over chromosomal disorders where the opposite is the case, namely, Klinefelter’s syndrome and XX male syndrome, which is also sometimes called de la Chapelle syndrome. They result in embodiments where individuals have male phenotypes despite having two X chromosomes, thus undermining the presumption that XX chromosomes imply femaleness. It has been recognised since 1959 that Klinefelter’s syndrome is caused by an XXY chromosome constitution, that is an extra X chromosome in phenotypic

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males (F. Miller, 2006). While the aetiology of the syndrome was first unknown, Klinefelter’s was clinically recognised in 1942 as a condition affecting males that is characterised by gynecomastia (i.e. “enlarged” breast tissue in males), small testes, and infertility (Klinefelter, Reifenstein, & Albright, 1942). With the maturation of Barr body testing during the 1950s, however, the presence of the second X chromosome became observable and the bodies of these previously unmistakably male individuals were re-interpreted and re-defined as being intersex due to their “abnormal” sex chromosomes (F. Miller, 2006; Griffiths, 2018). FergusonSmith was one of the scientists involved in the re-interpretation of Klinefelter’s in the 1950s, and he was part of the team that conducted early research on it using Barr body testing (Ferguson-Smith et al., 1957; Stewart et al., 1959). This research and Ferguson-Smith’s expertise on Klinefelter’s form the professional background from which he spoke years later as an influential critic of chromosome screening in women’s sports. He came to centre Klinefelter’s syndrome as crucial to his critique: because individuals with Klinefelter’s have two X chromosomes, they are Barr body positive even though they are phenotypic males. This fact not only prompted the re-interpretation of the syndrome as an intersex condition, but it also entails that men with Klinefelter’s could pass Barr body tests used by sport-governing bodies to screen athletes’ eligibility to compete in women’s sport. Notably, while Ferguson-Smith’s research contributed to the re-definition of Klinefelter’s as a form of intersex embodiment, Ferguson-Smith and his colleagues nonetheless recognised that individuals with Klinefelter’s are “completely male” and “normal males,” to the extent that, they argued, information about their chromosome constitution should be withheld from patients to “minimize psychological stress” (Stewart et al., 1959: 570). This approach was also consistent with medical guidelines at the time (Reis, 2009). Consequently, despite or perhaps because Klinefelter’s was re-defined as an intersex condition, Ferguson-Smith (correctly) argued that men with Klinefelter’s are unequivocally male and, therefore, any test that would ascribe them with a female status was erroneous.2 Notably, it should be highlighted that the IAAF used only Barr body testing and not fluorescent body testing for the Y-chromosome, which the IOC added in 1972. This means that individuals with Klinefelter’s would at least theoretically have been able to “pass” IAAF chromosome screening as female. They would not have been able to “pass” IOC screening, because the fluorescent body test would have identified the Y chromosome carried by those with Klinefelter’s. It would not, however, have identified males who carry the XX male syndrome. This is characterised, in the words of de la Chapelle and colleagues, by individuals having XX chromosomes but “a male phenotype, male psychosexual identification, testes or gonads of testicular type” as well as “typically male” embodiment including “muscularity, distribution of fat, and general body proportions” (de la Chapelle et al., 1972: 72–73). The XX male syndrome was first clinically defined by de la Chapelle, and he subsequently devoted much of his career to researching this so-called sex reversal condition. Like Ferguson-Smith’s expertise on

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Klinefelter’s, de la Chapelle’s expertise on XX males form the background from which he later argued against chromosome screening in sport. He also recognised that both XX males and men with Klinefelter’s are unequivocally male. Ferguson-Smith and de la Chapelle similarly recognised women with CAIS as unequivocally female despite their XY chromosomes and considered, at the time, that the “true” sex of individuals in general was to be found not in genetic but in phenotypic characteristics. It is worth noting that alongside Ferguson-Smith, de la Chapelle became perhaps the most influential critic of chromosome screening by the 1980s. Both scientists continued to professionally evaluate the changing landscape of women’s eligibility regulations in sports – as well as revising their own views – well into the 21st century. This makes their engagement with related debates an impressive critical endeavour spanning almost half a century. In the 1970s and 1980s, debates over chromosome screening in women’s sports were also contextualised by new social anxieties over male to female transsexual athletes in women’s sport, which became intertwined with disputes centred around chromosomal disorders. By the late 1960s, which had been a decade abounding in social movements, increasing medical interest, social advocacy, and support networks around transsexuality had enabled the emergence of more organised research programmes and centres focused on transsexuality. This included the work of Harry Benjamin, who had begun to create a formal network of doctors and psychologists advocating medical treatment and surgery for transsexuality. In 1966, the John Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, under the influence of John Money, announced a formal programme of surgery for transsexual patients. By the end of the 1970s, transsexuality had gained professional medical recognition and treatment guidelines (Meyerowitz, 2002). During the 1970s, several pioneering transsexual activists also requested a redefinition of legal sex, including the right to change one’s name and sex on birth certificates (Meyerowitz, 2002). In the late 1970s, the increasing recognition and visibility of transsexuality prompted social anxieties in the sporting context that were carried by transsexual women who began to enter women’s events at elite levels, the most prominent of whom was American tennis player Renée Richards. In 1976, Richards registered to compete in the women’s US Open tennis championship, but upon learning about her entry, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) instituted a chromosome test for the women’s tournament. They informed Richards that she would have to “pass” this test to be eligible to compete. As one observer noted, by “instituting the sex test, the U.S.T.A. is belatedly following the lead of the International Olympic Committee” (Herman, 1976: 31). However, Richards decided to issue a legal challenge against the USTA, arguing that they had instituted the test only to prevent her from competing, which amounted to unlawful discrimination. In a historically significant court ruling, Richards won her case and was ruled eligible to compete (“Renee Richards Gets Court OK to Play as Female,” 1977). The court decision was controversial and incited concern from sport regulators and observers over the opening of so-called transsexual floodgates, which was seen to threaten the “authenticity” of women’s sport. The

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USTA president commented that, after the court ruling, “we have been called by a number of transsexuals about wanting to play. . . . For instance, a 240-pound, 6-foot-8 transsexual called to ask permission to play in a country tournament” (“Dr. Richards Put in Main Draw of U.S. Open,” 1977: 51). A reporter worried that allowing “Richards to compete as a woman would open the door to others who, perhaps, would change their sex deliberately to grab a share of the big prize money now on offer. . . . Imagine a 19-year-old guy who’s a terrific player changing his sex to play in women’s tennis” (“Volley in Forest Hills,” 1976). One observer went as far as prophesising that post-Richards, “women’s sport will be taken over by a giant race of surgically created women” (“Renee Richards Controversy: What Is a Woman?,” 1976: 18). The backlash against Richards was centred on a protectionist rhetoric over the “authenticity” (or purity) of the female category in sport, which was perceived to be under a threat from presumed males infiltrating into women’s events as “surgically created” (and thus not real) women. This mirrored radical feminist accounts of transsexuality at the time. Janice Raymond (1979) among others had framed transsexual women’s claim to womanhood as a superficial surgical appropriation of womanhood. She imagined this superficiality to be ontologically distinct from “true” femaleness, which she grounded in being and living as a chromosomal female. Raymond considered transsexual women’s claim to womanhood to be a form of violent deception, rendering transsexuality as a fraudulent and abusive kind of gender masquerade through which “males” were infiltrating not only into women’s spaces but also into women’s bodies. Indeed, Raymond (1979) explicitly called transsexual women “boundary violators” – a form of exclusionary rhetoric also embedded in the backlash against Richards. This (sex and gender) boundary policing aimed to protect “authentic” female embodiment by excluding transsexual women, who served as artificial “others” against which authentic femaleness could, in turn, be delineated. Such exclusion functioned to safeguard the boundaries of the female category in the face of troubling sex category crossings by transsexual subjects who were causing gender and sex boundary instability in the 1970s. Key to this in the context of sport was that authentic or true femaleness was associated with relative frailness and athletic inferiority, whereby “authentic” women needed protection against transsexual women’s presumed male prowess. In particular, references to Richards’ and other transsexual women’s presumed superior size and strength were prevalent in newspaper commentaries, as were suspicions over fraudulent motives for sex reassignment: social anxieties over “transsexual floodgates” were centrally concerned with suspicions that male to female transsexual athletes’ motive for undergoing sex reassignment was to reap the benefits of their “male” athleticism in women’s sport. In the 1970s and 1980s, the controversy over transsexual women intertwined with the theoretical possibility that XX males and men with Klinefelter’s would pass chromosome eligibility screening. This incited new debates over the possibility of gender fraud or masquerade in women’s sport. Before I discuss how these debates unfolded, however, I wish to unpack the notion of “masquerade” itself to

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foreground the broader implications of the mobilisation of the masquerade imaginary in relation to the female category in sport.

Gender masquerade Like the sex and gender “hybrid” or “indeterminate” bodies that had been the focus of gendered social anxieties in sport in 1960s, the problem bodies of 1970s and 1980 caused “gender trouble” but of a somewhat different kind. The truth of these bodies’ sex was presumed to be known – that is they were presumed to be male – but they were feared to be committing a deceptive kind of category crossing, namely, gender fraud. The anxieties that they incited concerned the possibility that male individuals who were presumably (un-ambiguously) assigned male at birth could make a fraudulent claim to femaleness or womanhood. The prospect of gender masquerade is threatening to fixed sex and gender categories because the possibility that one might cross gender and sex category boundaries implies that these boundaries are unstable. This, in turn, means that cross-category “passing” is easily experienced as a threatening border crisis (Garber, 1992). Gender masquerade consequently poses a challenge to category stability as well as category purity. The very notion of “masquerade” presumes that there exists an authentic or true identity that pre-exists – and is covered by – the “mask” that is adopted and that this true identity can also be revealed by “unmasking” (Tseelon, 2001). While the concept of masquerade allows for carnival-like playfulness, it simultaneously connotes fraudulence in ways that render its distinction from the kin concept “deception” blurry: both suggest a falseness or a misrepresentation of “the truth” which is being concealed by the mask (Tseelon, 2001). Gender masquerade, and especially its always already deceptive kin “gender fraud,” demonstrate that womanhood or femininity (and manhood or masculinity) are not determined by the body but can be assumed or learned. That subjects whose “true” sex is taken to be male can act or look like women unmoors womanhood from femaleness, making it subject to misappropriation. Fear of masquerade, then, is not only a fear of category disruption but also a fear of “artifactuality” of identity as assumed appearance (Garber, 1992). Indeed, the centrality of the notion of “passing” as a practice of performing gender, or passing as a gender, in relation to subjects whose bodily configurations and identity claims do not align (such as transsexual/gender people) is foregrounded by the idea that their identity claims are, in one way or another, an imitation (Serrano, 2007). “Passing” thus easily becomes trespassing. The “true” identity that is presumed to lie beneath the “appearances” produced through gender masquerade is often taken to be carried by the (sex characteristics of the) body, which places forceful cultural body constraints on gender identity claims. Practices of “unmasking” those who are suspected to be gender masquerading can be violent: for example, violence can accompany the discovery of the “wrong” (especially genital) organs on the bodies of transsexual/gender women and men who occupy gender segregated spaces. This kind of violence

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demonstrates the force of the cultural conflation between the sexed body and gender identity claims. The latter are constrained by presumptions about sex and gender coherence that demand sexed bodies and the gender categories within which they are placed to be aligned. When the possibility of gender masquerade is suspected, claims to a gender status – such as claiming to be woman – easily become subject to policing through practices of unmasking, which aim to protect the purity of gender categories against misappropriation. The mobilisation of the gender masquerade imaginary by opponents of chromosome screening in women’s sports, and by Ferguson-Smith and de la Chapelle in particular, eventually had a significant effect on how the boundaries of the female category were delineated and regulated. Framing “gender masquerade” as the key threat to the “authenticity” of women’s sport, and the relationship between the concept of masquerade and that of deception, meant that fraudulent claims to womanhood by male infiltrators were considered a real and a concerning possibility. This was particular so because men with Klinefelter’s and XX male syndrome could (theoretically) “pass” chromosome screening. Centring these men – alongside transsexual women – as the locus of concern in turn required that the truth of sex be located, not in chromosomes, but elsewhere on the body, namely, in phenotypes, and, finally, in genitals, taken as the ultimate phenotypic expression of sex.

Ferguson-Smith and the male masquerade threat Chromosome screening in women’s sports began to attract criticism immediately after the IOC had introduced their screening system, including from FergusonSmith who became the first scientist to refuse to conduct this form of screening for sport in 1969. The British Olympic Association requested that FergusonSmith’s laboratory perform Barr body testing on women competitors at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games. Ferguson-Smith (1969) responded, however, that using Barr body testing for sex identification purposes was inappropriate: the test results, he noted, can be “at variance with the apparent social and legal sex” of the individual and consequently “in medical practice, the results . . . mean very little when taken in isolation.” To explain, he focused on two examples: women with XY chromosomes and men with XXY chromosomes. Ferguson-Smith (1969) noted, firstly, that chromosomal disorders where women have XY chromosomes (e.g. CAIS) affect “normal-looking, attractive and athletic females,” where “normal looking” implied (normatively feminine) female phenotype. Secondly, he added that individuals with Klinefelter’s syndrome “are entirely male and show the sex chromatin expected of a female” because of XXY chromosomes. He concluded that, as “a physician with experience in these conditions,” he was disturbed by the possibility of individuals being “irresponsibly labelled as having the wrong sex on the basis of a clinical test performed out of context for a non-clinical reason.” Therefore, when uncritically used for sex identification, chromosomes screening and especially Barr body screening (falsely) isolated chromosomes and (falsely) side-lined phenotype.

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Ferguson-Smith did, however, have an alternative proposal for a more appropriate method of sex screening in women’s sports, namely, physical inspections. This proposal was based not only on the centrality of phenotypes as the foundation based on which gender could be verified but also on the following assumption: “the whole purpose of a ‘sex test’ . . . is to disqualify the male athlete who attempts to masquerade as a female in women’s events. In my view, this purpose is most simply and economically achieved by a physical inspection” (1969). To contextualise this assumption Ferguson-Smith provided a curious example about an athlete who, he stated, probably had Klinefelter’s syndrome: You will recall the case of the Polish male athlete, a transvestite with this condition, who masqueraded as a female and competed in women’s events. In his case, and despite his male external genitalia, the buccal smear would have upheld his eligibility to compete in women’s events. (1969) This anecdote is almost certainly a mistaken interpretation of the Ewa Klobukowska case, discussed in the previous chapter, which Ferguson-Smith likely constructed based on inaccurate information about the details of her case, perhaps due to exaggerated news depictions.3 Ferguson-Smith’s critique of chromosome screening was, then, built on three key ideas: firstly, screening for chromosomes was misleading because it failed in some cases to accurately identify “true” (i.e. phenotypic) sex. Secondly, he assumed that the objective of gender verification was to identify and disqualify males masquerading as women in sport, where “maleness” meant phenotypic male embodiment. Thirdly, and consequently, it was necessary to devise a gender verification system based on phenotypic rather that genetic attributes, and physical inspections were the most appropriate method for this purpose. This was such because inspections would have been based on inspecting female athletes’ bodily appearances – that is their phenotypes. While misleading, Ferguson-Smith’s anecdote about a Polish transvestite in women’s sport, and especially the fact that he emphasised that the athlete had “male external genitalia,” is significant: by “diagnosing” the athlete with Klinefelter’s syndrome, Ferguson-Smith provided a clear example of gender masquerade in women’s sport. This masquerading athlete would not only have been able to escape detection if Barr body screening was used, but was also obviously male, which was evident from the presence of male genitalia. Because some men with chromosomal disorders could “pass” chromosome screening and employ fraudulent practices of cross-dressing to visually “pass” as women (which is what Ferguson-Smith implied when referring to the Polish athlete as a transvestite), chromosome screening left open a gap for gender fraud. The problem seemed to be, then, not only that some “normal-looking” women could be falsely – and unfairly –identified as gender suspect, but also that some men could abuse the chromosome screening system and enter women’s competitions despite their

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(normatively) male bodies, including male genitalia. Indeed, as Ferguson-Smith and colleagues had recognised for years, individuals with Klinefelter’s syndrome should not be regarded as sex “ambiguous” but as obvious males, despite their chromosomes. In this context, it is worth noting that “male” genitals and the penis in particular tend to perform a symbolic function in protectionist discourses around gendersegregated women’s spaces in ways that also structured the gender masquerade concern in women’s sport. The presence of a penis in women-only spaces tends to be constituted as a threat in ways that conflate the penis with dangerous or violent male sexuality. This relies on a protectionist imaginary through which women’s bodies and spaces are policed against sexual violence (Westbrook & Schilt, 2013). A sexual imaginary of this kind also foregrounded the gender masquerade discourses in sport, in ways that intertwined the sexualised “penis threat” with males’ presumed athletic superiority: fraudulent gender masquerade was about male bodies with superior prowess violently “penetrating” into the presumably vulnerable space of women’s sport. The fraudulent category-crossing embodied by the trope of the gender masquerade or fraud was centrally foregrounded by imaginaries of women’s bodies as fragile and in need of protection against threatening male bodies, symbolised by the penis. Ferguson-Smith’s critiques of chromosome screening are significant for the history of gender verification, not only because he became one of the most influential critics of this form of screening in sport, but also because others followed his lead and built on his arguments, which he later published in multiple articles. In 1969, Ferguson-Smith’s gender masquerade concerns were mostly directed at the possibility of “transvestite” men with chromosomal disorders masquerading as women. By the mid-1970s, however, he had materialised what has now become the dominant narrative of the history of gender verification in sport that I critiqued in Chapter 1.4 For Ferguson-Smith’s purposes, this historical narrative performed a key (strategic) function in support of his arguments: by centring exemplar cases of fraudulent males masquerading as women in sport in past, Ferguson-Smith’s historical claims foregrounded the possibility of male masquerade as the key historical as well as contemporary threat to the boundaries of the female category. Therefore, as some men with chromosomal disorders could “pass” as females, chromosome screening was inadequate for countering this threat. It should be replaced, he argued, with physical inspections that could identify all men committing gender fraud, including those with dual X chromosomes. Ferguson-Smith and many colleagues following his lead continued to maintain the belief that the aim of gender verification was to detect gender masquerade for over a decade, mainly because IOC and IAAF officials failed and even refused to communicate to them the rationales based on which gender verification had been introduced and continued. By the early 1980s, however, de la Chapelle began to organise a more systematic movement of scientific opposition against chromosome screening.

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De la Chapelle and the scientific opposition to chromosome screening Like Ferguson-Smith, de la Chapelle was disturbed by the possibility that chromosome screening could unjustly exclude phenotypic females with XY chromosomes from women’s sport. In 1982, de la Chapelle circulated a critical address against chromosome screening, arguing for its discontinuation on these grounds as well as on the grounds that there were several chromosomal disorders where individuals with “male-type body build and muscle strength” would “pass” chromosome screening (1982: 4). Unlike Ferguson-Smith, however, de la Chapelle observed that he had “not been able to find a concise definition of what exactly is the aim of the ‘femininity control’ practiced” (1982: 4). Indeed, he made many attempts to discover this aim and asked the IOC-MC multiple times to respond to his critical address, but for several years, the IOC failed to provide him with answers. In particular, de la Chapelle demanded clarification on which kinds of bodies, exactly, the IOC-MC wished to exclude from women’s sport and why because, he argued, chromosome screening tests were incapable of identifying several categories of individuals who “might have an advantage over normal women” in sport (1982: 4). While the IOC-MC sent occasional replies to de la Chapelle’s letters, they did not offer this clarification. As late as 1988, de la Chapelle remarked with frustration that “the IOC has never defined what they want to achieve with the test,” adding that in the IOC gender verification specialist Hay’s writings, “the matter has been presented as unclearly as possible, and I have not found any other published objective. In the letter exchange I have had with the IOC, which is notably voluminous, the objective has never been presented either” (1988c).5 De la Chapelle was, nonetheless, able to surmise that they “are not out to get males masquerading as females” because this had “been stated several times both [verbally] and in writing by people from the IOC” (1987a). Here, it should be recalled that on-site gender verification had initially been envisioned as a deterrent mechanism, at least partially aiming to silence public and press speculations around “borderline” masculine bodies in women’s sport, as I discussed in Chapter 3. It seems likely that the IOC-MC’s unwillingness to engage with de la Chapelle’s demands was connected with this, as gender verification was linked with IOC’s desire to avoid the kinds of press speculations and innuendo that had centred on women’s international sports – and Eastern bloc female athletes in particular – during the Cold War. Indeed, in one of the IOC-MC’s replies to de la Chapelle’s letters, the IOC-MC president de Merode (1987) stated that at the time when the IOC on-site gender verification paradigm was introduced, incessant denunciations having their origin in the Olympic village, accompanied by persistent rumours widely echoed by the media, were besmirching sport. . . . Since 1968, the denunciations and rumours have ceased and the scandals have disappeared. We have thus achieved our aim. An end to the tests would mean . . . a resurgence of scandals of which sport would be the victim.

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It seems clear that for de Merode, who was a strong believer in the Olympic project, the aims of gender verification were intertwined with a desire to avoid the kinds of “bad publicity” that the Cold War gender scandals and speculations had brought to women’s Olympic sport. To the extent that gender verification had silenced these rumours, it was successful enough to not require further discussions. Faced with the IOC-MC’s persistent refusal to properly engage with his critiques, de la Chapelle began to assemble a more organised opposition against chromosome screening in the mid-1980s. He gained an international following of scientists who supported him, including Ferguson-Smith as well as prolific names such as John Money and Murray Barr, and powerful North American scientific societies, including the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Society of Human Genetics, the American College of Physicians, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (de la Chapelle, 1988b). By the time of the 1988 Calgary Olympics, the medical officers assigned to oversee gender verification at Calgary publicly aired their reservations about chromosome screening. They argued that the method was outmoded in ways motivated by de la Chapelle and colleagues’ critiques (Lowry & Hoar, 1986). By the late 1980s, a scientific consensus had formed in agreement with de la Chapelle, placing the IOC in direct opposition to the scientific community. After Barr – who had first encountered the Barr body being used for chromosome screening – joined the opposition, de la Chapelle (1987c) wrote to him, rather perplexed, that their efforts to convince the IOC about the problems of chromosome screening have led to a most puzzling situation. On the one hand, the entire world of scientists in the relevant field now share your views (and mine) and are urging the IOC to stop. . . . On the other hand, the IOC is totally unmoved and unconvinced. . . . I am particularly appalled by the fact that these people do not even listen to you. After the IOC’s lack of interest in the scientific consensus seemed apparent, Money (1987) reflected that it “is not truth, but politics that makes the difference. If we scientists will ever have any influence on the Olympics Committee regarding determination of sex, it will be achieved by the pressure and threat of political organization and opposition.” He concluded that a “public outcry” was “needed to force the Olympics Committee into action.” Money’s conclusion turned out to be, at least partially, correct. In 1988, after her exclusion from sport during the 1985 Universiade Games in Kobe, MartínezPatiño learned about de la Chapelle’s opposition to chromosome screening. She contacted him, hoping he might be able to help her re-gain eligibility to compete in women’s sport. After establishing contact with Martínez-Patiño, de la Chapelle collaborated with writer and feminist critic of chromosome screening Alison Carlson to tell the story of Martínez-Patiño’s exclusion from women’s sport to the broader public to gain awareness as Money had hoped. Martínez-Patiño’s case was important for enabling the scientific opposition to force IOC engagement

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with their critiques, because the scientists were able to force a re-examination of her eligibility. Her case was discussed during IOC-MC meetings in 1988, after which she became the first athlete whose eligibility to compete was reinstated after exclusion resulting from gender verification (Martínez-Patiño, 2005). In 1988, after two decades of critique, IOC officials finally gave in to the scientific opposition to chromosome screening, now evidenced by Martínez-Patiño’s public example case of exclusion, and a gender verification working group meeting was organised by the IOC-MC to re-consider the methods and aims of gender verification.

(Re)defining the aims of gender verification The IOC gender verification working group meeting was organised in Lausanne in July 1988, after de Merode had assembled a small collection of IOC and IAAF medical officials and external medical experts to form the working group. In addition to de la Chapelle, de Merode invited Joe Leigh Simpson, an American gynaecologist and obstetrician who had been working with de la Chapelle to oppose chromosome screening. During the meeting, de la Chapelle and Simpson joined forces to advance an argumentative strategy against chromosome screening that was largely focused on the criticism already put forth by Ferguson-Smith in the late 1960s and pursued by critics for almost two decades since. Firstly, de la Chapelle and Simpson argued that as long as chromosome screening was used for gender verification, phenotypically female women with chromosomal disorders could be – and had been, as Martínez-Patiño’s story exemplified – unjustly excluded from women’s sport, even though these women should be clearly regarded as females. Additionally, chromosome screening was subject to testing errors, as in the case of Wengler discussed in the previous chapter. Secondly, chromosome screening was open to abuse by some men with chromosomal disorders, because chromosome screens could not “pick up 46, XX and 47, XXY men and thereby makes it possible to professionally plan and execute premeditated fraud” (de la Chapelle, 1988d). De la Chapelle added that even when Barr body testing was complemented with fluorescent body testing for the Y chromosome (as the IOC had done), the screening was still open to gender fraud committed by XX men, who could “pass” both forms of chromosome screening. This argument was centred on the idea, already entertained by Ferguson-Smith in the late 1960s, that the ability of phenotypic males to “pass” as female implied that gender fraud could be committed by men with chromosome “abnormalities” (cross-)dressing as women. However, in response to de la Chapelle’s and Simpson’s arguments about the exclusion of phenotypic females with XY chromosomes from women’s sports, IOC medical officials noted, simply, that while some sport organisations may have “misused” the screening tests to exclude these females, this did not justify the discontinuation of IOC testing (IOC, 1988b). The IOC medical official Hay claimed that misinterpretations of sex would not arise under the Olympic framework – a

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claim which reflected his trust in the “further examinations” provision of the IOC gender verification paradigm (IOC, 1988b). He considered this to be a safeguarding measure against phenotypic females’ exclusion. Because chromosome screening had not been intended by the IOC-MC to be the final arbiter of sex, women with XY chromosomes would (or were supposed to) have the option to undergo further examinations to fully investigate their eligibility. Indeed, as IOC medical officials reminded, de la Chapelle’s and Simpson’s example of Martínez-Patiño’s exclusion had occurred outside the Olympic Games and had not been carried out by the IOC directly. It was de la Chapelle’s and Simpson’s second argument about gender fraud that gained the IOC and IAAF officials’ attention. During the meeting, de la Chapelle presented the clinical features of XX and XXY males, explaining that these “individuals are almost normal males” including in terms of “muscle mass and strength, . . . and they would thus have a clear-cut advantage over females” (1988e). He argued that because these “almost normal males” could “pass” chromosome screening, they would never be subjected to any further examinations of their sex and would thus be verified as eligible to compete in women’s sport. Notably, de la Chapelle commented retrospectively that it became apparent to him during the working group meeting that for de Merode in particular, a central concern that motivated his on-going interest in gender verification was the possibility that unscrupulous governments might use dubious means to attain success in women’s sport, by sending “abnormally” sexed athletes to compete. As I discussed in previous chapters, this concern had been expressed by sport regulators since the institution of on-site gender verification in the Cold War context. In de la Chapelle’s (1989a) words, de Merode was “quite concerned about what could happen in countries or clubs where unscrupulous sport coaches ‘produce’ unfairly competing ‘females’” and, de la Chapelle added, de Merode had explicitly stated that this was “why gender verification was instituted in the first place: to prevent ‘certain countries’ from sending ‘hermaphrodites’ to compete as women.” In response, de la Chapelle and Simpson constructed an argument that was probably at least partially strategic: to demonstrate that chromosome screening was incapable of protecting the IOC against this kind of cheating, de la Chapelle argued that as long as the IOC and IAAF were using chromosome screening, XX and XXY males “could readily be picked up by coaches or sport clubs, trained, and sent to competitions as females” because “these males are both frequent and easily detectable by medical examination” (de la Chapelle, 1988e). Furthermore, Hay admitted that while the IOC had “normally carried out both the X and Y chromatin tests . . . following objections from various genetic societies, the Y chromatin test had not been effected in Calgary” (IOC, 1988b), implying that not only XX but also XXY males would “pass” both the IAAF’s and the IOC’s screening tests from the Calgary Olympics onwards. In opposing chromosome screening, de la Chapelle and Simpson thus constructed an argument around the possibility of gender fraud committed by corrupt governments, who might abuse the chromosome screening system to send

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individuals with male phenotypes into women’s competitions by disguising them as women. De Merode’s and others’ concerns over unscrupulous governments sending “abnormal” athletes to compete with women was, they argued, not addressed by chromosome screening: as long as this form of screening was used, some governments could send out athletes who were actually “almost normal males.” By centring bodies with male phenotypes in their arguments, de la Chapelle and Simpson effectively re-drew the issue as one of overt male bodies being infiltrated into women’s sport. In other words, while Ferguson-Smith had presumed that the rationale for gender verification was to prevent fraudulent gender masquerade, de la Chapelle and Simpson argued, in effect, that the rationale should be to prevent such masquerade, building on IOC officials’ existing concern over the methods possibly used by unscrupulous governments to win. While I suspect that this line of argument was at least partially strategic (because in opposing chromosome screening, de la Chapelle’s real emphasis was on the injustice faced by XY women), it is noteworthy that de la Chapelle did seem genuinely concerned at times about the possibility of XX men being fraudulently entered into women’s sport. The leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat quoted de la Chapelle remarking, in relation to IOC and IAAF chromosome screening policies, that in the present situation, some countries could screen out men who would be allowed to participate in women’s competitions. I, for example, have found 200 of such men in Finland and a few of them take part in sport – luckily, they do not know about their special characteristics. (“Sukupuolitesteissa Oikeusmurhia,” 1989)6 Concerns over unscrupulous governments and gender fraud in women’s sport were also reinforced by the increasing visibility of transsexual women in sport. The “transsexual floodgates” concerns reported by the press in relation to Richards were also expressed by some IOC officials and scientists involved in the gender verification debates. This was even though, broadly speaking, many of the scientists were relatively supportive of transsexual women’s eligibility. For example, in 1988, the United States Golf Association (USGA) asked de la Chapelle’s colleague Myron Genel’s medical opinion regarding whether or not transsexual athlete Charlotte Wood should be eligible to compete in women’s golf. While USGA speculated about Wood’s possible “inherent physical advantage,” Genel noted that her “size does not appear to be extraordinary relative to other women” and her oestrogen treatment “should have substantially mitigated many, though probably not all, differences in muscular strength which may have accrued from Ms. Wood’s former male sex” (Genel, 1988a). At the same time, however, some expressed concern over the “infiltration” of individuals into women’s sports who had been assigned male at birth but had not undergone medical sex reassignment or who would be willing to undergo – or pressured into undergoing – sex reassignment merely to reap the benefits of

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success in women’s sport. Ferguson-Smith (1987), for example, considered that compared to “truly” transsexual women, the case of a male transvestite would appear to be quite different. No physical sex reassignment has been made and it would not be realistic to allow anyone who chooses to cross-dress to masquerade as a female athlete. In India there is a large sect of individuals (numbering half a million) known as the Hijra or eunuchs. . . . It is not impossible that the more athletic of the castrated eunuchs could be recruited into sport, or that castration and reassignment for sex might be used to obtain the financial benefits associated with success in sport. . . . It would seem important to exclude even the remotest possibility that a young male athlete might be persuaded to undergo a sex change operation for such a purpose. Ferguson-Smith constructed this differentiation of transvestite fraudsters from “truly” transsexual women by drawing a normative line between legitimate (implying good or “pure” motives) and illegitimate (implying bad or fraudulent motives) sex reassignment, and consequently between legitimate and illegitimate claims to the status of woman. The former group was, in a sense, framed as entitled to sex reassignment and womanhood in contrast with the latter. This enabled Ferguson-Smith to advance a more supportive rhetoric of transsexual women’s eligibility, while maintaining an imaginary of the threat of the “cross-dresser” and “surgical masquerade” against which women’s sport needed protection. Indeed, de Merode expressed similar concerns: as phrased by a reporter who interviewed him about the rationales of gender verification in the early 1990s, de Merode worried over “doctors in third world counties eagerly waiting for sex testing to be dropped in order to perform sex change operations on their male athletes . . . and enter them in women’s competitions” (Marris, 1993). Debates between sport regulators and scientists over chromosome screening and gender masquerade in the 1980s thus intertwined, enduring Cold War era social anxieties over fraudulent governments with new concerns over the possible presence of overtly male individuals in women’s sport. Unlike the sex binary pollution carried by the “hybrid,” “borderline,” and “hermaphroditic” problem bodies of previous periods who were considered to require medical aid and sympathy from sport officials, the fraudulent gender masquerading men of the 1970s and 1980s were seen to be making an intentionally deceptive claim to womanhood by masking their “true” status as males. The “authenticity” of women’s sport was now perceived to be under a threat from XXY and XX males who could “pass” as females and masquerade as women, as well as from fraudulent “transvestites” undergoing sex reassignment and appropriating female embodiment with medical and surgical technologies. During and following the Lausanne gender verification working group meeting, the emphasis on male bodies infiltrating into women’s sport culminated into a new definition of the aims of gender verification and into a new definition of “femaleness” in international sport.

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“Man has a penis and a scrotum; a woman does not” The arguments that de la Chapelle and Simpson put forth at the Lausanne meeting in 1988 were successful – at least partially. According to de la Chapelle (1988e), after de Merode heard these arguments and reflected on the possibility of gender fraud by XX and XXY males and “transvestites,” he concluded that he “wished to avoid both instances of men masquerading as women and premeditated use of XXY and XX males.” Moreover, the IAAF medical commission president Arne Ljungqvist, who participated in the meeting, stated that his perspective was that gender verification should be applied “mainly to scare off imposters” (de la Chapelle, 1988f). Notably, the other participants agreed: the Lausanne gender verification working group concluded that the aim of gender verification in sport should be “to detect – or perhaps more accurately to deter – male imposters” (de la Chapelle, 1988b). The conclusions listed in the official meeting minutes (IOC, 1988a) were the following: firstly, the aim of gender verification, now explicitly defined, was “to prevent male imposters from participating in female competitions.” Secondly, “only those females with no external male genitalia [are] to be accepted.” The Lausanne working group thus constructed, in de la Chapelle’s (1988e) words, the following definition of sex to be applied in sport: a “male is an individual with a penis and testes in a well-formed scrotum. Others will be regarded as females.” This genitalia-centric definition not only positioned gender fraud as the key threat to the boundaries of the female category but it also, and importantly, identified “penises,” “testes,” and “well-formed scrotums” (as opposed to “ambiguously” formed genitalia, which would have signified sex “abnormality”) as the ultimate signifier of maleness and manhood. The “truth” of sex, in the final instance, was consequently carried not by sex phenotype in general but by genitals in particular, in ways that rendered the penis, testes, and scrotum as incontestable evidence of maleness. “Femaleness,” on the other hand, was defined as the absence of the penis, testes, and (well-formed) scrotum, in a way that was intended as inclusive of most women with female phenotypes. As Simpson (1988a) noted, “male pseudohermaphrodites,” e.g. women with XY chromosomes who have internal and thus not well-formed testes and no penis, “who are raised as females would not be excluded, but overt individuals with male external genitalia, who can be assumed to be imposters, would.” This not only implied that the purity of the female category could be secured simply by excluding (bodies with) penises, testes, and scrotums, but also that bodies competing in the female category with these genital attributes were presumed to be fraudulent: the presence of “male” external genitalia directly implied the status of an imposter. The conclusions of the Lausanne meeting and the new definition of sex had significant implications not only on how the boundaries of the female category were (re)drawn, but also on the methods that should be applied for gender verification. Because the key location of sex was now genitalia, chromosome screening was wholly inappropriate, as it was incapable of verifying anything about genital characteristics. Therefore, as an alternative method, de la Chapelle and Simpson

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proposed, as Ferguson-Smith had suggested, physical inspections. If chromosome screening was replaced with physical inspections, women athletes’ gender could be verified by the absence of (well-developed) male genitalia, in accordance with the new definition of “femaleness.” Consequently, the Lausanne working group agreed to “investigate physical examination as a more efficient means of gender verification” (IOC, 1988a). Yet, despite signing up to the Lausanne meeting conclusions, de Merode and the IOC-MC in general failed to act on this agreement. While de Merode initially stated that a second meeting would follow the Lausanne working group, he failed to deliver this promise. For the following two years, he did not resume the discussions, nor did he act on the Lausanne conclusions despite de la Chapelle’s multiple prompts and demands that he do so. This in many ways reflected and exemplified the continued reluctance of the IOC-MC in general and de Merode in particular to take on board the scientists’ critiques of their gender verification paradigm. In 1990, however, Ljungqvist, who had also signed up to the conclusions of the Lausanne group, organised another gender verification working group meeting, this time in Monte Carlo under the authority of the International Athletic Foundation (IAF). Ljungqvist had come to share many of de la Chapelle’s and his colleague’s concerns around chromosome screening and, unlike de Merode, he was a scientist on his own right at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He had also played a part in the re-instatement of Martínez-Patiño’s eligibility to compete after her exclusion. The Monte Carlo working group that he organised was larger and more comprehensive: it integrated a broader variety of external experts than the Lausanne meeting, including medical specialists as well as psychologists and critics like Carlson, who had been centrally involved in publicising MartínezPatiño’s story. The Monte Carlo working group not only re-affirmed the conclusions arrived at Lausanne, but these conclusions were also translated into policy, implemented by the IAAF in 1991. The Monte Carlo group decided, firstly, that chromosome screening for gender verification should be abandoned and, secondly, a new system instituted in its place, based on physical inspections. These were to be undertaken as part of a “health and gender examinations” framework. The group concluded as follows: A medical examination for the health and wellbeing of all athletes selected to participate in international competitions should be performed responsibly under the auspices of the national federation under internationally standardised guidelines. This medical examination would preclude the need for any genetic “sex test” [and] the criteria of eligibility for women’s competition . . . should include a description of the external genitalia. (IAF, 1990, original emphasis) Athletes were, moreover, to be issued with certificates as proof of their having undergone the examination. Because both female and male athletes would

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undergo these examinations, the new system might appear at first to have been more gender neutral. However, it was made clear that for female athletes (only), the “certificate will include gender verification,” based on the appearance of external genitalia (Ferguson-Smith, 1991). While the Monte Carlo working group agreed that the examinations should be conducted by national federations rather than the IAAF directly, they added that “to combat possible abuse of the system, quality control must be conducted at international competitions” (IAF, 1990). This “quality control” meant randomised on-site spot checks consisting of the same examinations as at national levels. This was considered necessary because there was “no question” that the new system would otherwise be “subject to potential abuse by unscrupulous coaches, athletic directors and certain national [Olympic] committees” (Genel, 1988b). The on-site quality control was, thus, a safeguard mechanism against the enduring concerns expressed by de Merode and others over unscrupulous governments, now focused on possible gender fraud committed by such governments. The Monte Carlo working group also came up with eligibility criteria for transsexual women athletes. These were foregrounded by – and exemplify – the centrality of social anxieties about the threat that penises were seen to pose in women’s sport. It was concluded that transsexual women who had undergone medical sex reassignment including genital surgery could be eligible to compete in women’s sport. This depended on a case-by-case decision made in consultation with medical experts (IAF, 1990) and required that the “sex change operation” had been undergone “for reasons other than competing in sport” (FergusonSmith, 1991). Simpson commented in relation to Richards specifically that she had indeed been “allowed to compete, but only after she underwent a sex change operation. Anyone undergoing a sex change operation would lack a penis and a scrotum, and plainly be categorised on physical inspection as ‘female’” (Simpson, 1988b). While this case-by-case system for transsexual women’s eligibility should, in many ways, be seen as a moderately emancipatory shift, positioning genital surgery as a criterion for (potential) eligibility implied that the penis and scrotum were at least implicitly associated with male (sporting) prowess as well as fraudulence. The imaginary of the “penis threat,” which underlies the Monte Carlo conclusions, framed “male genitalia” as threatening to the (pure) boundaries of the female category in ways that were foregrounded by (literalised) imaginaries of unlawful boundary “penetration” committed by (bodies with) penises. That genital surgery, if undergone for “the right reasons,” was seen to (possibly) legitimise transsexual women’s status as women also shows that the removal of the penis (and scrotum) was seen as de-threatening. It is notable that mandates for genital surgery for transsexual athletes were enforced in international sports until as late as 2015,7 which exemplifies the persistence and force of genitals (and distress over penises in particular) in definitions of “femaleness” across the decades. For the purposes of this book, the most significant consequence of the new genital-centric definition of “femaleness” was that social anxieties over the breakdown of the sex binary were re-framed. They became attached not to hybrid or sex

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binary blurring bodies but to overtly male bodies, where “maleness” was especially signified by penises, testes, and scrotums. By centring the possibility of fraudulent gender masquerade committed by individuals with male phenotypes, including (“well-formed” and thus “obviously”) male genitalia, sport regulators and scientists constructed a definition of (true) sex where one’s “femaleness” was verified by the absence of a penis, testes, and scrotum. Because the aim of gender verification was now to catch men masquerading as women, and because, in de la Chapelle’s words, a “man has a penis and a scrotum; a woman does not” (1989a), the examination of genitals was the correct gender verification method. The “gender” element of the IAAF’s new “health and gender examinations” functioned centrally as a practice of unveiling genitals as proof of one’s gender status in a context where gender masquerade was seen as a threat.

Conclusion The involvement of scientists like de la Chapelle and Ferguson-Smith in gender verification debates reconfigured the protectionist discourses around women’s sport. Sport regulators had primarily been concerned about “hybrid” and “indeterminate” bodies polluting sex category purity in sport. The scientists, however, had a more nuanced medical understanding of sex development and chromosomal disorders in particular. They argued that the IOC and IAAF chromosome screening system actually enabled cheating by outright males with dual X chromosomes who could commit gender fraud by masquerading as women. Their arguments focused on XX and XXY males, but also took shape in a context of increasing visibility of transsexual women taking part in women’s competitions, which incited social anxieties over the opening of “transsexual floodgates” to women’s sports. These two issues intertwined to give rise to concern over fraudulent male “transvestites” competing as women, which solidified the trope of gender masquerade as a central threat facing the “authenticity” (and safety) of the female sporting category. It should be emphasised, also, that the masquerade threat was not merely one focused on gender performance or presentation. The emphasis on XX/XXY males and men thought willing to undergo illegitimate sex reassignment surgery implied an embodied form of masquerade that enabled the infiltrator to misleadingly appropriate (at least some aspects of) female embodiment. The masquerade trope transferred the focus of gendered concern away from sex and gender binary blur, in ways that resulted in a shift around the aims of gender verification and the definition of “femaleness” that was applied. The scientists argued that using chromosome screening for gender verification was inappropriate and misleading, because some men could, at least theoretically, “pass” the screening, combined with the fact that some phenotypic females had been excluded from women’s sport due to the screening. Thus, physical inspections should be instituted instead because, in Ferguson-Smith’s and de la Chapelle’s view, (true) sex was carried by phenotypes, the ultimate signifier of which was genitalia. Physical inspections were therefore a more accurate way of verifying

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gender, as they would foreground phenotype in general and genitalia in particular. The culmination point of these arguments was the construction of a new definition of sex: “femaleness” was defined as the absence of “male” genitalia, which meant that one’s femaleness could be verified by confirming that she lacked a penis, testes, and (a well-formed) scrotum. When this reasoning was translated into the health and gender examinations policy by the IAAF, gender verification in athletics explicitly became a form of genital unmasking. The IOC, however, did not follow the IAAF in adopting the health and gender examinations system. It instituted, instead, a new, albeit still chromosome-based on-site gender verification method, namely, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the Y-chromosome-linked SRY gene. This choice was partially motivated by the fact that the IAAF health and gender examinations began to attract critique immediately after they were instituted. This critique came from female athletes and national team doctors, who considered these examinations to be a degrading retrograde step that was returning women’s athletics back to the “naked parades” era discussed in Chapter 3. Concurrently, while de la Chapelle had been instrumental in advancing the arguments that established male masquerade prevention as the aim of gender verification, that his arguments were likely at least partially strategic is significant. This is because de la Chapelle was actually concerned not only about the possible presence of “transvestites” and XX/XXY men in women’s sports but also about females with conditions such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which results in elevated androgen levels in females with XX chromosomes. It was the elevated androgen levels and, in particular, the apparent presence of what de la Chapelle called “hypermuscular” women in sport that concerned him. The next chapter discusses both the introduction of the PCR test by the IOC and the impact of de la Chapelle’s concerns on the IAAF’s health and gender examinations system. It charts the introduction of gender verification based on gender “suspicion.” It also highlights that while the 1970s and 1980s debates culminated in the formalisation of the male masquerade threat as the rationale for gender verification, this threat was only temporarily (and superficially) positioned as the heart of the problem.

Notes 1 While the term “transgender” is currently more widely used as an umbrella term that subsumes or surpasses the notion of transsexuality, I use “transsexuality” and “transsexual” to discuss the 1970s and 1980s context where “transgender” was not yet applied by contemporary commentators. The “transgender” notion gained popularity in the 1990s in the context of activism and scholarship by pioneering transgender writers such as Leslie Feinberg (1992), who employed the concept to resist the medicalisation of transsexuality and to refer to all those who defy binarised gendered and sexed embodiment. While transsexuality tends to connote a passing stage – of moving across the sex or gender binary (by the means of sex reassignment) to settle on the other side – transgender, in Feinberg’s reading, colligated all bodies that are “gender outlaws” in the sense of challenging binary sex and gender norms (see also Bornstein, 1994). While

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Feinberg’s historical monograph Transgender Warriors (1992) subsumed all past conceptualisations of gender variance under the transgender umbrella, using a concept and an identity category that only emerged in public and medical discourses in the 1990s risks projecting contemporary understandings of gender variance back in time and privileging these understandings over those that were used in the past. Indeed, the growing body of transgender theory as well as empirical research around transgender identities in the early 21st century (correctly) emphasises the diversity and complexity of gendered (and sexual) meaning (see for example Hines & Sanger, 2010; Stryker & Aizura, 2013) but acknowledgement of this diversity and complexity was not present in the dominant 1970s and 1980s characterisations of transsexual women in general and transsexual women in sport in particular. Debates over whether or not Klinefelter’s syndrome (and other sex chromosome variations not accompanied with “ambiguous” genitalia) should be counted as “intersex” have re-emerged in the early 21st century, however, with some now arguing that men with Klinefelter’s should not be considered intersex after all (for a more in depth analysis of this, see Griffiths, 2018). I found no other references to a Polish transvestite in women’s sport. Klobukowska’s story, however, was not only widely publicised, but also was the only Polish case of a sex-“suspicious” athlete. While Ferguson-Smith’s views about Klobukowska changed over the years, he continued to use her as an example in later commentaries where he identified her by name and claimed that she had Klinefelter’s syndrome (FergusonSmith, 1976). The earliest example I found of a narrative mirroring what has now become the dominant historical account of gender verification was presented by Ferguson-Smith in a paper published in 1976, where he claimed that gender verification had been introduced by elite sport-governing bodies “because there is evidence in the past that men have fraudulently masqueraded as women” (1976: 7). This paper produced an outline of many historical claims that have now become “common knowledge,” including illustrative gender fraud cases such as Ratjen and others who “may have been masquerading as women” (1976: 2). When tracing citations in search for primary sources to support the dominant historical gender verification narrative, the citation tracks lead me to a disproportionately large number of articles published either by Ferguson-Smith or by his close colleagues, which is where the citation tracks tend to end. The original document was written in Finnish. I translated it to English. The original document was written in Finnish. I translated it to English. The IOC 2015 consensus meeting on sex reassignment and hyperandrogenism finally removed the genital surgery requirement (see IOC, 2015). I will return to this point in Chapter 7.

Chapter 6

Gendered suspicions at the turn of the millennia

Despite the centrality of the gender fraud and masquerade imaginaries in the 1970s and 1980s, old social concerns over sex and gender binary breakdown embodied by “abnormal” and “masculinised” female athletes began to re-surface in relation to gender verification only a year after the IAAF had instituted the “health and gender examinations” system. These concerns quickly side-lined the masquerade issue. Indeed, worries over the sex binary blur had never truly subsided, not even when the central threat to the “authenticity” of women’s sports was officially identified with overt male infiltrators who had penises, testes, and “well-formed” scrotums. In this chapter, I chart how these enduring concerns motivated the introduction of a gender verification system that aimed to detect gender “suspicious” bodies in women’s sport. Even though it had taken decades to design the health and gender examinations scheme, the scheme itself was short lived. It immediately began to incite objections, because it was experienced as a throwback to an earlier era of humiliating “naked parades.” Both the IAAF and IOC responded to these objections by introducing alternative gender verification systems. The IOC began to use PCR for the Y-chromosome-linked SRY gene, and in so doing remained the target of critics who saw chromosome screening as an unviable gender verification method. The IAAF, on the other hand, introduced a case-by-case gender verification system designed to deal with cases of “suspicious” or “questionable” gender. While such cases could be identified by doping officials observing athletes’ genitals as they provided urine samples, the suspicion-based system was motivated less by concerns over genitals and more by concerns over “excessively” muscular highperforming female athletes who challenged socio-medical notions of “female physiological normalcy.” Their “hypermuscular” bodies lacked male genitals but seemed to “overflow” the boundaries of normal(ised) femaleness. While the gendered concerns of the 1990s and early 21st century were certainly continuous with earlier anxieties over sex binary breakdown, they were articulated in new ways in the post-Soviet geopolitical context. When the Iron Curtain was lifted, social anxieties over gender-binary-polluting female bodies from communist Eastern Europe gradually became anachronistic. At the same time, Western suspicions over gender binary pollution in sport were transferred onto

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Chinese female athletes, as China became the new international sporting superpower that filled the void left open by the decline of the Soviet “other.” Western worries over Chinese female athletes intertwined broader racialised, sexualised, and gendered discourses in ways that came to (pre-)mark some bodies more easily as gender suspect than others due to their failure to embody (white, Western) feminine body norms. In this context, racialised female bodies from the Global South have increasingly become the core target of gender policing, because the suspicion-based gender verification system in effect formalised (white, Western) feminine body aesthetics as the standard of gendered normalcy.

Gendered suspicion, excessive bodies, and feminine body aesthetics By the 1990s, the athletic or so-called fit female body had become not only permissible but also sexualised (and commercialised) in the popular imaginary and culture. The fitness boom of the 1970s and 1980s had encouraged women to take up weight training alongside activities like jogging in large numbers, and the feminist movements of the period intertwined sport participation with broader campaigns around women’s physical and sexual empowerment (Cahn, 1994; Hargreaves, 1994). The boundaries around acceptable female embodiment “in the dimensions and musculature of the body” were shifting, which allowed for “a broadening of definitions of sporting femininity” whereby “well-honed athletic female bodies” were “openly embraced as sexually attractive” (Hargreaves, 1994: 169–170). These shifts were embedded within broader politics and social reform around gender and sexuality, including relative destabilisation of gender roles within the family and workforce. They also coincided with the emergence of queer and transgender politics, social movements, and activism, which brought gender and sexual diversity as well as the “queering” of gender categories into the awareness of the broader public (Hines, 2010). The changing dimensions of gender and acceptable female embodiment were coupled with significant advances in women’s sport: women were running and swimming faster, throwing farther, and lifting heavier than ever. With increasing public interest in women’s sport, these performances were also broadcast to, and witnessed by, larger audiences than before. However, the high-performing and increasingly muscular female bodies in international sports also incited gendered social anxieties as they overtly stepped outside long-held feminine body norms. These anxieties in many ways represented a counter reaction within a context of gendered and sexual change that was destabilising category boundaries. They concentrated on what was perceived as “excessive” (as opposed to acceptable amounts of) muscle on some female athletes’ bodies and clustered around intertwined unease with women’s improving performance levels. After Czechoslovakian track athlete Jarmila Kratochvílová had set the all-time longest-standing athletics world record in the 800-meters and China’s Wang Junxia ran the first women’s sub-30-minute 10,000-meters, the unprecedented performance levels and sporting prowess of female bodies like

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theirs openly defied old cultural imaginaries that had relegated female bodies as soft and weak. Their high-performing “excessive” bodies, now observed and scrutinised by large international audiences, posed a visible threat to gendered and sexed borders. Female bodies that accumulate noticeable muscle mass blur gendered bodily boundaries not only because muscles are culturally coded as masculine or male, but also because muscular or “large” female bodies bulge out of the bounds of feminine embodiment, expected to be small and confined. The “bulky” body of a muscular female athlete “overflows ‘the natural boundaries’ of a woman’s body” (Tate, 2016: 101), refusing to stay disciplined within the petite “feminine form” that is culturally expected of women. The accumulation of mass on a female body, then, marks a refusal to be “shaped and contained” in “a social context where women are expected to be contained, to not take up space and to be well kempt” (Throsby, 2016: 130–131). In other words, female bodies with muscular “excess” transgress gendered norms by refusing to “stay put.” Their bodily boundaries threaten the presumed physiological limits of femaleness. As I have discussed in previous chapters, the mere presence of noticeable musculature had long been sufficient to render the sex and gender purity of female athletes’ bodies and, consequently, their performances suspect. Gendered concern over excessive muscle were, however, particularly emphasised in the 1990s and early 21st century. The perceived muscular excess and outstanding performances of athletes like Kratochvílová appeared to many observers to be unnatural for a female body and consequently fundamentally suspicious: too much to be “purely” female and too good to be “real.” Such suspicions derived from a persistent cultural refusal to accept noticeable muscularity on a female body and females’ highlevel performances, which were apprehended rather as threatening to natural(ised) sex categories (Johnston, 1996). This is partially because the “muscular woman” is easily “imagined to rely on ‘unnatural,’ masculine means to achieve her ‘unnatural’ physique,” which “threatens to produce an unrecognisable creature that is neither wholly female nor wholly male, yet terrifyingly both” (Magdalinski, 2009: 98–99). Such “unnatural” means imply doping and anabolic steroids in particular, and women’s sport observers are often imagined to be capable of recognising “suspicious” bodies through (masculine) visual cues: audiences “‘read’ female bodies in order to identify and condemn those who ‘appear’ to be chemically boosted” (Magdalinski, 2009: 104). Especially since the 1990s, concerns over the masculinising effects of steroids have also been intertwined with concerns over possible hormonal disorders that are perceived to render “excessively” muscular female bodies and their performances abnormal. In both cases, the “excessive” presence of androgenic hormones is seen to result in “excessive” muscularity and “excessively” high performance levels in female bodies, which is regarded “as an infringement against, and even obliteration of, the very essence of femininity” in visually observable, embodied terms (Magdalinski, 2009: 95). In the 1990s and early 21st century, the imagined overflow of muscle, power, and speed and the presumed overflow of androgens embodied by some female

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athletes gave rise to gendered boundary anxieties that were centred on suspiciousappearing bodies in women’s sport. These bodies were identified in terms of gendered bodily aesthetics that broke with the “feminine form”: female masculinity was centred “as an aesthetic marker of the bodies suspected to be unfairly enhanced – either by steroids or biological disorders” (Henne, 2014: 739). This body aesthetic was also, and notably, racialised in ways that meant that suspicious gendered appearances were disproportionately identified with racialised “others” of the West. The collapse of the Berlin wall and 1991 breakdown of the Soviet Union largely rendered the Cold War image of the gender “hybrid” athlete from the Eastern bloc an image of a past era, albeit a troubling and dangerous one serving as a warning for the future. By the mid-1990s, the position of the gendered “other” was largely re-filled by racialised bodies, especially from China and later from the Global South (see also Henne, 2014; Pieper, 2014). Like Eastern bloc female athletes but framed through different discursive means, their bodies polluted Western, white body norms in intersecting ways: the colonial imaginaries discussed in Chapter 1 had long attributed the racialised “other” with imperfect sex(ual) differentiation. This imperfection was conceptualised through boundary contamination, which was in turn contrasted against the presumed “pure” differentiation of Western, white, and upper/middle-class sexed bodies and gendered roles. As these old imaginaries were read onto the bodies of high-performing and muscular female athletes implicitly and explicitly, the athletes were left in an intersecting node of imaginaries: their “excessively” muscled bodies and “excessive” sporting prowess was intertwined with their racial “excess” or, in other words, the racialised perception that their bodies were already sex(ually) abnormal and pathological. Thus, when suspicion based on gendered body aesthetics was centred as an explicit gender verification apparatus, some bodies were more easily marked as suspicious than others. Before I discuss the suspicion-based gender verification system, however, it is necessary to trace the problems that accompanied the IAAF health and gender examinations scheme. This is not only because these problems resulted in the scheme’s discontinuation and the institution of the PCR test by the IOC, but also because they form a step in the story that culminated into the introduction of suspicion-based gender verification.

Objections to the health and gender examinations, and the PCR test The IAAF health and gender examinations were trialled during the 1991 Tokyo World Championships and the Nieuwegein 15-km road race World Championships, but many team doctors who were asked to conduct the examinations immediately expressed discomfort with their intimate nature. British doctor Malcolm Brown, for example, refused to perform the examinations on his athletes because he considered that “the invasion of privacy of a physical examination to determine gender is unnecessary,” in particular when it came to examining “mammary glands

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and genital organs” (Bowell, 1991: 32). Indeed, Brown alongside other team doctors co-signed a letter to the IAAF in protest of the examinations. They argued that the examinations were “a retrograde step which many find distasteful, degrading, impractical, inaccurate and impossible to enforce on a worldwide basis” and asked that the IAAF “urgently reconsider the introduction of this method” (Villalon et al., 1991). Elizabeth Stolk (1992), who was involved in overseeing the implementation of the examinations in relation to the Nieuwegein Championships, stated that the new system left her “feeling that some athletes might have been embarrassed or shocked by the procedure.” Many female athletes concurred: American track athlete Frankie Smith, for example, protested that the examinations were “degrading” and “disgusting” (“Physical Exam to Determine the Sex of Athletes,” 1991). These objections derived from the widely shared feeling that the examinations were a throwback to the late 1960s era of humiliating “naked parades,” which I discussed in Chapter 5. As Malcolm Ferguson-Smith’s colleague Elizabeth Ferris (1991) observed, with “respect to the responses from athletes to the new procedure, I too have heard a certain amount of outraged indignation from women athletes who envisage a return to the Dark Ages of genital ‘inspection.’” The resentment around the new IAAF scheme was also noticed by the IOC medical official Bernard Dingeon, who commented that requirements for physical examinations raise “a big question mark with regard to the position we are defending vis-à-vis RESPECT for the athlete” (1992a, original capitals). During the Monte Carlo gender verification working group meeting, where the IAAF “health and gender examinations” system was designed, Dingeon had proposed an alternative test to replace the previous chromosome screening system, namely, the PCR test for the Y-chromosome-linked SRY gene. The SRY gene, which has been conceptualised as “the testes determining factor,” was discovered in 1990 (Richardson, 2013), and the PCR test was seen as more sophisticated than previous chromosome tests. Because PCR was nonetheless a chromosome test, however, Dingeon’s proposal to use it for gender verification was disregarded at Monte Carlo because PCR was subject to most of the same critiques as the older chromosome screening methods, which I discussed in the previous chapter. As Carlson (1991, original emphasis) noted, “obviously, substituting one chromosome measure to another misses the point” of most of the objections to chromosome screening that had been advanced over the past decades. Nonetheless, Dingeon (1992b) argued that the PCR was preferable to the IAAF health and gender examinations because the latter was disrespectful to women athletes. He also noted that PCR was more accurate than previous chromosome tests, thus minimising the possibility of testing errors. Significantly, other IOC-MC officials agreed. Just prior to the 1992 Albertville Olympics – only two years after the SRY gene was discovered – the IOC decided to institute the PCR test as their new gender verification screening method. Dingeon was assigned to implement the testing at Albertville. Afterwards, he noted that based “on our experience, we can affirm that the gynecological control ‘being talked about’ would have been very badly received by many of the girls” (Dingeon, 1992a).

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The IAAF was also forced to re-consider the health and gender examinations system only a year after its implementation. Confronted with widespread discomfort with the examinations, the IAF organised another seminar on gender verification in London in May 1992, where the examinations’ viability was discussed. The result of these discussions was a new gender verification paradigm for athletics.

Genitals, gendered suspicion, and hypermuscular women Prior to the London gender verification seminar, Ljungqvist reflected on the objections that had been mounted against the IAAF health and gender examinations. Building on the Monte Carlo consensus that the objective of gender verification was to identify men masquerading as women, he had the following realisation: Nowadays when doping control is routine . . . it is highly doubtful that men would take the chance at masquerading as women since they run a great risk of being selected for doping control. During the control . . . the voiding of the urine [is] carefully watched by an official to make sure that the urine actually comes from the urinary bladder. . . . Therefore . . . any man masquerading as female would probably be identified. (Ljungqvist, 1991) Ljungqvist realised that it was possible to counter the objections against the health and gender examinations by using doping control as the means of gender verification: because unveiling genitals during these controls was necessary anyway, doping officials could inspect female athletes’ genitals and in so doing make separate physical examinations unnecessary. Athletes generally accepted the requirement to reveal their genitals during doping controls, which meant that criticisms based on privacy invasion would lose force. Ljungqvist presented this idea during the London seminar, and it was accepted: the participants agreed that “the procedures which have to be followed during doping controls are quite sufficient for also making sure whether the athletes are male or female” (Ljungqvist, 1992a). Consequently, the IAAF council accepted with immediate effect that “from now on, there will be no special screening for gender at international athletics competitions. [The] health check will no longer be compulsory” (Ljungqvist, 1992b). This decision did not, however, abolish gender verification in athletics. A new clause was added to the IAAF regulations, which left a provision within their regulatory system “for dealing with any questionable case, including gender”: the “medical delegate of a competition” was given “the full right to investigate any case that he [or she] may deem necessary” (Ljungqvist, 1992b). This meant that the IAAF reserved “the right for full investigation of anybody where there was a question raised as to their gender,” as de la Chapelle’s colleague Martin Bobrow (1987) had phrased it some years earlier. The implication was, in Bobrow’s (1987) words, “that if a lady was able to hurl a javelin for some ridiculous distance, and had very hairy

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legs, a question could be raised.” The provision for dealing with questionable cases was centrally motivated by enduring concerns over what de la Chapelle (1987b) had in the 1980s called “hypermuscular” women with “male-type” body build. De la Chapelle’s suspicions about “hypermuscular” women were centred, in particular, around the Czechoslovakian runner Kratochvílová, who had performed at unprecedented levels in the 1980s. She set several world records, including the 800-meter record that continues to stand at the time of writing. Kratochvílová’s “excessive” muscularity was a site of gendered anxiety for many observers during as well as after the height of her competitive career. Medical observer Leroy Perry, for example, commented that Kratochvílová’s body “is not a normal physiological female body. I’ve treated Olympic female athletes in 34 countries. . . . But I’ve never seen a body like that. . . . I think there is something chemically different about her physical make-up” (“Tracking Down the Drug Users,” 1984: 14). While many suspected that Kratochvílová’s body and her exceptional performance levels were the result of steroid doping, almost equally prevalent were accusations that questioned her gender. As one journalist noted, there were “two theories equally repugnant . . . to explain the success of Jarmila Kratochvilova. . . . The first is that Miss Kratochvilova has taken drugs to improve her performance. The second, quite bluntly, is that she is not a woman” (Butcher, 1983: 17). Notably, this was despite the fact that Kratochvílová passed chromosome screening for gender verification in the 1980s. This fact itself had undermined, for some, the reliability of chromosome screening: “as masculine as the Czechoslovak superstar may seem,” one journalist remarked, “there is no doubt that she is a woman” because the “IOC has given her a certificate affirming that. . . . But a look across the field at the world championships brings one to wonder whether the chromosomes are telling the truth” (Christie, 1983). The suspicions directed at Kratochvílová were centrally foregrounded by the challenge that her body represented the presumed limits of female bodies’ sporting potential. Her muscular body overflowed and exceeded the boundaries of acceptable and normalised female physiology and transgressed the dominant feminine body aesthetics in women’s sport. De la Chapelle, in particular, considered Kratochvílová’s musculature and performance levels to exemplify not just masculinisation but a type of sex abnormality that should merit exclusion from women’s athletics. Even before the Lausanne and Monte Carlo gender verification working group meetings, de la Chapelle had identified Kratochvílová as an example of an athlete with a sex abnormality that resulted in “hypermuscularity.” He commented that Kratochvílová probably was a typical example of so called adrenal hyperplasia; anyone could see that she had a male type-body, but her sex chromatin was indeed “feminine.” . . . This type of abnormality is quite common; many presently active sports women have the same condition, albeit often in milder form. Many of them should probably not compete in women’s events. (de la Chapelle, 1987b)

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De la Chapelle (1991) had observed Kratochvı́lová’s performance at the 1983 Helsinki World Championships and noted in retrospect that “I who sat in the stands agreed with her competitors who said ‘she does not look like a woman.’” Indeed, West German track athlete Gaby Bußmann, for example, contended that “Kratochvilova’s competitors should boycott her races on the grounds that the Czechoslovakian resembles a man too much” (Butcher, 1983: 17). For de la Chapelle and others, Kratochvílová’s muscular, perceived masculine bodily appearances combined with her exceptional speed were sufficient (and necessary) grounds for gender suspicion. Her bodily exteriors contaminated gendered visual body boundaries, and rendered her femaleness and the gender authenticity of bodies that resembled hers, in need of verification. De la Chapelle (1991) openly communicated his concerns to colleagues, including Ljungqvist, remarking that “you know the Jarmila Kratochwilova case yourself. You know that there was a public outcry about her masculine appearance.” De la Chapelle (1991) added that it was his belief that Kratochvílová should have been “subjected to a ‘case by case’ analysis” of gender. This suggestion was closely connected with his suspicion that Kratochvílová’s “hypermuscularity” as well as high performance levels were a “symptom” of CAH, which results in elevated androgen levels in females. De la Chapelle seems to have presumed that Kratochvílova’s “excessive” muscularity and performance levels were caused by “excessive” androgen levels. In leaving a provision open for dealing with “questionable cases,” the IAAF built on de la Chapelle’s suggestion that gender-suspect athletes like Kratochvílová should be subjected to “case-by-case” gender verification. In addition to using doping controls to inspect female athletes’ genitals, the IAAF instituted a suspicion-based gender verification system whereby athletes whose gender was “questionable” (i.e. insufficiently feminine) could be made to undergo an examination to verify their gender. The discontinuation of the health and gender examinations scheme consequently marked a move from gender verification applied to all female athletes to a case-by-case system that mirrored the IAAF’s much earlier 1930s protest-based policies, discussed in Chapter 2, remarkably closely. De la Chapelle’s remarks about Kratochvílová, as well as Bobrow’s comments about ladies with “hairy legs” able to “hurl a javelin for some ridiculous distance” bring starkly to the fore which kinds of bodies were considered suspicious. They illustrate the underlying concern over “excess” muscle and prowess that overflows feminine confinement and highlight the centrality of gendered body aesthetics and “feminine” performance levels. The implementation of the suspicion-based gender verification clause demonstrates how gender masquerade prevention, centred on detecting “male” genitals, was not enough to secure the boundaries of the female category, nor to combat sport regulators’ and observers’ enduring anxieties over “masculinised” or sex binary polluting bodies. Boundaries around the female category drawn around genitals were insufficient because it was not (just) male bodies with penises that incited concern, but “hypermuscular,” gender-suspicious bodies whose

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appearances transgressed normative gendered body boundaries. In de la Chapelle’s (1989b) words, “if a person is a woman, it is enough to look at her to find that out.” The converse, of course, implies that suspect bodies could be identified through gendered visual cues as well. Two years after the discontinuation of the health and gender examinations system, however, the IAAF faced a backlash from female athletes which, in some ways, continues to resonate today. The backlash reflected the broader, gendered geopolitical context of the 1990s and centred on so-called grey areas of sex as a site of gendered concern, in ways intertwined with worries over the effects of androgenic hormones on female bodies.

The “essence of man” In 1994, two years after the discontinuation of the IAAF health and gender examinations, a group of 16 female track and field athletes, headed by Janet Heinonen, the editor of the Keeping Track magazine, began to campaign for the reintroduction of compulsory on-site gender verification for all women in athletics. The campaign was mounted largely on the grounds that “reliance on visual monitoring for sex in doping controls” was insufficient and verifying gender in high-stakes competitions “provides reassurance to women athletes” (Heinonen, 1994). Additionally, Keeping Track published an article stating that “women athletes report that in many cases no one is watching closely when they provide urine samples” (Decent Proposal, 1994). Consequently, in Carlson’s (1994a) words, who had multiple discussions with Heinonen, the Heinonen 16 group wanted “better guarantees of protection against unfair competition.” Notably, the Heinonen 16 group argued that in addition to serving as a deterrent against gender masquerade, the purpose of gender verification in athletics should be to “identify athletes who fall in the ‘grey area’ of sex” (Heinonen, 1994). As phrased by the Keeping Track magazine, neither the chromosome-based “buccal smear nor a quick visual check for prominent male genitalia in doping controls will identify those rare individuals who have medical conditions such as ambiguous genitalia or congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which may confer an athletic advantage” (Decent Proposal, 1994). The reason why “ambiguous genitalia” and CAH were taken to confer athletic advantage related to concerns over high levels of androgens in female bodies. The Heinonen 16 group saw testosterone “as the unifying theme as far as unfair advantage is concerned” and, in Carlson’s (1994a) words, the “question remains, for them, about what ‘grey areas’ (sex identitywise) constitute unfair advantage. They want this to be satisfactorily explained, decided and formally defined in policy.” The Heinonen 16’s concerns arose in the 1990s context of international sport, which was characterised by the sudden prominence of Chinese female athletes as well as revelations about a large-scale doping programme in East Germany during the Cold War. After the Soviet Union collapsed, China became a new global superpower that challenged Western dominance, creating geopolitical tensions

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that in some ways resembled those between the West and the East during the Cold War. These tensions extended into international sport as Chinese athletes began to achieve unprecedented sporting success. Chinese female athletes in particular emerged as the new “other” in relation to the West against which Western notions of appropriate femininity in sport could be contrasted (Pieper, 2014). In 1993, Chinese women dominated long-distance races at the IAAF Stuttgart World Championships, winning six out of nine medals (excluding the marathon). They set three long-distance world records at the Beijing Chinese National Games, two of which were achieved by the highly successful Junxia, who secured multiple records and medals during the first part of the 1990s. Chinese women’s newfound success in international sport sparked public commentary from many Western observers, who expressed suspicions about the “real reason” behind their sporting dominance. This suspicion was intertwined with racialised imaginaries around the oriental(ised) feminine “other.” In Western depictions, Asian women have been stereotyped as passive, diminutive, excessively submissive, and available for white men. In contrast with black women, who have been framed as unfeminine in relation to white women, Asian women have been constituted as hyper-feminine through gendered tropes like the delicate and subservient “lotus blossom” (Pyke & Johnson, 2003). As Chinese women became leading figures in sport, Western observers began speculating about the “unnatural” appearance of Chinese female athletes, who disrupted both (white, Western) gender norms and racialised preconception about Asian women (see also Magdalinski, 2009). Many Western commentators drew parallels between China in the 1990s and the Cold War Eastern bloc, which re-enforced the old anxieties, discussed in Chapter 3, over suspiciously masculinised or doping-enhanced bodies in women’s sports. These suspicions were associated with unscrupulous governments willing to use dubious means to attain success. Now, however, concerns were directed at the Chinese state, and the comparison with Cold War Eastern Europe was reinforced by some journalists observing that “coaches from eastern Germany have helped establish the Chinese [sports] program” (Longman, 1994). That the successes of Chinese women in athletics seemed to coincide with the IAAF discontinuation of the health and gender examinations system did not go unnoticed by sport observers either. Discussing advances attained by women athletes during the preceding years, one reporter remarked that just as the new world order seems to be taking hold for women athletes, along come China, with its own version of the state-supported, behind-closed-doors sports system. The rise of the Chinese athletes revealed the hole in the IAAF position on gender verification. It became obvious that world records in track could be set without any requirement of gender verification, that athletes could compete almost exclusively within their own borders, invisible to their competitors worldwide while rewriting the record books and all time lists. (Give-and-take on Gender Verification, 1994)

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Western concerns in the 1990s over Chinese female athletes, like Cold War concerns over Eastern bloc female athletes, centred on the perceived problem of (male-like) sporting prowess possessed by female athletes. The athletes were presumed to carry such prowess mostly due to steroid doping but also as a consequence of sex “abnormalities.” These concerns were, now more explicitly than before, centred on the performance-enhancing effects of testosterone, which has been perceived to be the foundation of male(-like) athletic potential. One reporter, for example, commented in relation to “the unbelievable performances of the Chinese female runners” that “I am not alone in believing that when a woman’s athletic performances are extraordinary and not predicted by previous results, then the woman isn’t natural. She’s a wannabe man wearing the essence of man: testosterone” (Connolly, 1994: 13). This reporter considered not only that Chinese women’s performances were “unbelievable,” but also that testosterone constituted the “essence of man.” This rendered testosterone a foundationally male substance that women can only “wear” in pretence, like a mask. When “worn” by females in “excessive” amounts, this hormone seemed not only to stimulate male-like athletic potential but to pollute their femaleness, masculinising their performances and gendered appearances as well as their sex. The explanatory importance of testosterone was also related to and intertwined with revelations about the large-scale Cold War East German state-sponsored doping programme, which was exposed during the early 1990s. The doping programme not only contributed to East German, Cold War–era sporting success, but it was also considered to explain the “masculinised” bodies of East German, Cold War–era female athletes. After the Berlin wall fell, the breakdown of the East German state enabled the discovery of classified government and Stasi documents. These included reports on the so-called State Plan 14.25, which amounted to a state-sponsored programme, including a widespread distribution of steroids that was applied to thousands of East German athletes during the Cold War (Dimeo, Hunt, & Horbury, 2011). The revelation of State Plan 14.25 by the mid-1990s created a public scandal that sparked a period of “doping trials” in Germany. It was also taken by many to confirm suspicions about the bodies of East German female athletes that had been widespread since the Cold War. For example, one observer commented in retrospect that during the Belgrade 1973 swimming world championships: the East German faces and names were familiar, but their bodies – and their performances – were not. They had gained an average of 22 pounds and the average gain in height was about an inch and a half. . . . The word on everyone’s lips . . . was steroids. (Shuer, 1982) Commentary on the “excessive” muscularity and size of East German female athletes was especially common (exemplified by the odd suggestion that steroids might be responsible not only for weight but also for height gains) and perceived

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as evidence of dangerous masculinisation due to steroids. Recalling the appearance of Cold War–era, East German female athletes, American athlete Deena Deardurff remarked: Their body structure was completely different from ours. . . . They were twice as big as we were and had completely developed muscles that we didn’t have. I remember one time we were walking out to an event and I heard someone behind me, and I couldn’t figure out why there was a man there, walking with us. It was an East German woman. (Shuer, 1982) Suspicions about East German muscular and “masculinised” female athletes, contrasted against the “appropriately” feminine bodies of Western women, had been a bogyman in women’s sport since the height of Eastern bloc, Cold War success in international sport. The East German state-sponsored doping programme came to stand as exemplary of the immoral nature of steroid doping as a form of (totalitarian state) abuse of athletes in both public and academic discourses. It symbolised the danger inherent in the corruption of the Olympic values and international sport by “dirty” political agendas (Dimeo, Hunt, & Horbury, 2011). This legacy also extended to regulatory reform: it was seen as evidence that the IOC had failed in their anti-doping efforts, which partially inspired demands for a new anti-doping framework, culminating in the establishment of the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA) in 1999 as an independent international anti-doping body (Dimeo, Hunt, & Horbury, 2011). The (gendered) evils of the East German sports programme were embodied and perpetuated by the story of Heidi Krieger in particular, who was the 1986 European shot-put champion. In the late 1990s, Krieger “laid charges against her former doctor after allegations that he turned her into a man by over-prescribing anabolic steroids. . . . She had developed masculine features, including facial hair and an Adam’s apple” and “suffered severe psychological problems” after taking blue “vitamin” pills that were, in fact, steroids (Mackay, 1997: 3). Krieger later underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed his name to Andreas, which newspapers represented as a direct consequence of the steroids’ masculinising effects on his body and psyche.1 Krieger’s story has come to stand in the popular sport imagination as “the most extreme example of the effects of an insidious, state-sponsored system of doping” (Longman, 2004), epitomised by the “Heidi Krieger medal” awarded to those who lead the “fight against doping” in sport. Through this medal, Krieger’s story stands as symbolic of the gendered perils of steroids and as a warning of the dangerously masculinising effects of “excessive” androgens in female bodies, which can, it seemed, be severe enough to turn a woman into a man. This is old worry that has been expressed since the 1930s, as I discussed in Chapter 4. The fact that the East German doping revelations coincided with the rise of Chinese female athletes contributed to the reasons why testosterone-induced

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masculinisation became a key gendered concern in women’s sport in the 1990s. Suspicions about the success of Chinese female athletes and suspicions about former East German female athletes were intertwined in two ways: firstly, China’s “state-supported, behind-closed-doors sports system” re-surfaced old Cold War anxieties over unscrupulous governments using illicit means of success. Secondly, both suspicions centred around social anxieties over the excessive presence of androgenic hormones in female bodies. As I noted previously, the Heinonen 16 group’s campaign to re-introduce gender verification for all women in athletics was focused on testosterone levels as the unifying theme of “unfair advantage” in women’s sport. The Heinonen 16 were concerned especially about the “grey area” of sex as a site of unfair advantage. Consequently, they did not argue for the re-introduction of chromosome screening but, rather, for the introduction of blood testing for total testosterone levels (Heinonen, 1994). As Carlson (1994b) noted, the Heinonen 16’s concerns had been motivated by “the recent Statzi reports about East German sport programs, the Chinese runners (‘drugs? Or sex disorders?’),” and “what the athletes say are recent anecdotal evidences of some very ‘suspicious’ competitors.” The “real worry” for many, Carlson (1994b) added, was that “unscrupulous sports organizations might . . . seek out women athletes with sex related disorders – and discourage medical treatment, thinking that the athlete would ‘benefit’ from the possible related hormone variation.” While Heinonen 16’s arguments did not result in a policy response, they are significant for the history of gender verification, firstly because they exemplify broader concerns over suspiciously masculinised (or androgenised) bodies in women’s sport in the 1990s. They are significant, secondly, because these concerns brought androgens explicitly into debates about gender verification. While androgenic hormones in general and hormonal disorders in particular had been debated before, the concern over high testosterone levels in female bodies and the suggestion that testosterone could be used for gender verification considerably shaped gender verification policies in the early 21st century. Most significant was the idea that female bodies with high testosterone were “wearing the essence of man,” which implied that they were not within the confines of “normal” female capacity. I return to these issues in the next chapter. The rest of this chapter discusses the abolition of the IOC’s PCR test, and the final phase of the suspicion-based gender verification period during the late 1990s and early 21st century.

The discontinuation of PCR testing The IOC continued to use the PCR test for gender verification until 1999 – long after the IAAF had moved to suspicion-based gender verification – despite the fact that the PCR test was subject to most of the critiques against chromosome screening that had been expressed by the scientific community since the 1970s. Relatedly, during the years that PCR testing was applied, the IOC faced sustained opposition, including refusal by medical professionals to conduct the test, which

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resulted in practical as well as political and ethical problems. Spanish scientist Xavier Estivill refused to conduct the test during the 1992 Barcelona Olympics on the grounds that it “could lead to increased misdiagnosis of women athletes as men,” arguing that there was an “absence of a clear idea what the results actually mean” (C. Anderson, 1991). Similarly, 22 French scientists co-signed a petition in relation to the 1992 Albertville Olympics arguing that genetic testing for sex is scientifically flawed and unethical (“Determination du Sexe Génétique Chez Les Concurrentes Des Jeux Olympiques d’Albertville,” 1992). During the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, no scientist from any Nordic country agreed to conduct the PCR test for the IOC (de la Chapelle, 1993), and the IOC consequently had to send Dingeon and his Albertville gender verification team to Norway so that the tests could be performed at all (Ljungqvist, 1997). Afterwards, the Norwegian parliament passed a ruling which made genetic testing for gender verification illegal under Norwegian law (Ljungqvist, 1997). In 1996, the IOC World Conference on Women and Sport passed a resolution urging “the IOC to discontinue the current process of gender verification” (Ferris, 1996). During the following two years, Ljungqvist, who had been elected as an IOC member in 1994, argued for the discontinuation of PCR testing at various IOC meetings. Finally, the IOC session in Seoul leading up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games confirmed that PCR testing at the Olympics was to be discontinued (Ljungqvist, 1999a). Mirroring the IAAF, however, the IOC reserved the right to “arrange for the determination of the gender of a competitor” when necessary and, to enable this, the IOC would have “a team of specialists standing by (including a female gynecologist) should a case need to be examined” during the Olympics (Ljungqvist, 1999b). The discontinuation of PCR testing thus represented a shift to suspicionbased testing also in the Olympics, with the addition of an appointed team of specialists positioned at the Olympic site prepared to investigate any gendersuspicious bodies that might turn up at Olympic competitions. As one reporter observed in relation to the Sydney Olympics, “a ‘flying squad’ of specially selected Olympic medical experts, including a team of gynecologists, will be in Australia during the Games to target individual athletes if they are deemed suspicious” (Pittaway, 1999: 90). During the Beijing Olympics eight years later, a reporter noted that “suspicious-looking woman athletes . . . will be forced to take a gender test” (Macartney, 2008: 35). Another added that the organisers “have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate ‘suspect’ female athletes” on their “external appearance, hormones and genes,” noting that the “lab is similar to ones set up at previous Olympics” not only in Sydney but also in Athens (Thomas, 2008: D1). In relation to the Beijing Games, Ljungqvist, who was elected as the IOC-MC chairman in 2003 after de Merode’s death, noted to a journalist that the IOC “must be ready to take on such [suspicious] cases should they arise. . . . Sometimes, fingers are pointed at particular female athletes” and the IOC has “to be able to investigate it and clarify” (Thomas, 2008: D1). That the IOC was prepared for the possible presence of suspicious bodies with laboratories especially constructed for this purpose illustrates that the concern

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over gender appearances was taken seriously. It also highlights the centrality of continued gendered anxieties around masculinised, “hypermuscular” bodies already expressed by de la Chapelle in the 1980s. By the turn of the century, then, suspicion-based gender verification, combined with the observation of genitals during doping controls, had become the primary frame for gender verification in international sports.

Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya In 2006 and 2009 respectively, two gender scandals occurred in athletics under the suspicion-based gender verification system. They focused on Indian athlete Shanthi Soundarajan and South African athlete Caster Semenya, and both were widely publicised by the media. The latter in particular gained unprecedented public interest, enabled by the globalised online media space of the 21st century, which quickly spread news about the scandals to wide international audiences. The increasing importance of online reporting and changing news consumption habits since the mid-1990s (including online news) had transformed the structure, speed, and volume of news reporting (Allan, 2006). “More space equals more news” and the internet’s (relative) lack of spatial boundaries and high speed now implies increasing geographical reach in news distribution (Fenton, 2010). Located within this context, the gender scandals around Soundarajan and Semenya attracted a disproportionate volume of media coverage and public awareness when compared with earlier stories of gender-suspect athletes. During the 2006 Asian Games at Doha, Soundarajan finished second in the women’s 800-meter race, but news outlets reported some days after that she was stripped off her silver medal by the Olympic Council of Asia because she had failed gender verification. Journalists conveyed that Soundarajan had been gender verified due to suspicions raised about her gender. Ljungqvist clarified that it was “an official who observed Sundarajan during the mandatory urine test” for doping control that had “questioned her sex” (Thomas, 2008). Consequently, Soundarajan was subjected to “extensive tests by a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and a genetic expert” (Inverdale, 2006: 15). Afterwards, reporters speculated that “she may be a man” or “does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman” (Ellis, 2006: 24). In Soundarajan’s own words, she was “stripped – literally” and her “gender was debated on national television” (Soundarajan, 2016). That Soundarajan seems to have been subjected to gender verification due to suspicions raised by a doping official shows that the observation of genitals during urine collection was, indeed, used as grounds for gendered doubt, not (only) to catch explicit males masquerading as women, but to identify sex “abnormalities” in genitals. This, in turn, justified further “sex testing.” Coinciding with Soundarajan’s exclusion from women’s athletics, the IAAF (2006) released a refined set of guidelines on their “policy on gender verification.” The 2006 guidelines made it explicit that suspicion-based gender verification aimed to address “the occasional anomalies” that surface, either “as a chance observation during the ubiquitous

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anti-doping controls these days or through a ‘challenge’ by a competitor,” in addition to being “picked up by the national team doctors during health checks.” The guidelines stated that if there was “any ‘suspicion’ or if there is a ‘challenge’” about an athlete’s gender, she must attend a “medical evaluation before a panel comprising gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, internal medicine specialist, [and an] expert on gender/transgender issues.” The panel would then give “appropriate advice to the athlete as to the need to ‘withdraw’ from competition until the problem is definitively resolved through appropriate medical and surgical measures.” The refined guidelines bring to fore, firstly, the centrality of “ambiguous” genitals rather than mere “penises and well-formed scrotums” in the construction of gendered suspicion and illegitimacy, which was to be identified through doping controls. Secondly, they illustrate the enduring medicalisation of athletes’ bodily sex and gender binary disruptions. These disruptions were being “resolved” through medical and surgical means, which shows how the medical and surgical regulatory frames for sex binary pollution that had been erected over international sport in the late 1960s, as I discussed in Chapter 4, has endured across the decades. In 2009, only three years after Soundarajan’s exclusion, Caster Semenya won the women’s 800-meter race during the IAAF World Championships in Berlin. Like Soundarajan, she was made to undergo gender verification, now in accordance with the IAAF 2006 guidelines. This was a notable event for the history of gender verification, firstly because it became the most widely publicised gender scandal in sport since the beginning of gender verification, enabled by globalised online media. Secondly, the publicity brought gender verification in sport into the media spotlight in an unprecedented way, enabling not only sensationalised stories that questioned Semenya’s gender, but also public debate over which kinds of bodies can or should be counted as acceptable in women’s sports. Media outlets writing about Semenya published headlines such as, “Could this women’s world champ be a man?” (Adams, 2009) and some declared (without evidence) that “Semenya has male sex organs” (Hurst, 2009). Much of the commentary was centred on Semenya’s perceived masculine embodiment and muscularity in particular. One reporter, for example, commented that “Semenya’s muscular physique helped propel her to victory” but “now that physique, coupled with an ongoing gender verification test, is fuelling suspicion that Semenya could be stripped of her medal because she is actually a he” (Adams, 2009). Semenya’s competitors also highlighted her perceived suspicious masculinity: Elisa Cusma, who finished sixth racing against Semenya in Berlin, remarked that “these kinds of people should not run with us. . . . For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man” (Clarey, 2009). Referring to Semenya’s body frame and gender presentation, the fifth-place finisher Mariya Savinova added, “Just look at her” (Clarey, 2009). The gendered anxieties directed against Semenya intertwined concerns over her body frame and gender presentation with concerns over her high-performance levels. Some considered that she had improved her running times suspiciously rapidly. IAAF spokesperson Nick Davis commented that there had been “a huge

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drop” in her personal best, and even though usually “potential doping was the first concern when a dramatic drop in time occurs . . . in Semenya’s case, . . . the I.A.A.F had moved on to examining other possibilities” (Clarey, 2009). As one reporter stated, “the IAAF isn’t accusing her of doping or even cheating, but her progress this year has been extraordinary and they want to know why” (Too Fast to Be a Woman? The Story of Caster Semenya, 2011). While Semenya had, for the first time, benefited from world-class professional coaching when the improvements in her times occurred, it seemed that her outstanding performance had to have another explanation. These speculations closely mirrored the concerns that were targeted at Kratochvílová decades earlier, and it is notable that Semenya (and Soundarajan as well) competed in the 800-meter race where the (“suspiciously” fast) world record is held by Kratochvílová. Disdain over Semenya’s “masculine” appearance was tangled with her seemingly running “too fast to be a woman,” which is why her running times needed explaining in some way. This was especially if she was to become fast enough to challenge Kratochvílová’s 800-meter record, which was perceived to be too fast for “a normal physiological female body,” as a medical observer had commented about Kratochvílová. Similarly, that “just looking at her” was enough to render Semenya’s gender suspect mirrored the views expressed by de la Chapelle and others about Kratochvílová’s suspiciousness being evidenced by the observation that “she does not look like a woman.” Semenya’s gendered transgressions were, however, made doubly salient by the intersection of her gender presentation and muscular embodiment with racialised discourses around the deviance of black bodies in relation to Western, white body norms. Her gender suspiciousness was embedded within the racialised imaginaries through which black women’s bodies have long been imagined as the negation or the opposite of appropriate (white) femininity. It was also framed by the colonial legacies that have pre-positioned the Black female body as gender deviant and as “the object of pathological distortions in which it has been constructed as sexually abnormal and racially ‘other’” (Tate, 2015: 2). Indeed, when “race” is added into “the affective terrain of muscles” and gender, it immediately conjures the “question of Black women’s heterosexual womanhood from which they are removed” (Tate, 2015: 100). In addition, Semenya’s publicly visible romantic relationships with women, combined with her gender presentation, summoned the figure of the “butch black lesbian,” which placed her within the heteronormative discourses that conflate masculine female bodies with deviant sexuality. This image recalls the legacy of the “mannish lesbian athlete threat” in sport that has long been associated with female athletes’ perceived “excessive” masculinity (Cahn, 1994; Griffin, 1998; Lock, 2003). In Brenna Munro’s (2010: 394) words, then, “Semenya’s vexed embodiment . . . invokes multiple larger unfolding histories,” which intersect around race, gender, sex, sexuality, and sport ideology, and were simultaneously interlaced upon Semenya’s body to render her and her performances suspect. Semenya’s “suspiciousness” exemplifies how some bodies, due to intersecting broader

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cultural discourses, much more easily become gender suspicious than others: her body, and bodies that resemble hers, are always already more easily marked as suspect in relation to (white, Western) feminine body aesthetics through which the “normal,” appropriately feminine female body is constructed along white, Western, and middle-class gender norms. The controversies around both Semenya and Soundarajan, as well as the emergence of Chinese female athletes as a new focus of concern for Western observers in the 1990s, show how “racialized bodies have discursively come to fill the vacancy left by East German and Soviet bloc women” (Henne, 2014: 806) after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Yet, the way in which Semenya’s gender verification was handled by the IAAF and news outlets – especially the fact that her gender was publicly questioned and undermined – was also widely criticised both in the academic and public media spaces. The medicalisation of Semenya’s body and gender by Western doctors and observers was criticised by South African officials and observers. They argued that the probing of Semenya’s body represented a continuation of the colonial racist gaze and dissection (both symbolic and literal) of black African bodies, which have been seen as objects of medical curiosity by colonial physicians (see Hoad, 2010; Magubane, 2014; Munro, 2010; Nyong’o, 2010). Many observers, both in the West and South Africa, also criticised the public scrutiny of Semenya’s sex as medical and media malpractice (see for example Dreger, 2009a, 2009b; Schultz, 2011; Wiesemann, 2011). By mandating Semenya to undergo gender verification, the IAAF publicly rendered her gender in doubt in ways that disrespected her identity as female and woman. The suspicion-based policy under which she was investigated also did not provide any clear idea of how exactly the line between female and male was drawn in suspicious cases. Dreger (2010: 23, original emphasis) observed that nature doesn’t actually have a line between the sexes. If we want a line, we have to draw it on nature. . . . But the IAAF . . . doesn’t specify which conditions disqualify an athlete from playing as a woman. So the line is essentially still missing. The gender verification tests that Semenya was made to undergo were followed by 11 months of uncertainty over whether or not she would be disqualified. In July 2010, the IAAF finally announced that Semenya would indeed be allowed to resume competition and to keep her medals. This decision was, however, accompanied with rumours that she had been subjected to medical treatments with “weakening” effects (Hurts, 2010) or “womanizing” hormone therapy that “will make her less of a dominant athlete” (Goldman & Block, 2010). These rumours, and the controversy Semenya incited, were especially focused on the widely reported claim that the tests performed on Semenya had revealed her “testosterone levels to be three times as high as those normally expected in a female” (Harrell, 2009). It was reported that she had a medical condition called “female hyperandrogenism,” which results in an “excess” of androgenic hormones in

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females. This, in turn, was presumed to provide Semenya with “unfair (male-like) advantage” over other (hormonally “normal”) female athletes. The notion of female “hyperandrogenism” relies on the gendered medicalisation of androgens along the lines of a quantitative system of “normal” androgen ranges that are different for females and males. As I discussed briefly in Chapter 1, this system gives rise to the possibility of androgen excess and deficiency conditions that are classifiable into hormonal disorders: Semenya’s “androgen excess” can only be considered excessive because her androgen levels are contrasted against the “normal” female androgen range, in comparison to which her levels appear to be “abnormal.” Female “hyperandrogenism” is akin to the notion of female “hypermuscularity.” Both connote (pathological) “excess” that in Semenya’s case was attached to her visible musculature and hormone levels, as well as to her racialised and “butch” appearance due to which her body was perceived to be suspiciously gendered. In the upcoming years, the controversy and public debate around Semenya’s embodiment motivated a change in gender verification methods: as the Heinonen 16 group had hoped in the mid-1990s, measuring female athletes’ androgens levels, and levels of testosterone in particular, were established as the method for gender verification. I will return to this in the next chapter.

Conclusion The gendered concern over “hypermuscular” women in the 1990s bring to the fore not only the persistence of social anxieties over the breakdown of sexed and gendered difference in sport, but also the fact that the prevention of gender fraud by overt men masquerading as women was, always already, an insufficient means through which to secure the boundaries of the female sporting category. The IAAF health and gender examinations were short lived in part due to objections from female athletes and team doctors. De la Chapelle’s suspicions about the “hypermuscular” bodies and “excessively” high-level performances of women like Kratochvílová, however, provided the basis for the introduction of a gender verification system designed to catch “suspicious” bodies like hers. While the IOC responded to the objections against the IAAF health and gender examinations by introducing yet another chromosome-based gender verification method, by 1999 the persistent opposition to the use of chromosomes for gender verification compelled the IOC to follow the IAAF’s lead in instituting suspicion-based gender verification also for the Olympics. The suspicion-based system retained the association between genitals and sex, as doping officials were charged with the task of observing female athletes’ genitals during urine sample collection. The case-by-case identification of gender“questionable” cases targeted at gender-suspicious-appearing bodies illustrates, however, that concerns over sex binary breakdown and the desire to protect the feminine “purity” of women’s sports continued to drive gender verification. In

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the 1990s context, where the boundaries around permissible female (sporting) bodies were shifting and female athletes were performing at progressively high levels, the increasingly muscular and powerful bodies of some elite-level female competitors radically destabilised old imaginaries around “female physiological normalcy.” Their uncontained bodies and performances appeared “excessive” and were speculated to be the result of either steroid doping or sex abnormalities. They were suspected to be wearing “the essence of man” (i.e. testosterone) inauthentically or at least in excessive amounts. The masculinisation that testosterone was seen to cause, whether exogenously via steroid doping or endogenous via sex “abnormalities,” implied that the women who embodied testosterone in “excess” failed to stay confined within the limits of “normal” female athletic potential. The reasons why testosterone was centred as the embodied substance that could be used to regulate the boundaries of the female category in sports were foregrounded by the post-Soviet geopolitical context: the newfound prominence of Chinese women in international sports coincided with revelations about largescale doping in East Germany during the Cold War, which was seen to confirm earlier suspicions about East German female athletes’ muscular and “masculinised” bodies. At the same time as Heidi Krieger’s story became a symbol of the dangerous gendered consequences of steroid doping for women, the suspicions that Western observers had directed towards communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War were transferred onto the Chinese “state-supported, behind-closeddoors sports system.” Chinese female athletes broke not only records but also Western gender norms and racialised preconceptions about Asian women, to the extent that they were seen to threaten the gender purity of women’s sport. As Eastern European women vacated the place of the gendered “other” in sport, racialised bodies first from China and then increasingly from the Global South became the new “other” against which the gender purity of white, Western women could be contrasted. Semenya’s story, in particular, illustrates how intersecting racialised, gendered, and sexual legacies that intertwine upon bodies like hers (pre-)mark some bodies more easily than others as the object of Western suspicions, suspicions that were institutionalised as a legitimate gender verification method by the suspicion-based gender verification system. Suspicion-based gender verification was centrally concerned with multiple kinds of embodied “excess.” These were attached not only to muscles and performance levels that exceed presumed “female physiological normalcy,” but also to the racialised and “masculine” excess of bodies like Semenya’s, which are discursively positioned as the negative contrast to appropriate (white) femininity. In the early 21st century, excess came to be centrally identified with testosterone and the sex category “overflow” of “hyperandrogenic” female athletes in particular. In the next chapter, I discuss the introduction of the female hyperandrogenism regulations, which established testosterone as the foundation of sex difference as well as the focal point of gender verification in sports.

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Note 1 Despite newspaper suggestions that steroids directly caused his gender transition, Krieger himself noted that “doping probably didn’t directly cause my transsexuality” while “it certainly intensified it” (Woman Athlete Turns Male, 1997). Krieger’s wife added that “he is glad that he became a man” but what made him “angry . . . is a belief that the steroids essentially made the decision for Heidi, leaving her unable to sort out her sexual identity on her own” (Longman, 2004).

Chapter 7

The testosterone debate – from hyperandrogenic females to biological males

The unprecedented visibility of Caster Semenya’s gender verification in the international media not only brought the issue of gender verification in sports to the awareness of broader publics, but also sparked widespread criticism of suspicion-based gender verification. In response to these criticisms and objections to the public way in which Semenya’s case was handled by both the IAAF and the press, the IAAF and the IOC were pushed, once again, to re-consider the aims and methods of gender verification. In this chapter, I discuss the regulations on female hyperandrogenism that the IAAF and IOC introduced in response to the controversy that Semenya’s case incited. I map how androgenic hormones in general and testosterone in particular were more firmly foregrounded as the cause of males’ athletic advantage over females and, therefore, as the “essence” of sex difference in sports. I then chart the scientific controversy that surrounds the claim that androgens indeed constitute this “essence” – a claim that has been highly contested. Finally, I discuss the most recent IAAF eligibility regulations for the female classification that were introduced in 2018 and consider the implications and disputed scientific basis upon which the new regulations are built. The female hyperandrogenism regulations were foregrounded by the medicalisation of androgens and, especially, high-level androgens in female bodies as an androgen “excess” condition called “female hyperandrogenism.” They were also entangled with anti-doping regulations, in ways that meant that female hyperandrogenism and the exogenous administration of androgens by women for doping became conceptually conflated. They were merged under a single notion of “unfair (androgen-induced and male-like) advantage” that needed policing. This policing included diagnostic practices to identify and catch suspiciously “androgenised” or masculinised bodies, which could then be subjected to medical interventions designed to bring their androgen levels back within the confines of “normal” female embodiment. The hyperandrogenism regulations incited, however, widespread critique from scientists and other observers, who argued that the regulations were unevidenced and unjust, which resulted in a notable decision by the CAS to suspend the regulations pending further evidence of their soundness. While this allowed athletes like Semenya to compete unrestricted for a short period of time, a new

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set of regulations were soon designed by the IAAF, which no longer focused on hyperandrogenism in general, nor did they apply to all women. Rather, they were specifically targeted at a small group of women with a particular cluster of sex characterises competing in a sub-set of athletics events. These regulations are the last gender verification policy that I consider in this book, and I conclude this chapter by mapping related on-going debates that characterise the international landscape of women’s sport at the time of writing.

Conceptualising androgens The regulations that this chapter is focused on are centrally foregrounded by the gendered legacy of “sex hormones” and the quantitative model of hormonal sex difference that had been popularised during the 1930s. As I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, the quantitative model enabled the medicalisation of sex hormone “excess” and “deficiency” conditions. This in turn enabled endocrinologists to define sex and gender binary blur in hormonal terms as a pathological condition that can be treated or normalised with medical intervention. The quantitative sex hormone model is, however, also entangled with binarised conceptualisations of “sex chromosomes” that position the second X and Y chromosomes as the “hard reality” of sex that represents what “nature intended,” especially for bodies that transgress sexed body boundaries due to “abnormal” hormone levels (Richardson, 2013). Androgens continue to carry the gendered history through which they have been constituted as “male” hormones, including literally in their naming as androgens and despite their variable functions within all sexes. The widespread conceptualisation of androgens and testosterone in particular as “male” signals that testosterone “is restricted to men” and a dangerous or “foreign” substance in women’s bodies (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018: 12). As Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000: 147) argued, the gendering of androgens has produced a strange cultural effect: androgens are “multisite chemical growth regulators” that affect various bodily sites and organs including ones that are not explicitly involved in sex classifications, but because “sex hormones affect their physiology, these organs . . . come to be seen as sex organs. Chemicals infuse the body, from head to toe, with gender meanings.” Androgens carry the signs of masculinity throughout the body: they masculinise, and their effects are seen as masculinising, even when it comes to apparently gender-neutral bodily features like hair or muscles. Yet, sometimes, hormones can carry the signs of gender incorrectly, onto the “wrong” bodies, in which case it is often seen as appropriate to resort to a more multidimensional theory of sex difference: namely, a combined analysis of genetic sex, positioned as the primary determinant, and hormonal sex, in turn seen as the secondary development of sex characteristics (Richardson, 2013). The quantitative model of sex hormones established, normalised, and medicalised a standard range of androgens for male and female bodies, respectively, whereby the “normal” male range is significantly higher than the female range (Oudshoorn, 1994). This implies that there can be too much or too little of the

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substance in the organism. Androgen excess or deficiency can in turn be subjected to diagnostic and intervention techniques, but the amount that is considered to require intervention is sex specific. In Foucault’s (2003) terms, the quantitative model of hormonal pathologies is based on a conflation between the standardised gendered sex hormone ranges, on one hand, and “health” on the other hand, which works as the medical norm against which “abnormal” and thus “unhealthy” hormone levels can be contrasted. The consequence of this medical model has been the emergence of hormone therapies, perhaps the most notable of which is the medicalisation of menopause as an oestrogen deficiency disease: female bodies’ ageing processes are positioned as a hormonal pathology to be controlled through hormone replacement therapy (HRT) (see Hoberman, 2005; Langston, 2010; Roberts, 2007). This model of menopause is foregrounded by the naturalisation of (youthful) femininity as the norm of female embodiment. Based on this norm, the perceived masculinising consequences of menopause that may result from hormonal changes (e.g. increased body hair) are considered to be a “malfunction.” This, in turn, retains and reinforces the naturalisation of embodied “feminine” aesthetics as “normal” for women, enduring over time (Roberts, 2007). Mirroring menopause, the pathologisation of high androgen levels in nonmenopausal female bodies as “hyperandrogenism” is based on the quantitative sex hormone model. Like menopausal women’s bodies, hyperandrogenic women’s bodies are seen to “overflow” the boundaries of feminine body aesthetics (Roberts, 2007) as they exceed the amount of androgens that is considered acceptable and “normal” for women. In both cases, the gendered model of hormone levels requires that the hormonal overflow be contained, so that the overflowing bodies can be re-aligned with the sex binary to maintain naturalised femininity for female bodies. While female hyperandrogenism is considered to be an androgen excess condition affecting women, low androgen levels in male bodies are considered to be an androgen deficiency disease, sometimes called “hypogonadism” or “low T syndrome” (Huhtaniemi, 2015), which can be remedied with HRT. In international sports, this carries interesting consequences due to the so-called therapeutic exemption provision, which enables athletes to administer substances that would usually be considered doping if this is required for medical reasons. Men who can evidence “low T” can get a therapeutic exemption to the anti-doping exogenous testosterone ban if they require testosterone for “therapeutic use.” This also applies to transgender men, who can get therapeutic exemptions for HRT to bring their androgen levels up to the male range (WADA, 2017). Thus, any man “who successfully argues that he doesn’t make ‘enough’ testosterone can take more” (Dreger, 2009a), but any woman who has high androgen levels, whether endogenous or exogenous, embodies troubling androgen excess. This derives from a conflation between high levels of endogenous androgens and steroid doping, both of which are seen as unnatural for women, in ways enabled by the socio-scientific perception of androgens as “foreign” to female bodies, even when it is the body itself that produces the hormone. The centring of androgens as the foundation of sex difference and the gendered regulation of this hormone in sport were fundamentally governed by gendered

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hormonal binaries and by the idea that bodies can be brought in line with these binaries when they fail to approximate the androgen range appropriate for their sex category. This was intertwined with medical distinction between “treatment” and “enhancement,” where the difference between the two comes down to the question of when and under what conditions should the human organism be altered and what justifies this altering (Hoberman, 2005). When it comes to synthetic testosterone, to (legally) gain access to it, one must be defined as male, because part of the condition of “femaleness” is that deficiency in testosterone is a “natural” and altering this state is unnatural, enhancing, or both (Preciado, 2013). This is also true for transgender women who have had surgery to remove their gonads. Even though, under regular medical practice, this surgery is accompanied with testosterone supplementation to enable transgender women to maintain sufficient testosterone levels after gonadectomy, testosterone supplementation for women is impermissible under WADA regulations. Consequently, while transgender men can get therapeutic exemption for testosterone, transgender women cannot, with the effect that some transgender women athletes have to compete with testosterone levels that are insufficient to maintain health and wellbeing (Genel, 2017). The medicalisation of sex-specific androgen ranges and the association between androgens and maleness also foreground the association between androgens and performance advantage. When androgens were centred as the foundation of sex categorisation in sport, the effect was that not only exogenous but also high-level endogenous androgens in female bodies were defined explicitly as performance enhancement. This had the unusual consequence that a line was drawn between treatment and enhancement by defining high-level endogenous androgens in female bodies as an enhancement that must be treated. Women with high androgen levels, then, were framed as enhanced, which means that their bodies (and performances) should be “brought down” to the “natural” female state. Men with low androgen levels, on the other hand, are framed as deficient and must be “brought up” to the “natural” male state. While low androgen levels maintain femininity of the female body, high levels maintain masculinity of the male body, both in terms of gendered bodily appearances and gendered performance levels. By 2018, this conceptualisation of androgens in sport was also combined with an emphasis of genetic sex, in ways that were built on the idea that chromosomes are the initiators and hormones are the messengers of sex. Before considering this most recent iteration of gender verification regulations, however, I will discuss in the following sections the introduction, implications, and, finally, suspension of the IOC and IAAF regulations on female hyperandrogenism.

Regulations on female hyperandrogenism The most notable characteristic of the IAAF and IOC discussions that ensued after the Semenya controversy was an emphasis on the widely reported claim that Semenya had elevated androgen levels, which were presumed to provide her an unfair competitive advantage over other women. Many observers, including the former

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female athlete Martínez-Patiño, who had in the 1980s been disqualified from women’s sport on the grounds of her AIS, considered that androgen levels might be a clear and easy way to define the line between the sexes in sport: “here is a trait which is known to influence one’s athletic performance and which happens to be sexually dimorphic: androgens” (Sanchez, Martinez-Patino, & Vilain, 2013: 113). In 2010, the IOC held two meetings, in Miami and Lausanne, that were also attended by IAAF representatives to re-discuss how the binary sex division should be regulated in sport. Embedded within the conclusions of the meetings were three key ideas that shifted the focus around gender verification and which were developed into IAAF and IOC regulations on female hyperandrogenism in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Firstly, the rhetoric around gender fraud or masquerade prevention was entirely abandoned from official documents. The IAAF (2011a) dropped “all references to the terminology of ‘gender verification’ and ‘gender policy’ in its Rules” and the IOC (2012) stated that “nothing in these Regulations is intended to make any determination of sex.” This shift was clearly intended to avoid speculations that athletes subjected to related examinations were actual men rather than women with sex abnormalities, as such accusations roused critiques of the IAAF having disrespected Semenya’s gender identity. The shift was also contextualised by a change in the politics around intersex bodies. Since the late 1990s, activists had increasingly campaigned for care reform with emphasis on nomenclature, arguing for a move away from terms like “intersex” and “hermaphroditism” to an aetiology-based nomenclature. This was because the former functions to label (and reduce) “the whole person according to the condition . . . rather than naming a condition a person has” (Dreger et al., 2005: 732). In 2006, a consensus statement was published for the term “disorders of sex development” (DSDs) to replace older nomenclature (Hughes et al., 2006). The aim was to emphasise DSDs as medical conditions that patients have in contrast to language centring on subjects who are intersex. A key focus was medicalisation and conceptualisation of these “disorders” as separate from questions of (gender) identity. This was mirrored in the terminology shift in regulatory policy in sport. Yet, despite declaring that “if an athlete is recognised as a female in law, she is eligible to compete in women’s competition,” the IAAF (2011a) added that eligibility was nonetheless subject to compliance “with IAAF Rules and Regulations,” including the hyperandrogenism regulations. The IOC (2012) added that their regulations were “designed to identify circumstances in which a particular athlete will not be eligible . . . to participate in [the Olympics] in the female category.” Both regulations thus continued to police the boundaries of the female category: despite rhetoric moving away from “sex,” “gender,” and “gender verification” towards “hyperandrogenism” as a medical condition, the regulations still functioned to verify that the bodies of athletes competing in women’s sport fell within the delineated boundaries of “femaleness,” now defined in hormonal terms. Secondly, and relatedly, the IOC and the IAAF attempt to shift the emphasis away from sex and gender in effect (re)centred the emphasis on “health.” This focus mirrored the earlier IOC rhetoric around treatment that was advanced by

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Thiebault and others in the late 1960s, which I discussed in Chapter 3. The search for medical conditions and diagnoses was, however, no longer directed at vague notions sex “hybridity” but at hyperandrogenism in particular, seen as a medical problem. In the words of one reporter, the Miami meeting concluded that “the issue of athletes whose sex seems ambiguous [should] be treated as a medical condition,” and athletes “who identify themselves as female but have medical disorders that give them masculine characteristics should have their disorders diagnosed and treated” (Kolata, 2010b: B23). As Simpson noted to the same journalist, an athlete identified as hyperandrogenic “is now a patient who needs medical advice” (Kolata, 2010a: D2). Yet, despite this health-centric rhetoric, diagnosis and treatment for hyperandrogenism was explicitly mobilised as a mandate: a hyperandrogenic female athlete could be compelled to undergo treatment “to normalise her androgen levels” and “if an athlete declines, fails or refuses to undergo assessment or is otherwise not compliant . . . she shall not be eligible to compete” (IAAF, 2011a). Additionally, the IOC included a requirement for NOCs, which stated that “each NOC shall, as appropriate, prior to the registration of its national athletes, actively investigate any perceived deviation in sex characteristics” (IOC, 2012). Consequently, like earlier gender verification frameworks had done, the IOC’s 2012 mandate stretched the medical policing of hyperandrogenism outside Olympic competition, across levels of sport participation. Relatedly, a year after the IOC policy was introduced, the SAI instituted their own hyperandrogenism regulations, modelled on the IOC framework, which stated that hyperandrogenismrelated medical examinations “may be carried out at any level of competition” and “are not meant for just Sports persons who compete in international events” (SAI, 2013). Thirdly, the hyperandrogenism regulations were built on the assumption that androgens, and thus female hyperandrogenism, provide a performance advantage in sport. This was because the “difference in athletic performance between males and females is known to be predominantly due to higher levels of androgenic hormones in males resulting in increased strength and muscle development” (IAAF, 2011a). While this assumption is highly contested – a point to which I will return later – the IAAF (2011a) stated that the regulations were built on “respect for the very essence of the male and female classifications in Athletics,” implying that androgens and testosterone in particular, defined as a “performance-enhancing hormone,” constituted this essence. The IOC (2012) added that “androgenic hormones have performance-enhancing effects,” which is “one of the reasons why the exogenous administration of such hormones and/or the promotion of the endogenous production of these hormones are banned under the World Anti-Doping Code, to which the IOC is a signatory.” They thereby conflated exogenous and high-level endogenous androgens in women under a single umbrella of unfair advantage. Androgens were identified not only as the essence of sex classification in sport, but also as the essence of high-level performance more generally, which is why not only steroid doping but also high-level endogenous androgens

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in females constituted unfair performance enhancement. Both the IOC and the IAAF established an androgen threshold, measured by testosterone, for the female category. The effect of this was that female athletes’ levels may not fall within the “normal male range Total Testosterone Levels,” which was specified by the IAAF as below 10 nmol/L (IAAF, 2011a). To be categorised as female in athletics, then, athletes had to embody less than 10 nmol/L of testosterone. This new androgen-focused framework had the following intertwined effects: the conflation of androgens, performance enhancement, and sex categorisation in regulatory policy meant that enhanced or high-level performance come to be regulated as a male sex characteristic. As androgens were understood to enhance performance and as male bodies were understood to have enhanced performance due to higher levels of androgens, “androgen enhanced performance” came to be regulated, not only as unfair doping but also as a male characteristic that could be used to police the sex binary by excluding female bodies with “androgenic advantage” from women’s sport. Consequently, the sex binary was re-drawn around androgens, and “androgenic advantage” was additionally pathologised in female bodies as “hyperandrogenism” that needs medical normalisation. The medicalising rhetoric around androgen “excess” worked to safeguard binary sex so that hyperandrogenic bodies could be subjected to normalising treatment, which would bring the athlete’s (male-like, enhanced) performance down to the (presumed lower) female levels. Thus, the underlying but implicit ideas upon which the hyperandrogenism regulations were built actually aimed to render female athletes’ enhanced, high-level performances pathological. The hyperandrogenism regulations were also connected with the 2003 Stockholm consensus and the 2015 IOC consensus regulations on athletes who have undergone gender reassignment, which established refined guidelines for the eligibility of transgender athletes. According to the Stockholm consensus, an eligibility condition for transgender athletes was that “hormonal therapy appropriate for the assigned sex has been administered in a verifiable manner and for a sufficient length of time to minimise gender-related advantages in sport competitions” (IOC, 2003).1 The 2015 policy stated that athletes competing in women’s sport must demonstrate androgen levels below the IAAF’s specified 10 nmol/L threshold, which also applied to hyperandrogenic athletes. The aim of this was to minimise “any advantage in women’s competition” (IOC, 2015), which means androgen levels were positioned as key to advantage in sport also in relation to transgender athletes. However, while the Stockholm consensus applied to all transgender athletes, the 2015 regulations apply only to those who transition from male to female. Those transitioning from female to male, on the other hand, “are eligible to compete in the male category without restriction” (IOC, 2015). This change illustrates how the androgen-focused regulations in sport were foregrounded not only by the association between androgens and enhancement, but also by a distinction between “fair” and “unfair” androgens in relation to their appropriate versus inappropriate presence in gendered bodies. Considering the anti-doping steroid ban, as

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Sheila Cavanagh and Heather Sykes (2006: 78) have noted, because “transsexual men take testosterone injections, it is curious that the Olympic community does not consider that they may have an advantage over genetic [sic] men.” While they suggest that this omission results from a refusal to accept transgender men as men, it is also connected with the medicalisation of low androgen levels in male bodies as a “deficiency” that must be remedied with HRT. This, in turn, is intertwined with the idea that androgens are the foundation of males’ athletic advantage over females. Transgender men competing in sport can take testosterone to remedy an androgen deficiency that would place them at a disadvantage against other men. Their androgen levels and, presumably, performance levels must be “lifted” to male standards, while transgender women’s androgens levels and, presumably, performance levels must be “lowered” to female standards. As phrased by medical observers, “the most essential element of women’s sport is that it is practiced by testosterone-challenged athletes” (Tucker & Harper, 2016), apparently akin to a hormonal disability. While both the hyperandrogenism and transgender athletes’ eligibility regulations were focused on policing a medicalised hormonal sex binary through androgens, the diagnostic tools and treatment framework mobilised for androgen excess relied on particular conceptualisations of what constitutes “normal” (and “healthy”) female embodiment. These conceptualisations exemplify the persistence of social anxieties around masculine or insufficiently feminine bodily appearances, which were now rendered suspect in relation to “abnormal” androgen levels.

Diagnosing and treating hyperandrogenism The IAAF specified that an investigation into hyperandrogenism may be initiated when “reasonable grounds” exist to suspect the condition, which may be derived from sources including routine drug tests showing an abnormal profile within the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) or from “the results from a routine preparticipation examination” (IAAF, 2011b). The ABP is a new longitudinal, personalised monitoring system for biomarkers of doping that enables the identification of deviations from “natural” baseline values (Sottas et al., 2011). Its steroidal module, which monitors androgen levels, enables the identification of variations from “normal” baseline levels consistent with the use of doping substances (Gilbert, 2010; Vernec, 2014). While the ABP in general has intensified the medical(ised) surveillance of athletes’ bodies – including via the production of a “total body profile” for each athlete (Gilbert, 2010) – the use of ABP as a tool to detect hyperandrogenism also intensified the intertwinement of doping control and gender verification. The ABP worked in conjunction with the hyperandrogenism regulations to detect “suspiciously” high levels of circulating androgens in the blood. Through the control of steroids via the ABP, anti-doping regulations in general, and hyperandrogenism regulations, the “prohibition of certain hormones and hormone levels from the legitimate

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athletic body” worked together with the “rules regarding what constitutes a doping violation to exclude athletes with biological makeups considered to be outside of the norm” (Olsen-Acre, 2006: 234). Additionally, doping controls operated in conjunction with the hyperandrogenism regulations as a form of genital policing, as they had done for over a decade: the IAAF specified that “clitoral hypertrophy” or “clitoromegaly,” which means clitoral enlargement compared to “normal”sized clitorises, should be considered a sign of hyperandrogenism (IAAF, 2011b) and be monitored through observation of genitalia during urine sample collection for doping control. While many hyperandrogenism cases were likely detected through doping control (Jordan-Young, Sonksen, & Karkazis, 2014), reasonable grounds for triggering hyperandrogenism investigations could also be obtained through pre-competition examinations. This was especially because the IOC specifically required NOCs to actively investigate athletes for sex “deviations.” The IAAF (2011b) published “a practical document” to “assist medical doctors in the screening, evaluation and specialist referral of virilised female athletes,” which was intended, firstly, as a guideline to the kinds of examinations that should be undergone by athletes suspected of hyperandrogenism. The IAAF (2011b) specified that they would appoint a pool of independent medical experts to evaluate suspected hyperandrogenism cases arising in athletics with reference to “clinical signs” of hyperandrogenism. Secondly, the document was intended as a diagnostic guide for sport physicians to identify hyperandrogenic athletes so that they could be referred for further examinations by specialists. The IAAF (2011b) added that initial related “sports medicine examinations” should be included as part of pre-participation health checks by sport physicians, reminiscent of their health and gender examinations discussed in Chapter 6. The content of this guideline highlights how the hyperandrogenism regulations were foregrounded by (white, Western) feminine body norms, which were used as a diagnostic tool to identify “abnormally” masculinised female bodies, where such masculinisation was seen as evidence of pathological androgen excess. The list of “clinical signs suggesting hyperandrogenism” included not only “clitoromegaly” but also deep voice, increased muscle mass, breast atrophy, and body hair of male type (IAAF, 2011b). In addition, the IAAF (2011b) presumed that “the individuals concerned often display masculine traits and have an uncommon athletic capacity in relation to their fellow female competitors.” They thus associated hyperandrogenism not only with athletic advantage but also with masculine gender performance. The IAAF provided two scales of measurement that are of specific interest: the Ferriman-Gallwey scale for hirsutism and the Tanner scale for breast development and pubic hair. Hirsutism has been medically defined as “the presence of excess body or facial terminal (coarse) hair growth in females in a male-like pattern” (Yildiz et al., 2010: 52). It is “the most commonly used clinical diagnostic criterion of androgen excess” (Yildiz et al., 2010: 61). The Ferriman-Gallwey hirsutism scale, developed by David Ferriman and John Gallwey (1961), is a visual observation tool for

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androgen-sensitive skin areas to grade body hair growth on a scale against illustrative pictures. The medical definition of hirsutism and this diagnostic tool for identifying it simultaneously medicalise and gender hair on female bodies through a quantitative visual observation system: “abnormal” hair growth can be diagnosed in relation to the medical norm of (acceptable) amount of hair growth and pattern for female bodies. According to the IAAF (2011b), a Ferriman-Gallwey “score (>6/! minimized by the beauty [sic!])” suggests hyperandrogenism and “biological investigations should be performed on scores over 16.” The amount and pattern of hair is a cultural signifier of the division between male and female bodies. Smooth skin and hairlessness are a normalised bodily condition for women, and hair removal practices are consequently a common part of women’s feminine body maintenance practices. Because body and facial hair are coded as masculine, when visible on a woman’s body in “excessive” amounts, this “unruly” hair “represents a symbolic threat to the gendered social order” (Toerien & Wilkinson, 2003: 341). While older imaginaries constituted hairy women as socially disruptive or monstrous, the medicalisation of hirsutism has re-framed body hair “excess” on female bodies as a clinical condition that requires normalisation through interventions such as hormonal regulation and electrolysis (Preciado, 2013). Hair is medicalised by gendering hair growth based on its location, pattern, and type, where the occurrence of male-pattern hair growth on female bodies is framed as a medical problem: hirsutism classifications categorise hair according to gendered hair types, which include “sexual” hair (e.g. terminal chin, abdomen and thigh hair) and “asexual” hair (e.g. eyebrows and eyelashes). The former is conceptualised as “characteristically masculine, and if present in women is considered pathological” (Yildiz et al., 2010: 53). The IAAF’s use of the Ferriman-Gallwey scale as part of their guideline for diagnosing hyperandrogenic female athletes was foregrounded by the idea that “abnormally” masculine female bodies can be visually identified by observing hair as a gendered bodily cue and that such a cue itself connotes abnormal masculinisation. Sport physicians were thus instructed to be on the look-out for the concerning sight of “hairy women.” The IAAF guidelines also included the Tanner scale, which was originally developed by James Tanner in 1962 as a visual tool for identifying stages of sexual development in puberty based on “pictorial standards” (Roberts, 2015). For girls, the scale is used to measure breast and pubic hair development. Like the Ferriman-Gallwey scale, the Tanner scale is a model of bodily “normality” and a tool for identifying abnormality (Roberts, 2015). It provides five “stages of development” in relation to breast size and areola type and the IAAF (2011b) guidelines specified a “low” Tanner score (i.e. stages one or two) as a cause of concern for adult female athletes. This rendered flat chestedness in female athletes as troubling in ways that are intertwined with the cultural relegation of small breasts as a sign of immaturity or “boyishness” in women. Indeed, it is worth emphasising that the Tanner scale was designed to evaluate pubescent girls. A breast size scale is doubly problematic in the context of international sport in the early 21st century,

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where many female athletes maintain a low body fat percentage. By framing flat chestedness in women, combined with “excessive” body hair, as concerning, the IAAF guidelines built on and re-enforced cultural ideas about “normal” or “natural” feminine embodiment. Such embodiment was, in turn, identifiable through naturalised and gendered bodily cues that clustered around feminine body aesthetics including “full” breasts and smooth skin, the absence of which was positioned as troubling to the extent that it suggested pathology. The normalising aims of the hyperandrogenism regulations are exemplified by a report that outlined the medical interventions performed on four young female athletes diagnosed as hyperandrogenic through the regulations and treated for previously “undiagnosed medical conditions” (Fenichel et al., 2013). These athletes, who were from “rural or mountainous regions of developing countries,” were sent to medical reference centres in France for specialist examination and treatment. This was after they had been identified as possibly hyperandrogenic through an abnormal steroid profile and “clitoral hypertrophy” reported by a doping control officer in one case, through increased plasma testosterone detected through ABP in two cases, and through direct referral by a national federation doctor in the last case (Fenichel et al., 2013: E2). To remedy the “symptoms” of their newly diagnosed medical conditions, Western medical professionals administered “a partial clitoridectomy with a bilateral gonadectomy, followed by a deferred feminizing vaginoplasty and estrogen replacement therapy” (Fenichel et al., 2013: E3–E4). Despite the medical professionals’ affirming that leaving the athletes’ gonads intact “carries no health risk,” gonadectomies were performed based on the rationale that this would “allow them to continue elite sport in the female category” and surgery “would most likely decrease their performance level” (Fenichel et al., 2013: E3). Notably, clitoridectomy (i.e. reduction or partial removal of the clitoris, often resulting in loss of physical sensation) and feminising vaginoplasty have no relevance whatsoever for sport performance and were performed for aesthetic reasons. The aim of these interventions is to “normalise” genitals that do not conform to the cultural aesthetic standards of desirable female genital appearance, demonstrating the deep intertwinement of the hyperandrogenism regulations’ policing of androgen levels and the policing of feminine aesthetics. The body norms that foregrounded the hyperandrogenism regulations and treatment frameworks were entangled with the racialised histories of Western medicine that I discussed in Chapter 1. The medical management of sex “abnormalities” is foregrounded by the role that race and context play in determining which bodies are marked as problem bodies and what is done with those bodies (Magubane, 2014). Notably, Stéphane Bermon, who was involved in designing the hyperandrogenism regulations, conveyed that most or possibly all of the athletes subjected to hyperandrogenism investigation based on the regulations were from “poor countries” (Jordan-Young et al., 2014). The Western medical management model for DSD, including hyperandrogenism, that is presumed by the IOC and IAAF relies on access to diagnosis and what can be expensive, sometimes life-long treatment frameworks. The bodily conditions singled out by the IAAF

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and the IOC as concerning may not be detected or even necessarily viewed as a “problem” in the same way in non-Western contexts, where Western medical paradigms are not hegemonic in relation to bodies and sex difference (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2013). The medical practitioners responsible for treating the four athletes from “developing countries” in France suspected that the athletes’ “abnormalities” were “not formally diagnosed or given medical attention because they had been born in rural regions of countries with poor care” (Fenichel et al., 2013: E4). The hyperandrogenism treatment guidelines thus not only privileged Western medicine over other possible frames for conceptualising sexed embodiment, but also disproportionately affected women from contexts where access to Western medicine is limited or non-existent. These women may only have been diagnosed and “treated” (including with unnecessary surgical interventions) because of international sport participation. The medical tools mobilised by the IAAF to identify hyperandrogenism were also based on white body norms. The Ferriman-Gallwey hirsutism scale in particular is not only foregrounded by normative (white) feminine body aesthetics, but it was also developed based on a sample of predominantly white bodies (Javorsky et al., 2014). It has, however, been argued that the cut-off values for hirsutism diagnosis should be population-specific (Api et al., 2009; Hassan et al., 2005). There are ethnic variations in so-called “normal” hair growth,2 but these are not incorporated into the scoring system (Javorsky et al., 2014). Additionally, as Karkazis and colleagues (2012: 13) have noted, “more than half of the indicators of hyperandrogenism identified by the IAAF policy” (such as excess muscle mass, low voice, and insufficient breast size) are “entangled with deeply subjective and stereotypical Western definitions of femininity.” This made the hyperandrogenism regulations a racialised medical tool to detect gender non-conformity at the same time as the regulations intersect with racialised imaginaries that pre-position some bodies as more gender-suspect than others from the outset due to the racialisation of gendered binary blur, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Like older gender verification paradigms, the hyperandrogenism regulations (and the seemingly objective diagnostic tools provided by sport regulators to identify hyperandrogenic bodies) framed “masculinised” or insufficiently feminine bodies as concerning because they transgressed sexed and gendered body boundaries. This transgression was now conceptualised in relation to (the bodily effects of) androgen “excess.” Those who embodied it were seen as a medical crisis requiring medical normalisation, which in turn worked to protect feminine body norms by rendering non-conformity pathological.

Debating a testosterone sex gap 3 Like most previous gender verification paradigms in sport, the hyperandrogenism regulations were critiqued by scientists, other scholars, and observers from the moment of their inception. These critiques were more multidirectional than before

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in many ways due to the broader awareness about gender verification issues postSemenya. Here, however, I focus on one critique in particular because it had the most significant implications on regulatory policy, namely, challenge against the IAAF and IOC presumption that hyperandrogenism provides a male-like performance advantage in sport. This challenge and related debates also illustrate how the conflation between medicalised androgen excess and male-like athletic advantage was constructed. As I noted previously, the hyperandrogenism regulations were built on the idea that the gap between male and female performance levels is explained by the gap between male and female androgen levels. Consequently, both exogenous and endogenous high androgen levels in female bodies were positioned, not only as pathological, but also as a source of unfair male-like advance. When the hyperandrogenism regulations were introduced, the evidence to support this idea, which for many observers seemed self-evident anyway, came primarily from one presumed causal link. This was the link between the fact that men’s top sport performance results are, on average, 10% higher than women’s, and the fact most studies suggests that men’s testosterone levels are around ten times that of women’s with no overlap between “normal” male and female levels (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2015). This was reinforced by the general knowledge that steroid doping promotes performance increases. However, just after the hyperandrogenism regulations’ institution, Karkazis and colleagues argued that despite its widespread acceptance, the link between athleticism and androgens in general or testosterone in particular has not been proven. Despite the many assumptions about the relationship between testosterone and athletic advantage, there is no evidence showing that successful athletes have higher testosterone levels than less successful athletes. (Karkazis et al., 2012: 8, original emphasis) Karkazis, with Jordan-Young (2015), argued that while research has shown that there is no overlap between male and female testosterone levels in the general population, the same has not been shown to be the case for the special group of elite athletes in particular, whose bodies are, in many ways, extraordinary. They noted that one of the very few existing large-scale studies on testosterone in elite athletes (namely, the IOC- and WADA-funded GH-2000 study) actually suggested that elite athletes’ hormone profiles differ from usual reference ranges in both males and females: the study suggested that there is, in fact, an overlap, with some female athletes being above the “female range” and some Olympic-level male athletes being below the “male range,” including a few falling within the “female range” (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2015). Karkazis and colleagues argued, therefore, that the underlying premise upon which the hyperandrogenism regulations were built was un-evidenced, as the presumed causal link between (endogenous) testosterone

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and athletic advantage in elite-level athletes had not been proven. In 2015, this argument, combined with broader critique of the hyperandrogenism regulations, resulted in a historically notable case against the regulations at CAS. In the introduction to this book, I noted that just before the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, Indian runner Dutee Chand was subjected to medical examinations in accordance with the SAI hyperandrogenism regulations, which closely mirrored the IOC and IAAF policies. Here, I will return to Chand’s case, because it was her and her legal team who took the IAAF to CAS to challenge the hyperandrogenism regulations. After the required medical examinations had been performed on Chand, SAI notified that Chand would “not be eligible for selection for Commonwealth Games because her ‘male hormone’ levels were too high” and added that Chand would only be eligible to compete in the future “if she takes proper medical help and lowers her androgen levels to the specified range” (cited in CAS, 2015: 5–6, original emphasis). Chand, however, decided to challenge her exclusion and filed an appeal to CAS, supported by scientists and bioethicists including Karkazis, which meant that CAS held a hearing about the soundness of the hyperandrogenism regulations. The debates that took place during the CAS hearing centred on the foregrounding premise of the hyperandrogenism regulations, defended by sport regulators, namely, that hyperandrogenic female athletes have (male-like) athletic advantage over “normal” females due to their endogenous androgen levels. After hearing the arguments by Karkazis and colleagues, who emphasised the lack of evidence about the presumed link between (endogenous) testosterone and athletic advantage, CAS decided to suspend the regulations, pending this evidence. CAS (2015: 153) concluded that there was, indeed, insufficient evidence to support the presumption that hyperandrogenic female athletes “have a competitive advantage of the same order as that of a male athlete.” They added that there is not enough evidence to show that these athletes “enjoy such a substantial performance advantage” that “excluding them from competing in the female category” is “a necessary and proportionate means of preserving fairness in athletics competition and/or policing the binary male/female classification” (CAS, 2015: 153). CAS therefore suspended the regulations for an interim maximum period of two years. In this time, sport-governing bodies were tasked with providing “scientific evidence about the quantitative relationship between enhanced testosterone levels and improved athletic performance in hyperandrogenic athletes” (CAS, 2015). If the evidence was not forthcoming, the regulations would be declared void. The CAS ruling meant that Chand and other hyperandrogenic women, including Semenya, were eligible to compete with other women without having to lower their androgen levels. This was notable for the history of gender verification, especially because it implied that for the first time since the 1930s, there were no official gender verification regulations4 enforced in international athletics, including during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, where both Chand and Semenya competed in the 800-meter race.

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The Rio Olympics The CAS ruling resulted in newly framed social anxieties over the breakdown of the sex binary at the Rio Olympics, as the suspension of the hyperandrogenism regulations re-ignited older gendered concerns in sports. These concerns were now, however, largely targeted at Semenya and other women, mostly from the Global South, who were rumoured to have hyperandrogenism. Before the Rio competitions, observers speculated that “it is very possible that we could see an all intersex podium in the 800 in Rio, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see as many as five intersex women in the eight-person final. There are potential intersex medallists in other running events too” (Tucker & Harper, 2016). The same observers added that “Semenya could, and should, break the 800m world record . . . held by one Jarmila Kratochvilova. . . . If you know anything about the sport, you know that whoever it was who broke that record was going to be faced with a few probing questions” (Tucker & Harper, 2016). While Semenya did not break Kratochvílová’s record – although she did win the 800-meter race with “the fifth-fastest time in Olympic history” (Bull, 2016) – such speculations directly linked Semenya’s athletic prowess with the gendered rumours that had surrounded Kratochvílová’s embodiment and performance levels decades earlier. After the 800-meter race, news outlets reported that not only Semenya but also the “silver medallist Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui, who got a bronze,” both of whom are black African women, “have . . . faced questions about their testosterone levels” (Morgan, 2016). They were “subjected to the kinds of innuendo that Semenya herself experienced in 2009” (Bull, 2016). Similar speculations were also voiced by female athletes: the 800-meter sixth place finisher, Lyndsay Sharp, commented that “everyone can see it’s two separate races so there’s nothing I can do” (Morgan, 2016). The fifth-place finisher, Joanna Jozwik, noted that she was “glad” that she was “the first European, the second white” to finish the race, adding that she felt “like the silver medallist” and that, in her view, the fourth-place finisher, Melissa Bishop, “should be the gold medallist” (Critchley, 2016). She also remarked (without evidence) that the “three athletes who were on the podium . . . have a very high testosterone level, similar to male’s, which is why they look how they look and run how they run” (Critchley, 2016). As Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018) observed, “it is impossible to miss the optics of this controversy – the three black women from sub-Saharan Africa ebullient on the podium and . . . white Global North women feeling they should be there instead,” which reflects the racial politics and asymmetrical burdens and benefits of the hyperandrogenism concern. Relatedly, the successful long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe, who had also participated in the CAS hearing representing women athletes, commented in relation to the hyperandrogenism regulations’ suspension that what worries me is we know that there are certain communities where the condition of intersex, of hyperandrogenism, is more prevalent. . . . We don’t want to get to the situation where people are actively going to those communities to

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seek out girls who look like they’re going to be able to go out and perform, and to run fast, and then take them away and train them. It becomes a manipulated situation. (“‘No Longer Sport’: Paula Radcliffe Wades into Semenya Debate,” 2016) Radcliffe’s comments, and similar comments by sports officials like Bermon (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018), were directed at athletes and sports authorities from the Global South. They closely mirrored, however, the concerns of Western observers during the Cold War period, which I discussed in Chapter 3, over dubious non-Western governments who might seek out and send “abnormal” athletes into women’s international competitions, albeit now framed around the medical language of hyperandrogenism. This concern was additionally reinforced by the publication of the so-called McLaren report (McLaren, 2016a, 2016b), which coincided with the suspension of the hyperandrogenism regulations. The McLaren report provided evidence that there was a large-scale, state-sponsored doping programme in Russia, which created an international scandal and resulted in the suspension of the Russian Olympic and Paralympic Committees. The International Paralympic Committee president Philip Craven, among others, referred to the Russian “doping culture” as “polluting” (IPC, 2016). While the doping scandal re-surfaced social anxieties over pure versus polluted bodies in sport, it also intertwined with concerns over the unrestricted entry of hyperandrogenic bodies into women’s sport: as the hyperandrogenism regulations were suspended, politicised fears targeted at sex-binary-polluting and “artificial” (i.e. doped) athletes became entangled. Indeed, Radcliffe contextualised her concern over hyperandrogenic bodies in relation to the Russian doping scandal by noting that “we’ve seen the lengths that countries like Russia will go to . . . have major success on the world stage, on the Olympic stage” (“‘No Longer Sport’: Paula Radcliffe Wades Into Semenya Debate,” 2016). The unusual context of the Rio Olympics, then, brought to the fore many of the core anxieties upon which gender verification in sport has been foregrounded, both historically and in the present, albeit now re-framed in relation to hyperandrogenism. Concern over sex and gender binary breakdown targeted at hyperandrogenic bodies (like concern over the “hermaphroditic,” “metamorphosing,” “hybrid,” and “hypermuscular” bodies of the past) intertwined with racialised imaginaries of where, symbolically and geopolitically, sexed and gendered binary pollution is presumed to be located. Concurrently, the IAAF president Sebastian Coe stated that the IAAF planned to collect the evidence that CAS had requested in order to reinstate the hyperandrogenic regulations (Morgan, 2016).

IAAF DSD regulations and the testosterone debate In 2017, IAAF in-house scientists Stéphane Bermon and Pierre-Yves Garnier (2017) published a new study that, they claimed, provided evidence that female

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athletes with high endogenous testosterone have a (statistically) significant performance advantage over other women. This study was a statistical analysis of testosterone concentrations and performance results of athletes who competed at the 2011 Daegu and 2013 Moscow IAAF World Championships. It appeared to demonstrate that women with higher testosterone concentrations performed 1.8–4.5% better than other women. However, this advantage was only evident in some events, namely, the 400-meters, 400-meter hurdles, 800-meters, pole vault, and hammer throw. Nonetheless, the IAAF declared that the Bermon and Garnier (2017) study was a key part of the evidence that they planned to submit to CAS “regarding the degree of performance advantage that hyperandrogenic female athletes enjoy over female athletes with normal testosterone levels” (IAAF, 2017a). While the IAAF decreed the Bermon and Garnier (2017) study as foundational support for their case to re-continue regulating androgen levels in women’s sport, the reliability of Bermon and Garnier’s findings fell under dispute when the dataset and methodology that they had used to derive these findings were examined by independent experts, including sport scientists and statisticians. Firstly, there were issues with the underlying data: in attempting to replicate the findings, Pielke, Tucker, and Boye (2018) found, among other things, that there were multiple performance results reported for single individuals, single results reported more than once, and phantom results that could not be located within official results statistics. In addition, the times of several athletes who had been doping were included in the dataset, which could have skewed the results. While Bermon and colleagues (2018) later attempted to correct some of these errors, Pielke, Tucker, and Boye (2019b) noted that the issues connected with the study “include methodological considerations that no reanalysis can overcome.” Secondly, and relatedly, critics highlighted that even if the dataset was taken at face value, there were several problems with the study design, including with the methods that Bermon and Garnier used to analyse the data, which were argued to be inappropriate at best and flawed at worst.5 Moreover, some highlighted that the 1.8–4.5% performance advantage that Bermon and Garnier claimed to have found was not even the evidence that CAS had requested. Rather, they had requested evidence that hyperandrogenic female athletes have an advantage comparable to that of male athletes, that is 10–12% (for in-depth critique of these and other issues with the study, see Camporesi, 2018; Franklin, Betancurt, & Camporesi, 2018; Karkazis & Meyerowitz-Katz, 2017; Karkazis and Carpenter, 2018; Kreutzer, 2018; Lenskyj, 2018; Longman, 2018; Menier, 2018; Pielke, Tucker, & Boye, 2018, 2019a, 2019b; Sőnksen et al., 2018). Despite the highly contested nature of the Bermon and Garnier (2017) study, in March 2018, the IAAF informed CAS that it had created a new set of regulations, which were built to a significant extent8 on Bermon and Garnier’s findings and designed to replace the 2011 hyperandrogenism regulations that CAS had initially suspended. The new regulations, which were realised in April 2018, were titled “eligibility regulations for the female classification (athletes with differences of sex development)” (IAAF, 2018a). I will henceforth refer to them as “the DSD

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regulations.” Significantly, they no longer applied to the 100-meter race in which Chand competed, but only covered middle distance races between 400-meters and 1 mile (CAS, 2019a). Because of this, Chand was now eligible to compete without restriction in the 100-meters, and CAS consequently terminated the court proceedings relating to Chand (CAS, 2019a). Unlike the previous hyperandrogenism regulations, the DSD regulations were designed to “apply only to the participation by a Relevant Athlete in the female classification in a Restricted Event at an International Competition” (IAAF, 2018a: 2, original capitals). “Restricted events” were middle-distance running races. “Relevant athletes,” on the other hand, were athletes legally recognised as women (or as intersex etc. in countries where third genders are legally recognised) but who have certain DSDs,6 such as PAIS or CAH, which often give rise to elevated testosterone levels. As a consequence, the relevant athletes needed to have endogenous testosterone levels above 5 nmol/L, while being sufficiently sensitive to androgens for those levels to have “material androgenising effect” (IAAF, 2018a: 3). This in effect conveyed an enduring concern over hormonally “masculinised” embodiment (Karkazis & Carpenter, 2018). In order to compete (and set world records) in women’s international middle-distance races, the relevant athletes were required to reduce and maintain their testosterone level below 5 nmol/L (IAAF, 2018a). This new threshold was much lower than the 10 nmol/L limit set by the hyperandrogenism regulations. It is noteworthy that the IAAF (2018b) also confirmed plans to update the eligibility regulations for transgender athletes, which likely means that the IAAF aims to reduce the current 10 nmol/L testosterone threshold for transgender women to 5 nmol/L to be consistent with the DSD regulations. A key change in the DSD regulations was that the term “hyperandrogenism” was omitted and replaced with an emphasis on DSDs. This was because the IAAF considered that the term “hyperandrogenism” was actually misleading when it came to delineating which kinds of bodily conditions were the true target of the regulations. Indeed, the DSD regulations did not apply to hyperandrogenism in general: some conditions that can give rise to hyperandrogenism, such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and adrenal and ovarian tumours, were not included under the regulations, “even if such conditions cause the individual to have blood testosterone levels above the normal female range,” including above the 5 nmol/L threshold (IAAF, 2018s: A-9). Rather, the threshold only applied to a selectively targeted group of women with specific DSDs in particular. In other words, the cause of the high testosterone apparently mattered, even though it is not immediately clear why it should be relevant to sports performance. I will return to this point shortly. The release of the DSD regulations by the IAAF was accompanied with widespread public debate that included amplified scrutiny of the already disputed empirical basis upon which the regulations were built. Some raised questions about scientific integrity and noted that the IAAF seemed to be engaged in policy-based evidence making rather than evidence-based policy making (e.g. Lenskyj, 2018; Pielke, Tucker, and Boye, 2019a). Others noted that the DSD regulations were

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likely to disproportionately affect athletes from the Global South and seemed, moreover, to be targeted at one athlete in particular, namely, Semenya (e.g. Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018). Indeed, the South African minister of sport, Tokozile Xasa, nicknamed the regulations “Caster Semenya Regulations” (Bull, 2018). This was because the regulations were designed to apply to middle-distance races only, despite the fact that Bermon and Garnier (2017) claimed to have found an androgen-induced performance advantage in hammer throw and pole vault as well. Furthermore, it was in hammer throw and pole vault, not in middle-distance races, where the most significant performance advantage (4.5% and 2.9%, respectively) was identified. No advantage was reported for the 1,500-meters race while the 1-mile event was not even analysed, and yet both were included under the regulations’ scope. In this “calculated selection,” Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018) argued, the geographical focus of the IAAF’s gendered concerns was revealed: “this regulation is about targeting and impeding a few exceptional women of colour from the global south, especially Caster Semenya,” as it aims specifically to “exclude women from middle-distance running events, the events in which women from the global south,” and Semenya in particular, “have excelled.” Relatedly, soon after the DSD regulations were released, newspapers reported that Semenya was making plans to challenge the regulations at CAS, as Chand had done with the hyperandrogenism regulations only a few years before, supported by Chand’s legal team (Koshie, 2018) and Athletics South Africa (ASA) (Athletics SA to Challenge ‘Skewed’ IAAF Ruling, 2018). The Semenya hearing took place in February 2019 and concerned the DSD regulations’ scientific basis as well as the extent to which they were discriminatory, proportionate, and concordant with the national and international commandments, laws, and human rights (CAS, 2019a). It took several months for CAS to release an award, but in the meantime, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (2019) alongside other major human rights and equality organisations such as the Human Rights Watch (Grentholtz & Worden, 2018), Athlete Ally & Women’s Sport Foundation (2018) issued resolutions declaring the DSD regulations to be incompatible with international human rights norms and standards. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the extensive objections that had been advanced from various directions against the DSD regulations and the science that underpinned it, the decision that CAS finally reached in May 2019 was to uphold the regulations. This was despite the fact that the IAAF had not produced evidence of the relevant athletes having an advantage comparable to that of male athletes as CAS had initially demanded in 2015. It was also despite the fact that CAS (2019c) acknowledged “the difficulty to rely on concrete evidence of actual (as opposed to theoretical) significant athletic advantage” carried by the athletes in the 1,500-meter and 1-mile running events. To counter this issue, the IAAF (2019b) stated that “there is enough evidence from the filed,” meanings practical experience from athletics competitions, to support the inclusion of these distances under the regulations (although what exactly this evidence is remains unclear). They added that “it is also generally accepted that an elite 800m runner will also

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excel over 1500m and one mile” (IAAF, 2019b). While CAS (2019b: 1) found that the regulations are, indeed, discriminatory both on the grounds of legal sex and “innate biological characteristics,” they declared that “such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the legitimate objective of ensuring fair competition in female athletics in certain events and protecting the ‘protected class’ of female athletes in those events.” The previously discussed developments and discussions that took place during the CAS hearing both clarified and notably altered the definition of “femaleness” in athletics, in ways that are highlighted by the IAAF and expert witness statements. IAAF witnesses clarified, firstly, that the testosterone threshold had been set at 5 nmol/L because it was “necessary to make allowances for women with PCOS,” who could have testosterone levels up to 4.8 nmol/L but rarely above (CAS, 2019a: 89). This suggests not only that the threshold had been set using the uppermost levels of testosterone observed in women with PCOS as a guide to the highest levels of testosterone that occur in “normal” females, but also that women with PCOS were not added under the scope of the regulation because they were considered to be “normal” females. Secondly, during the course of the CAS proceedings, the IAAF introduced an amendment to the DSD regulations, after which the regulations covered only DSD conditions “where the affected individual has XY chromosomes,” while “no individuals with XX chromosomes are subjected to any restrictions or eligibility conditions” (CAS, 2019a). The consequence of this amendment was that the final set of regulations (see IAAF, 2019a), which came into force a week after the CAS decision was released, no longer applied to CAH because women with CAH have XX chromosomes. This was even though CAH had initially fallen under the regulations’ scope and despite the fact that women with CAH may have testosterone levels significantly exceeding the 5 nmol/L threshold. Indeed, this was the reason why de la Chapelle and others had in the 1980s and 1990s considered CAH as one cause of concerning “hypermuscularity,” as I discussed in Chapter 6. Unlike de la Chapelle, the IAAF once again positioned XY chromosomes as foundational for sex category division, even though the DSD regulations were supposed to be focused on policing athletes’ testosterone levels rather than their chromosome constitutions. The IAAF appeal to chromosomes differed significantly from the chromosome screening paradigms that I discussed in previous chapters, however. Chromosomes were attributed with a more ambivalent role than before, and the implicit reasons for this become apparent when considering the terminology used by the IAAF at CAS. The IAAF explicitly referred to women who fell under the regulations’ scope as “biologically male athletes with female gender identities” who “desire” to compete in the female category (CAS, 2019a: 71). They remarked that unlike the Chand case of 2015, the case relating to Semenya “is not about biological females” but “about biological males” and the performance advantage they may derive from testosterone “when they compete against biological females” (CAS, 2019a: 73). In describing which characteristics they were concerned with when distinguishing “biological males” from “biological females,” the IAAF

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demarcated a binary distinction that opposed “male chromosomes (XY), male gonads (testes) and adult male levels of circulating testosterone” against XX chromosomes, ovaries, and female testosterone levels (CAS, 2019a: 72). After the CAS proceedings, the IAAF (2019b) clarified further that the reason why there must be separate male and female competition categories in athletics is because of genetic sex differences, which give rise to hormonal differences: the relevant “genetic difference” amounts to “XY chromosomes producing testes and high testosterone levels” and “XX chromosomes producing ovaries and low testosterone levels.” The aim of the new regulations, the IAAF (2019b) proclaimed, is “precisely to ensure that this genetic difference” is not “outcome-determinative” in athletics competitions, because an athlete with a relevant XY DSD has “all the same advantages as a 46 XY man has over a 46 XX woman.” The IAAF thus used the language of “biological truths,” while relying on a binary conceptualisation of (biological) “femaleness” and “maleness.” They did this in a way that enabled them to define women like Semenya as “male,” irrespective of their social and legal gender and in ways that positioned social gender categorisation as secondary to biology when deciding in which category one “truly” belongs. The IAAF’s reasoning was foregrounded by the presumption that there must be a coherence between genetic, gonadal, and hormonal sex in the development of “female” and “male” bodies. This is the sex development model that I discussed in Chapter 1: XY chromosomes were presumed to entail testes development, which in turn was presumed to (nearly always)7 entail hormonal “masculinisation” implying “biological maleness.” Even though the IAAF knew that some individuals do not follow this sex development pathway in a straightforward way, (most) divergences were defined away: to the extent that an athlete had testosterone levels in the “male range” and XY chromosomes, she was defined as a biological male despite any other characteristics she may have. Under this logic, it was the social gender or sex categories of women with XY chromosomes and “male” testosterone levels that were inconsistent with the biological (male) realities of their embodiment. While testosterone levels were the official focus of the DSD regulations, they were positioned as symptomatic of genetic sex rather than being the cause of the core problem. Women with XX chromosomes were, after all, defined as biological females and eligible to compete with other women irrespective of their testosterone level. The IAAF’s uses of the “biological female” and “biological male” notions were also foregrounded by presumptions about the kinds of female embodiment that are desired and desirable. These presumptions drew from social gender norms in ways that are highlighted by the prescribed treatments that athletes needed to undergo if they fell under the regulations’ scope. To compete with other women, the IAAF (2019b) mandated (as the 2011 hyperandrogenism regulations had also done) that the relevant athletes must medically lower their testosterone levels, which could be achieved by means such as off-label use of contraceptives for hormone regulation or other forms of HRT. Unlike before, however, the IAAF (2019b) now added that “lowering testosterone in one of these ways is the

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recognised ‘gender-affirming’ standard of care for any individual (athlete or not) who is 46 XY but has a female gender identity.” They highlighted, moreover, that the “loss of muscle mass, reduction of haemoglobin concentration, and increase in fat mass” that results from such care are, actually, the “desired effects” of this care, as “the medication helps to change their body to better reflect their chosen gender” (IAAF, 2019b). The IAAF (2018a: A-3) additionally provided an appendix document setting out the “framework for the assessment of cases arising under the Regulations,” which was similar to the diagnostic guidelines for hyperandrogenism that I discussed previously. The argument that medical interventions like hormone therapy and their expected material effects are gender affirming for athletes with XY DSD relied on the presumption that the gender of these athletes needed to be affirmed in some embodied way in the first place, whether the athletes themselves desired such affirmation or not. The IAAF using the “gender affirming” concept is a cooptation of language that is commonly used in the context of early 21st-century transgender healthcare, where this concept connotes the empowering and desired nature of related medical interventions that are sought for by the individuals who receive them (Vincent, 2018). Using this concept is indeed appropriate for elective transgender care that enables individuals to achieve gendered embodiment that corresponds with the material sex characteristics that they identify with. The IAAF, however, applied the concept in the very different context of international athletics edibility regulations, where the athletes were required to undergo medical interventions they had not asked for, merely to be eligible to compete in women’s athletics. In doing so, the IAAF positioned the physiological effects that the interventions would have for these athletes as desirable, not because they were desired by those undergoing the interventions, but because they were socially desirable, at least from the perspective of the IAAF: the athletes’ changed bodies would better reflect cultural ideas and the IAAF’s ideas, rather than the athletes’ own ideas, about the what women’s bodies are supposed to be like. What the medication would affirm, in other words, was the athletes’ adherence to gendered body norms – norms which were, in turn, positioned as a reflection or manifestation of the material realities of “biological femaleness.”

Conclusion While the IAAF and IOC claimed that the hyperandrogenism regulations they introduced in 2011 and 2012 were no longer about “gender verification” or aimed at distinguishing females from males, the content and implications of these regulations tell a different story. They continued to police the boundaries of the female category, and they were based on a particular (hormonal) definition of which bodies can – and which cannot – be categorised as “female” for sports purposes. Androgens were positioned as the “essence” of sex difference in sport due to these hormones’ presumed causal role in explaining the gap between male and female performance levels. The (performance enhancing) effects of doping with androgens were conflated

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with the (presumed performance enhancing) effects of hyperandrogenism, in ways that framed high level androgens in women, whether endogenous and exogenous, as unfairly performance enhancing. Because of the association with high androgen levels and high-performance levels, not only high androgens but also high-level performances came to be regulated as male attributes. These attributes were, in turn, medicalised and considered to require treatment when manifesting in females: hyperandrogenic women’s “excessive” androgen levels and, therefore, their “excessive” performance levels needed to be brought back within “normal” female standards with medical assistance. These standards, however, pertained to aesthetic (white and Western) norms of feminine embodiment as well as to women’s expected performance capacity. When the hyperandrogenism regulations were suspended in 2015 due to a challenge against the underlying science, the consequence was a gendered panic at the Rio Olympics, which was largely targeted at women from the Global South and Semenya in particular. Relatedly, the IAAF began searching for evidence that they could use to prove that female athletes’ androgen levels need to be restricted. While the evidence they found was widely disputed, the IAAF nonetheless introduced a new set of regulations largely based on this evidence that replaced their previous hyperandrogenism policy. These regulations were not only targeted to a specific group of athletes competing in specific events, but they were also highly criticised as unscientific and unjust. Despite this, CAS decided to uphold the regulations against the challenges that were brought against them, which meant that the regulations came into force. The definition of “femaleness” that the DSD regulations brought forth established binary sex difference as a “biological reality” that could not be destabilised by social sex and gender categories, nor by embodied sex characteristics that diverge from one’s “true” biological sex. Biological sex, in turn, was primarily determined by one’s chromosome constitution, but in ways that gave the causal link between XY chromosomes and “male” androgen levels particular significance: “biological males” were those with XY chromosomes that give rise to “male” androgen levels, while “biological females” were all those with XX chromosomes, irrespective of androgen levels. This logic enabled the IAAF to define women like Semenya as “biologically male,” whatever their gender identities and notwithstanding other sex characteristics that may contravene conventional notions of biological maleness. The DSD regulations and their empirical basis continue, however, to be highly contested, including on the grounds that they are inconsistent with human rights. Notably, the reason why the previously discussed disputes concerning the regulations were resolved at CAS rather than at mainstream courts is that international sport-governing bodies grant CAS exclusive power over the resolution of sporting disputes (Lenskyj, 2018). The IOC and international sports federations including the IAAF are not subject to international treaties, including human rights resolutions or to national courts and laws, including anti-discrimination, except those of their host country. In practice, this usually means the liberal laws of Switzerland,

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as most sport-governing bodies are based there. The only national court that can, according to the CAS code, overturn CAS rulings is the Swiss Federal Tribunal (Lenskyj, 2018). This implies not only that international sports largely function as a law onto themselves (Lenskyj, 2018), but also that the only viable option for Semenya to challenge the CAS decision to uphold the DSD regulations was to appeal it at the Swiss court. Shortly after the CAS ruling was released, this is exactly what she did: Semenya submitted an appeal to the Swiss court, on the grounds that the DSD regulations violate both international human rights and “the most fundamental principles of Swiss public policy” (Bogage, 2019). At the time of writing, the outcome of this appeal is pending.

Notes 1 The Stockholm consensus regulations (IOC, 2003) also required that surgical interventions including gonadectomy and external genitalia be completed, the latter of which illustrates that the concern over penises discussed in Chapter 5 had not died despite the overall changes in rhetoric. The 2015 IOC consensus regulations (IOC, 2015) finally removed the genital surgery requirement. 2 For example, a multinational study of 2,895 women from five racial groups concluded that variations in hair growth were significantly related to ethnicity/race (Javorsky et al., 2014). 3 This is the title of Karkazis and Jordan-Young’s (2015) influential article on the unproven link between testosterone and athletic advantage. 4 It should be noted that eligibility regulations for transgender women as per the 2015 IOC consensus regulations (IOC, 2015) were still enforced. 5 The Bermon and Garnier (2017) study used a group-level analysis method where women were classified into three (tertile) groups based on their free testosterone concentrations, and the lowest group was then compared with the highest group in each athletics discipline. However, critics, including Karkazis and Meyerowitz-Katz (2017), have argued that they should have done athlete-level analysis and used linear regression in order to be able to evidence the claim that the higher the testosterone concentration, the better the performance, in addition to which they should have analysed total rather than “free” testosterone (i.e. testosterone bound to sex hormone-binding globulin, rather than “free” hormone not bound in this way). Bermon and Garnier also failed to adjust for multiple comparisons despite running multiple tests simultaneously, and in so doing increased the likelihood of their inferences being erroneous or showing so-called false positives (Karkazis & Meyerowitz-Katz, 2017). 6 The conditions listed were the following: 5α-reductase type 2 deficiency; partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS); 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 3 deficiency; CAH; 3β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency; ovotesticular DSD; or another genetic condition involving disordered gonadal steroidogenesis (i.e. the formation of steroids by the testes/ovaries) (IAAF, 2018a: 3). 7 The only exceptions to this, the IAAF acknowledged, are CAIS and transgender women who have undergone hormone therapy to reduce their testosterone levels within the female range. 8 While IAAF scientists did publish additional papers to support the new regulations (Bermon, 2017; Handelsman, Hirschberg, & Bermon, 2018), these were review and option pieces that did not provide any new evidence, which means the Bermon and Garnier study formed the new regulations’ primary empirical basis (Pielke, Tucker, & Boye, 2019b: 3).

Chapter 8

The past, present, and future of gender verification and sex categories in sport

My aim in this book has been to examine the historical and contemporary manifestations of gender verification in international sports, in order to explore broader questions around the ontology and epistemology of sex difference through the sporting context. In particular, I have taken the genealogy of the female category in the Olympic Games and international athletics as a lens for exploring how “femaleness” has been defined, how and why these definitions have changed, and how the boundaries around the female category have been drawn, secured, and materialised. Focusing on “femaleness” as an object of scientific and cultural knowledge and regulation, I have mapped how sex categories are contextually produced and maintained in a binary relation through practices and policies of gender verification that have been directed almost exclusively at the bodies of female athletes. By documenting the history of gender verification from the 1930s till the present, the preceding chapters have demonstrated how the boundaries around the female category have shifted and been re-drawn anew in response to changing social, scientific, and political circumstances, which shows the notion of “femaleness” to be temporally and contextually fluid and unstable. This instability makes sex category boundaries more generally unstable in ways that also make them subject to recurring crises in the face of broader socio-political and socio-scientific shifts: where exactly the dividing binary line between the sexes is or should be located is a question of continuous debate and tension, which is provoked especially by subjects who transgress, resist, or fail to conform to prevalent gendered body norms. While this final chapter occupies the place and performs the role of a conclusion, it is not really a conclusion in the sense that it would not constitute an ending point for the analysis of gender verification and the making of the female body in sport. Indeed, the point in time at which this book concludes is only the start of newly emerging debates and negotiations over the definition and boundaries of femaleness that are simultaneously re-making and reinforcing old ideas about the “nature” of female bodies. Consequently, while this chapter brings together the core recurring themes of preceding chapters to map how sex difference has been produced and maintained as a binary relation, it is oriented towards the present and future as much as the past of gender verification and sex categories in sport.

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My aim in mapping a genealogy of the female category has been to provide, in Foucault’s (1991, 2000) terms, a critical history of the present that can inform how and why the notions of “femaleness” and female embodiment that are currently enacted have emerged. I here therefore return to the debates that are being waged at the time of writing over the IAAF DSD regulations that were foregrounded in the previous chapter, and I map the discursive context that embeds them. I end by considering where critical attention should be directed in the future when it comes to sex categories in sport as well as competitive sports more generally.

Continuities and discontinuities in the making of the female body The genealogy of the female category in international sports can shed light on broader questions around the ontology and epistemology of sex and gender difference and binaries. This is because it provides an exemplary contextual manifestation of the processes and practices through which sex difference is produced and maintained as a binary relation via the policing of the boundaries of the female category. As I noted in the introduction to this book, sport has been a central social signifier of sex difference because it expresses the different potential and limits that are seen to accompany male and female embodiment, respectively. Consequently, the sphere of sport has been a key site where the nature of sex difference and sexed embodiment more generally is displayed, debated, and contested. Gender verification brings to fore that the processes through which the sex binary is erected and secured are inherently circular. What gender verification has sought to do is to verify that those who identify themselves as women and claim the right to compete in women’s sport and in the female category are appropriately female or at least female “enough” to have that right. This is because the right is presumed to be derived from natural, biological, and physiologically or materially manifested femaleness that is independent of the cultural processes through which individuals gain social recognition as women or men. Yet, as Butler (1990, 1993) already argued two decades ago, there is no “natural” or “biological” reality of femaleness from which one’s right to compete in the female category could be derived, apart from the normative realities that are discursively constructed by the natural and especially biological sciences as academic disciplines. The gendered organisation of sports reflects and is a particularly rigorous example of broader socio-scientific, cultural, and political processes of gender binarisation. These processes presume and demand not only a binary societal gender division but also coherence and continuity between embodied and social sexed and the gendered attributes, namely, that those who are categorised socially as women are feminine females and those who are categorised as men are masculine males. It is these processes that regulate sexed bodies into a binary relation and make the sex binary appear to be a natural foundation for social gender relations and divisions between women and men. In other words, it is the power endowed social gender divisions that are the foundation of natural scientific discourses (and “truths”)

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about female and male embodiment, which in turn are naturalised and made to appear independent of the discourses through which they have emerged. In organising sport into binary sex categories, international sports governance is engaged in the wider social processes of gender binarisation that begin from the presumption that there is a foundational biological difference between female and male bodies that mandates the division of women and men into different (sporting) categories. Yet, because sport regulators are not faced with neatly divided, coherently sexed and gendered bodies but diverse bodies that carry sex and gender in complex, often culturally inconsistent ways, they are continually faced with bodies that undermine the idea that sex exists, empirically, as a binary. They are faced with bodies that undermine the idea that individuals’ sex characteristics, gender presentations, and identities must align with each other. The bodies that transgress binary body norms of sex difference pose a challenge not only to the organisation of sports but to the gendered organisation of society more generally: to the extent that the presumed natural and biological differences between female and male bodies are fragmented, so are the wider societal gender divisions that are legitimised and justified based on these biological differences. Gender verification in sports has been – and continues to be – primarily motivated by social anxieties over the breakdown of sex and gender binaries. It has been targeted at athletes competing in the female category who were seen to represent this breakdown because they transgressed prevalent cultural ideas about the “natural” appearance and capabilities of female bodies. By appearing masculine, masculinised, or “male-like,” having embodied attributes associated with maleness, or performing above the supposed limits of female bodies’ athletic performance potential, these athletes disrupted the presumed alignment between sexed and gendered attributes. They undermined the presumption that female and male, woman and man, and feminine and masculine are separate and mutually exclusive realities and their presence in women’s sport carried an unsettling kind of ontological crisis: they made it visible that binary sex categories have no material basis or ontological essence beyond their construction through socio-scientific discourses. The very existence of these bodies is evidence of the fact that, in Haraway’s (1991a: 155) words, there is “nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women.” Instead, binary sex categories in general and the female category in particular only emerge as fixed categories to the extent that they are defined and regulated into existence. This is what gender verification policies have, in effect, done. While sport regulators have, throughout the history of gender verification, looked to verify athletes’ gender with recourse to the sexed body, they first had to draw definitional boundaries around “femaleness” because to verify it, they first needed to know what femaleness is. In other words, to find femaleness, one must first know what one is looking for. The definitions that were chosen and applied were contextually contingent: what, exactly, gender verification has verified changed over time in ways that mirrored broader cultural, socio-scientific, and political developments. Because there is no cross-temporal or cross-contextual

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femaleness, sport regulators drew from socio-politically and culturally constructed norms and ideals around “femaleness.” Often, these norms and ideals fell under the name of science, and thus carried the authority of science in general and biology and medicine in particular. This gave them an aura of “truth” seemingly unburdened by the realm of culture and society. Indeed, embodied and sexed material attributes or substances, such as “sex” chromosomes or hormones, “male” and “female” genitals, and so on, are not only gendered into a binary but also equated with the presumably value-neutral realm of natural scientific knowledge. This knowledge has been perceived to hierarchically outweigh ethical, political, historical, social, and cultural questions. Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018: 13), among others, have called this way of thinking “scientism,” which equates “scientific knowledge with knowledge itself” in ways that valorise the natural sciences and relegate other forms of knowledge production as outside the purview of knowledge proper. The scientific and medical theories of sex difference that sport regulators built on were also intertwined with racialised, classed, and colonial discourses that have delineated the norms and ideals around female embodiment in relation to white, Western, and middle/upper-class feminine body aesthetics. The kinds of bodies that were perceived and named as gender troubling at different periods of time changed as the social norms and politics of gender shifted, moving from “metamorphosing,” “hermaphroditic,” “hybrid,” “indeterminate,” “masquerading,” “transvestite,” “hypermuscular,” and gender “suspicious” bodies finally to “hyperandrogenic” bodies and XY DSDs. The moving targets of gendered social anxieties were, however, always disproportionately racialised, classed, and geopolitical “others” of the white, Western middle/upper-class woman. This illustrates the foundational entanglement of normalised femaleness with racialised, classed, and colonial imaginaries that also condition where, in geopolitical terms, gender and sex binary transgressions were perceived to be located. Throughout most of its history, the bodies that became the target of gender verification were also the target of gender normalisation or sex binary “realignment.” As Butler (1993) and Morland (2001) have argued, the socio-scientific and medico-cultural norms of gender binarisation through which the sex binary is naturalised and through which a coherence and continuity between sex and gender attributes is presumed also delimit the kinds of morphological configurations that are socially allowed. Binary sex is not only naturalised as the (biological) norm, but also materialised onto bodies in general and onto bodies that transgress sex and gender binaries in particular. For decades, sport regulators have relied on medical configurations of normal and abnormal bodies, intertwined with feminine body norms, both to define femaleness and to identify as “abnormal” all those who fall outside the scope of the medical norms. When abnormal bodies were identified, they were not only excluded from the female category but also relegated as pathological bodies that required corrective or normalising medical interventions: medical sex binary realignment was prescribed for those who failed to embody binary sex norms. This, in turn, functioned to materialise those very norms onto

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these bodies and in so doing also secured the relationship of continuity and coherence between the material sex attributes of one’s body and her gender category. Gender verification, then, has been and continues to be a socio-scientific boundary-making apparatus that not only verifies femaleness but also produces the very femaleness that it purports to verify, in ways that also erect and secure the sex binary itself. The history of gender verification highlights how boundaries around female embodiment are formally erected and written into policy precisely because the location and existence of these boundaries is under perpetual contestation. The boundaries that are drawn are, in turn, repeatedly undermined by subjects who embody sex and gender category ambivalence. The genealogy of the female category in international sport brings to the fore not only that sex categories have no ontological essence or fixity but also that they are subject to perpetual negotiation, debate, and crises due to this lack of fixed essence. Crises have a tendency to resurface in spaces where binary sex or gender categories are presumed and applied, especially when existing social and scientific ideas about the “nature” of sex and gender difference are transgressed or resisted by subjects who fail to conform to these ideas. Indeed, in the current context of international sports, debates over the IAAF DSD regulations that I discussed in the previous chapter continue to unfold. They unfold in ways that both re-enact and re-frame old but enduring concerns over bodies that disrupt the continuity and coherence between socio-scientific delineations of “femaleness” and socially and legally validated gender categorisation.

Drawing lines in the sand – current delineations of femaleness As I noted in the previous chapter, in late May 2019, Caster Semenya and ASA filed an appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal (Bogage, 2019). They asked the Swiss court to overturn the CAS decision that had upheld the IAAF DSD regulations, which restrict the rights of athletes to compete in women’s athletics if they have high testosterone levels caused by an XY DSD. It is notable that the appeal was filed on the grounds that the CAS ruling is incompatible with international human rights standards, including the European Convention of Human Rights (de Villiers, 2019). Because Switzerland has ratified the Convention, the ruling was argued to also be incompatible with Swiss public policy, which is the national jurisdiction that both the IAAF and CAS fall under and must comply with (Lenskyj, 2018). In early June, the Swiss court ordered the IAAF to temporarily suspend the implementation of the DSD regulations while Semenya’s appeal was pending. The suspension they ordered did not apply to everyone, however, but only to the appellant, namely, Semenya (“Caster Semenya: Olympic 800m Champion Can Compete After Swiss Court Ruling,” 2019). The consequence of this is a somewhat perplexing state of affairs: while Semenya is eligible to compete in women’s athletics without restriction at the time writing, the IAAF continues to enforce the DSD regulations for all other athletes competing in women’s middledistance races.

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In the meantime, debates over the DSD regulations continue to be waged, but now with added emphasis on questions concerning human rights and discrimination. The IAAF (2019b) contends that it is a “private body exercising private (contractual) powers” and as such is “not subject to human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the European Convention on Human Rights.” The IAAF (2019b) maintains, moreover, that human rights should not be considered “absolute, inviolable or sacrosanct” in the first place – a conceptualisation that seems inconsistent with widely held beliefs about the nature of human rights and the very definition of these rights as “universal.” By contrast, the UN Human Rights Council (2019: 2), among others, has noted that the IAAF DSD regulations “are not compatible with international human rights norms and standards.” The Council (2019: 2) has also called upon states to “ensure that sporting associations and bodies implement policies and practices in accordance with international human rights” and repeal policies that fail to respect these rights. The Women’s Sport Foundation & Athlete Ally (2019) have added that the DSD regulations also violate the Olympic Charter, to which the IAAF is signatory, which states that “the practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind” (IOC, 2019: 11). The IAAF’s contention that sports supersedes human rights questions, despite what human rights organisations or even the Olympic Charter might say,1 is connected with long-held notions and ideals of sports exceptionalism in relation to politics and law (see Lenskyj, 2018). This exceptionalism positions international sports as an exceptional sphere of life that should be – and is granted the power to be – self-governing. It is intertwined with and partially derived from the Olympic ideals and imaginaries that I discussed in Chapter 3, which have claimed political neutrality for the Olympic movement and international sports governance in general. While the Olympic movement has declared for itself extraterritoriality and supranational sovereignty in relation to sports, the IOC and international federations of sports affiliated with it have positioned themselves as autonomous against “outside” influences, taken to encompass national and international policy. National governments have largely respected this claim and allowed sports to govern itself as well as to resolve its own disputes via CAS rather than mainstream courts (Lenskyj, 2018). This is also intertwined with the “scientism” that has characterised sex category regulation in sport, in ways that are highlighted by the IAAF DSD regulations’ emphasis on binary chromosomal and hormonal sex difference as a “biological reality” that outweighs questions of social and legal gender identity. As I discussed in Chapter 7, despite the highly scientifically contested foundations of the DSD regulations, the IAAF posits that the regulations are based on biological truths about sex difference that no social and political considerations, including human rights mandates, can overcome. Indeed, the CAS panel that arbitrated Dutee Chand’s challenge against the IAAF in 2015 considered the ethical and social arguments advanced by ethicists and social scientists like Karkazis to

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be largely irrelevant: these arguments, the CAS panel contended, amounted to “sociological opinion, which does not equate to scientific and clinical knowledge and evidence” (CAS, cited in Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018: 14). Sport regulators, then, have not only insisted that this is a purely scientific matter, but they have done so in ways that appeal to the presumed political and value “neutrality” of both science and international sport governance, where neutrality includes detachment from human rights. In other quarters, the IAAF DSD regulations and sex category regulation in sport in general are being defended and celebrated via appeals to “women rights,” sometimes in the name of feminism. These appeals not only mobilise rights language in ways that oppose women’s rights with the rights of gender and sex minorities but in so doing also position those who are excluded from women’s sports and women’s spaces more generally as not women. For example, Dorian Lambelet Coleman (2019), a legal representative and witness for the IAAF, has argued that the CAS decision to uphold the DSD regulations against Semenya’s challenge was “a victory for female athletes everywhere” – an argument that excludes Semenya from the category of female athletes by definition. In an emotionally loaded commentary that emphasised the “extraordinary harm to the females in the field” that the debate around Semenya had caused, Coleman (2019) contended that when we are told that 46, XY males who identify as female are no different from us because identity is all that matters, the effect is to erase our deeply significant, sex specific experience both on and off the track . . . . When we are told that 46, XY males with DSD who identify as female are simply “women with hyperandrogenism” . . . we aren’t fooled. Coleman’s arguments, which are in effect a re-framed version of the arguments that the IAAF used in defending the DSD regulations, should be seen as part of a broader cultural backlash against the increasing social and legal recognition of gender plurality and fluidity, including transgender and intersex people’s rights (see Hines, 2019). While these arguments closely mirror those expressed by radical feminists such as Janice Raymond (1979) in the 1970s and 1980s, the early 21st-century articulations of these arguments construct a distinction between biological sex attributes that are imagined as immutable and foundational and socially recognised gender identities, which are allowed to be fluid and flexible, but in ways that do not negate “biological facts” (Hines, 2019). In this way, and through a somewhat surprising alliance (considering the history of women’s sports) between the IAAF and women’s rights advocates, new boundaries are being drawn between “biological” and “social” or “legal” femaleness and between “scientific knowledge” and “sociological opinion.” This boundary drawing articulates, albeit from new angles, old distinctions between nature and culture, the scientific and the social, and sex and gender. As I have highlighted, the justification for sex-segregated sports and, thus, the justification for gender verification as well, has always been, and continues to

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be, that separate women’s events are necessary to provide female athletes with a fair competition because female bodies have weaker athletic performance potential than male bodies. This presumption is taken as foundational, despite widespread acceptance of the fact that it is not categorically true because some female bodies evidently have higher athletic performance levels than some male bodies and elite level female athletes have higher performance levels than most male bodies. Yet, because the belief in general female athletic inferiority has been so strongly embedded within sports governance, the effect has been that “female” has often been defined as inferior, relative to males. For example, by excluding women athletes with XY DSDs and high testosterone levels from the female category based on the conviction that the DSD provides these athletes with superior (male-like) athletic capacity, the boundary between female and male was defined by assuming female athletic inferiority. It was defined by excluding from the female category those women who threaten this definition. The effect is that women who have been thought to have the capacity to be superior rather than inferior in sport have been defined as not female for the purposes of sport, or as “abnormal” females. The dividing line of the sex binary in sport was drawn, and has always been drawn, to protect the principle of female athletic inferiority upon which sex-segregated sport is foregrounded. Gender verification, including the most recent female hyperandrogenism and DSD regulations, has functioned to ensure that this foregrounding principle holds true in practice, in the face of bodies who threatened the empirical accuracy of the principle by appearing to embody male-like athletic potential in a way that challenges the athletic superiority of male bodies. Female bodies are, however, a priori inferior to male bodies in sport only to the extent that the boundary between male and female is defined in those terms, by excluding from the female category those who threaten this definition. In the words of Eric Vilain, a scientist involved in the recent IAAF policy debates, when sport-governing bodies draw a line between the female and male categories, they draw this line “in the sand” (Macur, 2012: SP6). In doing so, they have effectively drawn an upper threshold on women’s performance levels. To argue that this boundary drawing is “a victory for female athletes everywhere,” as Coleman among others did in relation to the DSD regulations, is to celebrate an old but deeply engrained kind of misogyny. This misogyny now mobilises “scientism” and “women’s rights” themselves to proclaim that women’s bodies are – biologically, naturally, immutably – sub-standard and second-rate when compared to men’s bodies. It is to say, to borrow Coleman’s words, that the “deeply significant, sex specific experience” of being female is, singularly, one of relative embodied inferiority in sports, and those who do not share this experience must not be females because experience of inferiority is the experience of having a female body. In defining the female experience singularly in this way, it is Coleman herself who erases a deeply significant reality that has long been recognised in feminist politics: that there simply is no singular or shared experience of female embodiment. This is because bodies and experiences of both femaleness

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and womanhood are multiple, diverse, and dependent on where, when, and who one is talking about. Old concerns that motivated the formulation of gender verification policies in the past continue to embed the contemporary context of international sport. Understanding the implicit motivations for the institution and maintenance of gender verification regulations – of which the hyperandrogenism and DSD regulations, despite the IAAF’s claims to the country, are the most recent manifestation – should inform to what extent policies aimed at drawing a line between female and male “in the sand” can be justified in the present.

Beyond binary sex and gender categories? In 2018, when the IAAF was engaged in designing the first iteration of the DSD regulations, the influential IAAF affiliated scientist Stéphane Bermon gave an interview for The Guardian about his views on the future of sex categories in international sports. He stated that he was in favour of expanding the binary male and female category division to include “a third category for intersex athletes” and, moreover, he predicted that the creation of such a category could happen “probably in five or 10 years” (Ingle, 2018). To explain this position, he noted that in athletics, “we have a lot of athletes with this kind of condition” who should, presumably, compete in an intersex rather than female category of sport (Ingle, 2018). Accordingly, when the IAAF DSD regulations were implemented, they included a new provision stating that if an athlete is not eligible to compete in the female category due to the DSD regulations, she may still compete either in the male category or in an “intersex or similar classification that may be offered” in the future (IAAF, 2018a: 4). The regulations added a note about the fact that legal categories beyond the binary female and male now exist in several countries.2 Some months after Bermon made these comments, I became involved with a new policy that was being introduced by Scottish Athletics, the regional subauthority of British Athletics in Scotland, which concerned athletes with nonbinary gender identities competing within Scottish national championships. The policy, which came into force in April 2019 – thus coinciding with the CAS debates regarding the IAAF DSD regulations – made it compulsory for all Scottish Athletics championship events to include a non-binary gender category within the event entry options (Scottish Athletics, 2019). This was motivated, firstly, by an emerging movement of non-binary activism in Scotland and across the UK, including an increasing number of grassroots and community sports organisations opening their running events for non-binary entries. This is part of a wider social proliferation of non-binary and gender queer identities, countercultures, and related political movements in the early 21st century especially (but not exclusively) in Western countries. These movements celebrate and demand political recognition for gender identities and bodies that fall outside of or transgress the binary gender organisation of society (Richards, Bouman, & Barker, 2017; Richards et al., 2016). Secondly, and relatedly, it was also motivated by a recent

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public consultation carried out by the Scottish government regarding a proposed reform to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, which found that the majority of those who responded to the consultation were in favour of expanding the recognition of non-binary people in Scotland (Scottish Government, 2018). The Scottish Athletics non-binary category and the IAAF intersex category, if introduced, may appear similar, but they are being advocated from pointedly different perspectives that illustrate the complexity of current politics around gender not only in competitive sports but also more broadly. The Scottish Athletics policy was largely driven by community and public demands for recognition and inclusion of gender diversity within the organisational structures of society including sports. The IAAF push for an intersex category, on the other hand, is driven by the demands of a very different community and different publics who wish to see the female (sporting) category protected against embodied gender diversity. Relatedly, the Scottish Athletics policy (2019: 5–6) states that (at least in principle) the existence of the non-binary category “does not alter or interfere with the right of intersex men and women,” nor with “the right of trans men and trans women to continue to compete in the male and female categories, respectively.” The IAAF intersex category is, by contrast, advocated in order to restrict the rights of intersex women or women with DSDs to compete in the female category. As Karkazis and Carpenter (2018: 584) have argued, forcing women like Semenya to compete in categories other than female transgresses upon their legal and social identity as women. Indeed, Semenya has stated several times that she is “unquestionably a woman” (Norton Rose Fulbright, 2019). Unlike the non-binary athletes who register to compete in the Scottish Athletics non-binary category, Semenya and athletes like her have not asked to be placed into a third gender category. Rather, placing them into such a category amounts to “a public judgement on the sex and gender identity of the athletes” and also “manifestly redefines the sex of athletes other than female” who identify beyond the gender binary: most third gender categories, including the Scottish Athletics category, were not intended to be coercively applied to those identifying as women (or men) (Karkazis & Camporesi, 2018: 5). Yet, despite being advanced from different directions, both the Scottish Athletics category and the proposed IAAF category may, in the end, have similar implications both for athletes who do not fall within the male and female sex and gender binary divisions and for athletes who do. Even when third gender categories are promoted for emancipatory reasons,3 simply adding a gender category in between the conventional female and male categories – what I have come to call the “add non-binary and stir” approach – may have the effect of reinforcing the underlying female/male binary framework. To the extent that third gender categories are introduced as a way of accounting for sex and gender diversity, the diversity that occurs within the “female” and “male” categories themselves is rendered silent or erased in ways that make the original binary categories appear more straightforward than they are, empirically speaking. This erasure also attaches to dissonance between sex attributes and gender identities and presentations when

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it comes to the presumption that womanhood must follow from femaleness and femininity from womanhood. To the extent that sex and gender dissonance or discord is transferred onto third gender categories, the sex and gender of those subjects who (are allowed to) remain in the female and male, woman and man categories appears (too) easily aligned and (too) coherent. This may not reflect how the subjects themselves actually experience and enact their gendered and sexed selves (Hemmings & Rudy, 2019). At the same time, it may rigidify the boundaries of the female category and intensify the policing of these boundaries. This is because when gender and sex diversity and dissonance are relegated outside the female (and male) and woman (and man) categories, so will likely be those females and women who embody and perform femaleness and womanhood in non-normative ways. In February 2019, two medical researchers and one bioethicist published a commentary on transgender women athletes in elite sports that proposed and evaluated possible solutions for moving beyond the female/male binary division in international competitions (Knox, Anderson, & Heather, 2019). I wish to conclude with reference to this commentary, not because I want to advocate any of the solutions that were proposed therein, but because the commentary’s analysis of these solutions highlights a core issue in how the sex binary division in sports is currently understood and appraised in both public and academic discourses (indeed, the commentary was picked up and its conclusions reproduced by some news media outlets).4 The commentary began with a scientific review of the performance-enhancing effects of testosterone. This was presented as factual background despite the authors acknowledging that claims relating to the effect of testosterone in transgender women were “extrapolate[d] from evidence based on male physiology” due to paucity of evidence about transgender women directly (Knox, Anderson, & Heather, 2019: 397). Nonetheless, the authors concluded that the scientific evidence suggests that some transgender women have an unfair kind of performance advantage over other women that needs to be addressed for fairness’ sake. Instead of proposing new regulations for the female classification, the commentary’s authors advanced the following discussion of possible ways to discard binary sex categories altogether: firstly, while it would be possible to have a single category for all athletes regardless of gender, this would be unfair because “elite women athletes would rarely win against elite male athletes” (Knox, Anderson, & Heather, 2019: 401). Indeed, the top performances in the female category in international sports are generally approximately 10% lower than those in the male category. Secondly, it would be possible to change or increase the number of competition categories, either by introducing new gender categories, as I discussed previously, or by adopting, as the authors themselves (among others) proposed, a classification system inspired by Paralympics classifications. Such a system would classify athletes based on levels of sporting capacity and athletic performance potential by accounting for parameters such as weight and height, or testosterone and haemoglobin levels.

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This commentary is interesting, not only because it presumes that “scientific facts” (extrapolated from male physiology) should be the starting point for assessing normative and social questions that pertain to sex and gender category divisions in sports. It is interesting also, and relatedly, because both the starting point of the commentary and the solutions that it considers seem to me to address a symptom rather than the underlying issue when it comes to how sex difference is regulated in sport and how “sport” itself has been organised and conceptualised at least since the beginning of the modern Olympic Games. What international sports competitions do is that they pit the highest performing athletes against each other to determine the best physical output, to identify who runs the fastest, jumps the highest, or is the strongest. As I noted in Chapter 2, Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic movement, envisioned the “true” Olympic athlete to be, singularly and unequivocally, a masculine male. This vision is embedded within the foundational structures of the modern Olympic Games and international competitive sports more generally. They are built, as de Coubertin (1956) wanted, upon ideals of “muscular potentiality” and prowess demonstrated via sporting competitions where success is determined by “physical superiority,” which is primarily understood to mean superior strength and speed when compared against one’s competitors. This conceptualisation of “success” has been institutionalised as the basis and starting point for competitive sports (including the Paralympics), which are modelled on prioritising and valorising those physical capabilities that are most strongly associated with men’s bodies. In the game of citius, altius, fortius, men generally, even if not categorically, outperform women. The centring of physical superiority as conceived by de Coubertin delimits and constrains questions around sex and gender categories in sports: the institutionalised model of competitive sports is organised in a way that systematically places women, as a group, at a disadvantage against men, to such an extent that women are, indeed, unlikely to win against men unless “women’s sports” are segregated. It seems to me, then, that the “problem” to which “solutions” are required is less to do with sex and gender categories and sexed and gendered bodies and more to do with the institutionalised model of competitive sports and the conceptualisation of “success” that underlies it. As Helen Lenskyj (2013) has documented, there are various different modalities of physical activity beyond high-performance-oriented sports and myriad alterative models of sports organisation that have challenged the hegemonic notions of competition and success since the emergence of the modern Olympic movement. The issue is not, in other words, with the empirical reality of embodied differences but with the ways in which these differences are valued and evaluated. The issue is connected with the ways in which, in the realm of institutionalised sports, value is attached to particular modes of physicality at the expense of alterative possibilities at the same time as those modes that are most highly valued are associated with maleness even when they are embodied by women. What I propose, then, at the end, is that the focus of critical attention should be directed, not at the nature or science of sex difference and sexed bodies, but

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at the nature of “sport” and the foundational concept of “success” as well as the related notions of “competition” and “performance” that foreground what international sports are understood to be about in the first place. The history of gender verification and genealogy of the female category that I have mapped throughout the preceding chapters of this book are a symptom of the foundational gendered organisation of sport. The gendered organisation of sport is itself, however, a symptom of the wider gendered organisation of society in the context of which competitive sports have been erected, upon a model that values men’s bodies and male-centric notions of physicality over women’s bodies and alternative ways of imagining what performance (high level or otherwise) could mean. What would sports competitions look like if they prioritised and valorised female-centric notions of physicality instead? What would the Olympic Games look like if the “true” Olympic athlete were envisioned as female rather than male? If sports competitions were modelled upon embodied attributes where women generally, even if not categorically, outperform men, how would success be conceptualised and determined? (See also Lenskyj, 2013.) Engaging with these questions also requires a re-thinking of the role and status of sports in the wider society. In the 21st century, sport is one of the only remaining institutional spheres where sex segregation is not only allowed but also mandated by regulation and promoted as a positive thing across national jurisdictions. Because discourses around sex-segregated sports have focused on the nature of sex difference and sexed bodies rather than on the nature of sports itself and the gendered structures that foreground it, sex segregation can be promoted as empowering for “women” even while the institutions of competitive sports are premised on the devaluation of women’s bodies, in all their diversity. Sport-governing bodies like the IAAF can position themselves as independent of wider social and legal systems designed to protect individuals and groups against discrimination based on sex attributes and gender identity precisely because sport has been considered as an exceptional sphere of life where sex differences are determinative of success. Sex differences are, however, determinative of success precisely because the differences that are presumed to determine sports performance levels are conceptualised as “sex” differences and because “success” in sports is defined in a way that makes these particular differences determinative: because the key physical characteristics that are understood to cause superior strength and speed are subsumed under “male sex characteristics” even though females also embody them, and because success in sport is defined in terms of superior strength and speed, “male sex characteristics” are indeed determinative of success in sports. It is this gendered logic and conceptualisation of “success,” rather than the bodies of athletes who have become the victims of it, that should be scrutinised and challenged, alongside the gendered institutional structures of competitive sports and the politics of sport exceptionalism that enable this form of reasoning to be sustained and protected.

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Notes 1 This is, of course, not the first time that sport-governing bodies have ignored human rights issues on the grounds that international sports are “apolitical.” For example, Barbara Keys (2012) has unpacked the human rights dimensions of the early Cold War Olympics, including the IOC’s failure to engage with related human rights concerns targeted against it. 2 At the time of writing, legal recognition of third genders or “no gender” options have been introduced in jurisdictions, including Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, and some US states, including California and New York, while some countries, such as Malta, allow third gender markers in identification documents (Holzer, 2018; Ryan, 2018). However, the titles and content of these laws, the scope of recognition they allow, and the historical reasons for their existence differ significantly, in ways that also make it difficult to document exactly which laws directly pertain to third gender recognition and how many countries have such laws (Ryan, 2018). 3 I do not, however, wish to imply that the Scottish Athletics non-binary category is unproblematic or purely emancipatory. Indeed, it is not. For example, among other issues, the Scottish Athletics policy (2019) requires that non-binary athletes competing in long-distance races run with men in case a separate running time for the non-binary category is impractical. This is because the inclusion of non-binary athletes “must not interfere with the head to head competition at front of the Championship race” and “it is feasible that a non-binary athlete who is ineligible to compete in the female category running in a woman’s only races could have a physiological advantage to other athletes within that race.” The policy adds that Scottish Athletics must allow female competitors to “play a field free from potential outside influence” and the “men’s only race allows for fairer competition” when it comes to non-binary athletes’ inclusion. These remarks build on and reinforce the notion of relative female athletic inferiority and constitute non-binary athletes as an “outside influence” amounting to a potential threat to “authentic” running times in the female category. 4 See for example Patrick, 2019; “Gender Binary in Elite Sports Should Be Abandoned, Researchers Urge,” 2019.

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Index

ambiguous genitalia 18–19, 110, 117 American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (AAHPER) 28 American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists 91 American College of Physicians 91 American Olympic Committee 33 American Society of Human Genetics 91 amphetamines 49 Anderson, Benedict 44 androgen deficiency disease 125 androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) 77, 127 androgens 1–2, 14–15, 110, 114, 120, 123–126, 128–130, 135, 144–145; see also sex hormones Asian Athletics Association 1 Asian Games 116 Athlete Ally 141, 152 Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) 130 Balas, Iolanda 57 Barr body testing 67–68, 71, 83, 87–88, 91–92 Barr, Murray 68, 91 “bathroom bills” 3 Beckett, Arnold 54 Benjamin, Harry 84 Bergmann, Gretel 6 Berg, Stefan 8 Berlin 36 (film) 6 Berlioux, Monique 39, 51–53, 68 Bermon, Stéphane 133, 138–139, 155 binary sex/gender system: athletic performance levels and 2–3, 11–12, 25–29, 154–155; “biological truths” of 143; continuities and discontinuities in 148–151; feminist configurations of

16–20; “polluted” bodies 41, 43–44, 48, 53, 58–60, 64–65, 72, 95, 102, 117, 138; “pure” bodies 12, 43–49, 53, 58–60, 72, 79, 85–87, 96, 99, 104, 120–121; socio-scientific configurations of 10–16; solutions for moving beyond 155–159; see also gender difference; sex difference “biological body” 11–12 biological determinism 17, 26, 27, 143, 145 black females 12–13, 111, 117–121, 123, 126–127, 136–137, 141, 143, 151, 153 Bobrow, Martin 107 body hair 131–134 “borderline” bodies 34, 56–57 Boye, Erik 139 Bray, Alberta 32 breast size 35–36, 55–56, 131–134 British Athletics 155 British Olympic Association 87 Broster, Lennox 30, 32 Brown, Malcolm 105–106 Brundage, Avery 33, 34–35, 37, 59–60 Bußmann, Gaby 109 Butler, Judith 18–19, 148, 150 Cahn, Susan 26 Califa, Pat 17 Carlson, Alison 91, 97, 114 Caron, Christine 53 Cáslavská, Vera 53 Caurla, Lea/Leon 33 Cavanagh, Sheila 130 Chand, Dutee 1–3, 136, 140–142, 152 Chase, Cheryl 17 Chinese female athletes 103, 105, 110–114, 119, 121 chromosomal disorders 82, 87 chromosomal theories 14–15

Index chromosome screening 3, 21, 63, 67–68, 91–95, 106, 120 clitoridectomy 133 Coe, Sebastian 138 Cold War geopolitics 44–48 Coleman, Dorian Lambelet 153, 154 Commonwealth Games: Edinburgh 87; Glasgow 136; Jamaica 54–55 complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) 82, 84 congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) 100, 110, 140 Coubertin, Pierre de 25, 158 Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) 123, 136–143, 145–146, 151–153, 155 Cox, Norman 34–36 Craven, Philip 138 CrossFit Games 2 CrossFit Inc. 2 Davis, Nick 117 Deardurff, Deena 113 de Baillet-Latour, Henri 34, 37 de Beauvoir, Simone 16 de Coubertin, Pierre 25 de la Chapelle, Albert 81, 84, 87, 90–94, 96–100, 107–110, 118, 120 de Merode, Alexander 64, 90–98, 115 Derrida, Jacques 10 Dingeon, Dingeon 106 disorders of sex development (DSD): consensus statement for 127; medical management model 133–134; regulations on 138–146, 151–155 doping 48–53, 107, 113–114, 121, 131, 135, 138 Dreger, Alice 14, 35, 119 Eastern Europe 56, 69–70, 102, 111, 121 East German female athletes 112–114, 119, 121 Edström, Sigfrid 45 Ellis, Havelock 32 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 14 Fédération Internationale Médicine Sportive 64 Fédération Sportive Féminine Internationale (FSFI) 27–28 Feinberg, Leslie 17 female hyperandrogenism: diagnosing and treating 130–134; medical model 125;

183

notion of 119–121; regulations on 1, 3, 121, 123–124, 127–141, 143–145, 154 “femaleness”: binary conceptualisation of (biological) 143, 145; body hair 131–132; breast size 35–36, 55–56, 131–134; continuities and discontinuities in 148–151; current delineations of 151–155; feminist configurations of 16–20; genital-centric definition of 96–99; norms 11–12, 24, 119, 131, 149–150; notion of 147; “pure” 11–14, 21; testosterone thresholds 142 femininity: black females and 118, 121; chromosomal theories 14–15; female hyperandrogenism and 134; “femaleness” and 19, 69; gender masquerade and 86; hormonal theories 14–15; investigation of 58–61; in nation-building projects 47–48, 51; naturalised 125; role of androgen levels 14, 104–105, 126; role of women in sport and 25–30, 53, 56, 90, 103, 111; sex flexibility and 33–35, 157 femininity certificates 24, 39–40, 53–55, 61 Ferguson-Smith, Malcolm 81, 83–84, 87, 95 Ferriman, David 131 Ferriman-Gallwey hirsutism scale 131–132, 134 Ferris, Elizabeth 106 fluorescent body testing 67, 83 Foucault, Michel 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 65, 148 Gallico, Paul 28, 36–37 Gallwey, John 131 Garnier, Pierre-Yves 138–139 gender difference 4, 36, 44, 47–48, 148, 151; see also binary sex/gender system; sex difference gender fraud 5–8, 40, 81, 86, 88–89, 92–94, 96, 99, 120, 127 gender masquerade 86–87, 94–95, 99, 107, 110 gender scandals 90–91, 116–120, 123, 151 gender verification: aims of 92–95, 148–151; chromosome screening 21, 63; concept of 4, 19–20; genitalia-centric definition 96–99; history of 5–9; hyperandrogenism regulations 130–134; IAAF policy 4, 7, 38–41, 44, 53–56, 58, 61, 63, 68–70, 81, 83–84, 89, 99–101, 105–107, 109–111, 116–120, 123–124, 126–136, 138–146, 151–156, 159; IOC policy 4, 33–37, 44,

184

Index

58–60, 63, 68, 70–81, 89, 99–101, 106, 114–116, 123, 126–130, 133, 135, 144, 151; suspicion-based 58, 102–103, 105, 109–110, 114, 121 genitals 12, 16, 18–19, 96–99, 106, 107, 109–110, 116–117, 120, 133 Global South female athletes 22, 103, 105, 121, 137–138, 141, 145 Hampson, John 65 Haraway, Donna 148 “health and gender examinations” 21, 97, 99–100, 102, 131; see also medical examinations; physical examinations Heggie, Vanessa 5 Heinonen, Janet 110–114, 120 Heinrich, Hermann 8 Hermaphrodites with Attitude (Chase) 17 hermaphroditism 14, 15, 34–37, 40, 52, 68 hirsutism 131–134 hormone replacement therapy (HRT) 125, 130, 143–144 Human Rights Campaign foundation 3 Human Rights Watch 141 “hybridity” 13, 43, 58–60, 64–65 hyperandrogenism 130–134 “hypermuscular” women 108–110, 120 “hypogonadism” 125 “imagined (political) communities” 44 International Association of Athletics Federations/International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF): androgen thresholds 129; chromosome screening 67, 81, 94, 106; Daegu World Championship 139; disorders of sex development regulations 138–146, 151–155; European championships 56; female hyperandrogenism regulations 1, 3, 121, 123, 126–141, 143–145, 154; “femaleness” guidelines 133; gender scandals 116–120, 123, 126–127, 151; gender verification policy 4, 7, 38–41, 44, 53–56, 58, 61, 63, 68–70, 81, 83–84, 89, 99–101, 105–107, 109–111, 116–120, 123–124, 126–130, 138–146, 151–156, 159; “health and gender examinations” 21, 97, 99–100, 102, 105–111, 131; intersex category 156; Moscow World Championship 139; “naked parades” 7, 54–56, 61, 63, 68–70, 80; polymerase chain reaction testing 105–106; shift to health-centric rhetoric 127–128; “sports

medicine examinations” 131; suspicionbased gender verification system 102–103, 105, 109–110, 114; testosterone thresholds 140; use of “gender affirming” concept 144; World Championships 117; world record stricken from record book 32 International Athletic Foundation (IAF): London gender verification seminar 107; Mont Carlo gender verification working group 97–98, 106, 107, 108 International Cycling Union 64 International Olympic Committee (IOC): androgen thresholds 129; aspirations for authority and control over international sports 45; chromosome screening 91–95, 120; diagnostic paradigm for sex 70–73; doping issues 48–52; female hyperandrogenism regulations 1, 126–136, 144–145; gender verification policy 4, 33–37, 44, 58–60, 63, 70–81, 89–94, 99–101, 106, 114–116, 120, 123, 126–127, 133, 135, 144, 151; impact of on-site gender verification in Olympic Games 73–80; Lausanne gender verification working group 92, 95–97, 108; Lausanne meeting on regulation of binary sex division 127; medical management of sex abnormalities 65–68; Miami meeting on regulation of binary sex division 127–128; physical examinations requirement 33, 37–40; polymerase chain reaction testing 100, 102, 105–106, 114–116; sex abnormality concerns 50–53; shift to health-centric rhetoric 127–128; World Conference on Women and Sport 115 International Olympic Committee Medical Commission (IOC-MC): Barr body testing 67; chromosome screening 58–60, 63, 79–80, 81, 92; creation of 63, 79; medical examinations 64–65; on-site gender verification paradigm 68, 70–73 International Paralympic Committee 138 intersexuality 3, 6–7, 14–15, 18–19, 35, 74, 83, 127, 137, 140, 153, 155–156 “inversion” 32 Jönsson, Chloie 1–3 Jordan-Young, Rebecca M. 137, 141, 150 Karkazis, Katrina 135, 141, 150, 152 Keeping Track (magazine) 110 Klebsian sex classification system 14, 68, 71

Index Klinefelter’s syndrome 82–85, 87–88 Klobukowska, Ewa 88 Koubek/Koubková, Zdenek/Zdenka 31–33 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 32 Kratochvílová, Jarmila 103–104, 108–109, 118, 120, 137 Krieger, Heidi 113, 121 La Cava, Guiseppe 54 Laqueur, Thomas 11 Latour, Bruno 10, 13 Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society 91 Lenskyj, Helen 158 Ljungqvist, Arne 96, 107, 115 “low T syndrome” 125 Magubane, Zine 14 “male masquerade” 8, 87–89, 100 “male pseudohermaphroditism” 71 Martínez-Patiño, Maria 77–78, 82, 91–92, 93, 127 masculinity 15, 25, 28–34, 40, 47, 51, 56, 58, 74, 86, 90, 105, 117–118, 124, 126 McClintock, Anne 12 McLaren report 138 medical examinations 1, 63–65, 74, 79, 128, 136; see also “health and gender examinations”; physical examinations menopause 125 Messerli, M. 29 Milliant, Alice 27–28 Money, John 15, 19, 65–66, 84, 91 Morland, Iain 18, 150 Munro, Brenna 118 muscle mass 93, 104–105, 108–110, 120, 131, 134 “naked parades” 7, 54–56, 61, 63, 68–70, 80, 100 National Olympic Committee (NOC) 76, 128 Nieuwegein World Championships 105–106 Niyonsaba, Francine 136 oestrogens 14 Olympic Charter 152 Olympic Council of Asia 116 Olympic Games: Albertville 106; Beijing 115; Berlin 6–8; Calgary 91; founder of 25; Grenoble 59; Helsinki 45; impact of on-site gender verification in 73–80;

185

Lillehammer 115; medicalisation of 64–65; Mexico City 71; Rio de Janeiro 136, 137–138, 141; Seoul 115; Soviet entry into 45–47; Sydney 115 Pan American Games 55 partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS) 140 Peters, Mary 55–56 Physical Culture (magazine) 30–31 physical examinations 33, 37–40; see also “health and gender examinations”; medical examinations; “naked parades” Pielke, Roger, Jr. 139 “polluted” bodies 41, 43–44, 48, 53, 58–60, 64–65, 72, 95, 102, 117, 138 polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) 140, 142 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing 100, 102, 105–106, 114–116 Porritt, Arthur 48–49 Press, Irina 7, 50, 53, 56 Press, Tamara 7, 50, 53, 56 Prokop, Ludwig 50 “pure” bodies 12, 43–49, 53, 58–60, 64–65, 72, 79, 85–87, 96, 99, 104, 120–121 racial difference: black females 12–13, 111, 117–121, 123, 126–127, 136–137, 141, 143, 151, 153; Chinese female athletes 103, 105, 110–114, 119, 121; Cold War ideologies and 45; conceptualisations of working-class women 27; Global South female athletes 22, 103, 105, 121, 137–138, 141, 145; hybridity and 59; socio-scientific configurations of 12–14, 20, 35, 133–134, 138, 150 Radcliffe, Paula 137–138 Rand, Mary 53 Ratjen, Dora (Hermann) 6–8 Raymond, Janice 17, 85, 153 Red Sport International (Sportintern) 45 “Relevant athletes” 140 reproductive role differentiation 26 “Restricted events” 140 Richards, Renée 84–85 Russia 138 Russian Olympic Committee 138 Russian Paralympic Committee 138 Saran, Dale 2 Savinova, Mariya 117 Schelkanova, Tatyana 57 Scottish Athletics 155–156

186

Index

Second Sex (de Beauvoir) 17 Semenya, Caster 117–121, 123, 126–127, 136–137, 141, 143, 151, 153 sex abnormality 50–53, 65–68 sex change 32–34 Sex Changes (Feinberg and Califa) 17 sex development model 15, 143 sex difference: biological ontology of 14–16; hormonal theories 29–30, 40, 125–126; “hybridity” 13, 43, 58–60; role of women in sport 25–29; socio-scientific configurations of 10–16; see also binary sex/gender system; gender difference sex dimorphism 11–14 sex hormones 1–2, 14–15, 30, 51–52, 114, 123–126; see also androgens “sexual mutation” 51 Sharp, Lyndsay 137 Sidler, Maren 55–56 Simpson, Joe Leigh 92–94, 96, 128 Soundarajan, Shanthi 116–117 Soviet Union 44–47 Sports Authority of India (SAI) 1, 128, 136 SRY gene 106 State Plan 14.25 112 Stephens, Helen 6, 36–37 steroids 50–51, 105, 112, 121, 135 Stockholm consensus 129 Stolk, Elizabeth 106 “strain” 27–29 Swiss Federal Tribunal 151 Sykes, Heather 130 Tanner, James 132 Tanner scale 132–133 testosterone: Chinese female athletes 113–114; East German female athletes 112–114; gender scandals 119–120; levels in elite athletes 135–136; supplementation

for transgender women 126; thresholds 140, 142; “unfair advantage” in sport and 110, 112–114, 121, 140–142, 154 Thiebault, Jacques 58–60, 61, 128 Tokyo World Championships 105 transgender athletes 126, 129–130, 140, 157–158 transgender healthcare 144 Transgender Liberation (Feinberg and Califa) 17 transgender people 3, 125–126, 152 transsexuality 15–16, 74, 84–85, 95, 98 transvestites 95, 96, 100 Tucker, Ross 139 United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council 141, 152 United States Tennis Association (USTA) 84 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the European Convention on Human Rights 152 Universiade Games 77 urine samples 110, 116, 120 US National Amateur Athletic Federation 27 Vertinsky, Patricia 25 Vilain, Eric 154 Walsh, Stella 6–8, 36 Wambui, Margaret 136 Wang Junxia 103 Weston, Mary/Mark 31–34, 37 Women’s Sport Foundation 141, 152 Women’s World Games (WWGs) 27, 31–32 World Anti-Doing Commission (WADA) 10 World Anti-Doping Code 128 World Championships in Athletics 109 Xasa, Tokozile 141