What is a Woman Anyway? And Why is Sports So Obsessed With this Question?
I chat with Rose Eveleth of TESTED about new exclusionary World Athletics proposed rules
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Two years ago, I spent a spring weekend holed up in a Portland hotel room so I could focus on a particularly complicated chapter of my book. I had to get out of my space and away from the various distractions of daily life and working from home, and being the parent of two small children so I could really, really focus on how to write a chapter about how women runners have actually been at the epicenter of how uncomfortable the binary system of categorizing sex and gender has always been. The chapter essentially had to show how the idea that women runners were often not real women has led to the exclusion of so many women from the sport today, specifically trans and intersex women.
In order to get this right, I had to dig into the truth behind some really really controversial ideas, like how two transgender high school girls — who won a couple of races each in 2018 — basically kicked off a trans athlete witch hunt in the United States, which has only become more high profile and accepted today. I looked into why every woman Olympian from the 1960s to the late 1990s was routinely sex tested, so she could be deemed qualified to compete in the women’s category of sport. And why in recent years women runner’s testosterone levels and other wholly private medical information have become not only publicly known but also used against them to keep them out of the sport they love or forcing them to change their own bodies for the sake of sport.
Over that weekend, I knew I needed to dig deep into my own understanding of science and biology and gender and sex and the various feuds between academics and the international sporting federation that governs track and field, World Athletics. I think I did a pretty good job with it, and I was glad to be supported by my editor and publisher to include what has come to be a pretty controversial topic in the book.
About a month after my book came out, a thing happened that can sometimes feel unnerving in this business. Another journalist came out with a deep-dive project on sex-testing in track and field. I might have been annoyed or jealous about this project, especially given its huge platform on NPR/CBC, coming out so close to my book about a similar topic (how dare anyone, lol) but in fact, I was thrilled to learn about it. Mostly because the brilliant mind of Rose Eveleth was behind the podcast series TESTED, which tells the fascinating story of the history of sex testing at the Olympics and how the more recent rules targeting a specific group of women (who have a particular type of what is medically called a “difference in sex development,” in which they are assigned female at birth, raised as and identify as women but have chromosomal variations, possibly variations in internal reproductive organs, and androgen receptor variations that can cause higher than typical testosterone levels. If this sounds confusing because most of us have been raised to believe sex is binary, lol, listen to their podcast!! Also, read my book!! Even just Chapter 7), have impacted the careers of some of these athletes.
Eveleth put so much time and care and energy into the podcast (which just won the Best Documentary Podcast Award at the Ambies!) and you will learn 1,000,000 new things if you listen to it. And honestly, if you have ever thought, “hmm all this talk about transgender athletes, or women with high testosterone levels, and who is allowed to compete in sports sounds really complicated and confusing, but I’m sure the people in charge have it all figured out,” you should listen to this. Because here’s the thing: they don’t.
This is even clearer now, when World Athletics, the international governing body of track and field, has just recently proposed a NEW set of exclusionary rules for who gets to be considered a woman in track, and go back to requiring every elite woman track athlete to be sex tested — a thing that didn’t work out the last time they did it, either.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to commiserate with and find some clarity with Eveleth about these new proposed rules and what it’s like to put work out into the world on this fraught and frustrating topic. So our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below.
MAGGIE MERTENS: Do you want to explain what World Athletics is proposing with these new rules about who qualifies to participate in women’s track and field competitions? And what status these proposals have now? Because they’re not finalized, right?
REO EVELETH: So World Athletics published a 12 page document that was a series of proposed rules that came from this expert panel they’ve assembled, and at the end they proposed a set of new regulations. Currently they are proposed regulations, and there are some big questions in my mind about the actual specifics of how this is going to be put into place. As of right now, they have not released the final rules, but the proposal has three main things. One is that all trans athletes continue to be banned — all trans women athletes I should say. And the second is that it's a reversal of their policy on so called “DSD athletes,” where those folks are no longer allowed to compete. And then the third thing, which I think was a surprise to many people, is that they would like to bring back sex testing for all female athletes, which is something that was abandoned by World Athletics in the ‘90s by The IOC in 1999, and we haven't seen for 25 years. But we're back. We're back to it.
MM: We’re back, baby! Yeah. So what will it take for these rules to be finalized? Does Sebastian Coe just have to say they’re final?
RE: There's some specific things that need to work out. So, for example, there are these athletes like Christine Mboma, Beatrice Masalingi, (who I interviewed for TESTED) and when the last regulations came out in 2023 they required athletes within this DSD category to take these medications to lower their testosterone if they wanted to continue competing in the female category. And some of the women did that. They took the medications, they got their testosterone down. They sort of went through that whole process, which was very difficult and onerous and had all these side effects. And in this proposal, they sort of gesture at this idea that maybe those athletes who did this might be granted some kind of exemption to allow them to continue to compete, but that any new athletes would definitely not be allowed to, and so what that looks like is unclear.
And then there are specifics around this sort of sex test for all female athletes, in terms of what is the specific test that they're going to do. And there's two proposals. They could do a cheek swab, which is a little bit less specific, and that just looks for the so called SRY gene, which essentially shows whether you have any Y chromosomal material in your cells, and then there's a blood test. And there's pros and cons, depending on how you think about this in terms of those two types of tests. So, I believe that what's happening — and you know, it's not super clear — but basically the working group that produced this document will read all of the consultation and the letters that have been sent in. They will consider some of these specifics, and then they will release the official rules at some point. It could be really, any day now, but we don't know.
MM: And, after making an entire show about this very idea, TESTED, are you comfortable talking about how you feel about this set of proposed rules?
RE: Sure. I mean, it's frustrating to have made TESTED, and one of the things that we said while making the show was that it feels like this really terrible game of Whack-A-Mole, where you just see these same ideas and claims come up over and over and over again, and then they get debunked or rebutted, and it goes away, and then it comes back. And I was really shocked actually, that sex testing for all female athletes was back on the table. I expected them to change the rules around DSD athletes. That was not a surprise to me, but to sort of come back to this thing that we stopped doing because it wasn't effective, and it was invasive, and it was catching up all these women who had no reason for them to be removed from the Olympics… For about 30 years, they did a test like this on all female athletes at the Olympics and at World Athletics events. So women would show up to the Olympics — the pinnacle of their athletic career — and be told by some guy in a lab coat ‘Actually, surprise, you're not a woman and you can't compete and you have to leave.’ And the idea that we would go back to something like that, when there's been no evidence that there's ever been a man masquerading as a woman, cheating, trying to sneak into women's competition. And there's actually no evidence that these so called “DSD athletes” have this incredible advantage that World Athletics is claiming that they have. And yet, here we are again, for some reason, doing this again.
I interviewed a lot of people for TESTED, but there were a lot of people who worked for 20 years, trying to convince the IOC to drop sex testing, and none of those people are basically involved in this now, because a couple of them told me it's just too depressing to see that we just haven't learned anything, and we're just having the same conversations over and over again. And at some point you ask yourself, are we ever going to learn? Are people ever going to accept that things are not as simple as they want them to be? That biology is diverse and interesting and weird, and it's not easy to sort in this way. And the answer seems to maybe be no. And that's really depressing. And I sort of feel like now seeing this, I'm in that same space. Because we're just in this cycle that we keep seeing over and over again.
This is bleak, but my one sort of, maybe hope is that now that all female athletes are being implicated by this policy, there may be more discussion and there may be more support and questions from cis women in track. Again, it sucks that it has to happen via an actual policy like this, as opposed to, when their colleagues were being subjected to various human rights abuses. But that's my one hope here. When I saw this, I was like, ‘Wow, we are really just doing it again.’
MM: And then within these proposed rules, one of the things you pointed out in your newsletter was that they're literally saying, (again) “XY androgen-insensitive women are biologically the same as trans women.” And that’s pretty frightening to me, but to you, I mean, what stands out about that?
RE: My background is in science. I'm a science guy. I love science. And what was really striking [while making Tested, was learning] the ways in which this is such a great example of how organizations create and manipulate evidence. And you see, even in this consultation document, there are 3-4 pages of citations at the end that make it look like this is a really robustly supported document. And they do that because if they make this claim that these sort of so called “DSD athletes” are exactly the same as quote, unquote, “biological males,” then there's plenty of evidence to cite, and that makes their case look much more scientific, much more sound. Of course, that fundamental assumption is not correct.
If DSD athletes were exactly the same as biological males, they wouldn't have a diagnosis. You can't just say that one thing is the same as the other thing, and also say that it's a diagnosis that needs medical treatment. Because in that case, all men need medical treatment. There's just a lot of cognitive dissonance happening here in the service of creating this narrative that there is this overwhelming evidence.
Now, the thing that I always like to point out, and I think is interesting, is that there is not a single study done about the advantage that DSD athletes have over cis women. It hasn't been done. The only people who could do that study are World Athletics. They have that data, and they have not done that study. Why is that? I think at some point, it is reasonable to think that perhaps they haven't done it because it doesn't support this regulation. Because if they did that study and showed that these women have a huge advantage, then, yeah, we might be having a different conversation.
But what we're talking about now is this situation in which they have really produced no evidence on the specific population they are talking about — nor is there evidence about trans athletes, by the way — and in the absence of evidence on either population, rather than saying, ‘Okay, cool, let's go out and get that evidence, let's do the science,’ they're saying we don't even need to do that, because we're going to make this incorrect assumption and make this equivalency, even though the medical consensus amongst endocrinologists is that athletes with these sex variations are not equivalent to cis men. So, I think it is just another example of the ways in which organizations can really make it seem like they have science on their side by manipulating the terms of the conversation.
MM: It's so frustrating. Okay, so at this point, the proposed change in WA rules would be for any woman who has a DSD of some kind, with elevated testosterone, or XY chromosomes, would not be allowed to compete in the women's category? Is that right?
RE: It'll be interesting to see. This is another one of those details that it will be interesting to see how they define so they use this term called “XY DSD.” So DSD is a broad category. There are many things that fall into it. Not all people with DSDs have Y chromosomal material. Some of them do. And then there’s this sort of sub-category of DSD is what they call “Androgen-sensitive XY DSD.” And so that is a sort of subset of DSD condition. So it's not just having high testosterone, it is having high testosterone, a Y chromosome, and being sensitive to androgen. Now, again, that is still not equivalent to cis men, that's just not how it works. But I think, over the years since 2009 when Caster [Semenya] came onto the scene, and they were like, ‘Oh, we have to do something about this,’ they've sort of slowly narrowed the focal point so it was high testosterone. And then they realized, that actually doesn't really work. And they're narrowing and narrowing down to this sort of subset of conditions. And if these rules are adopted, those folks like Christine, Beatrice, they will not be allowed to compete.
MM: And in your opinion, this is a big question, but how does sport even make sense if there are people who are just left out?
RE: Yeah, I've asked myself this a lot. And I don't have a great answer in terms of, why have sporting bodies like World Athletics really obsessed about this very small population of people who may or may not have an advantage at all, and who may or may not have an advantage that is bigger or smaller than any other athletic advantage, and who has won a very small number of competitions, all things considered.
We know that there's all sorts of things that give people an advantage. I will never be an elite athlete. No matter how much I train. You could throw unlimited money and resources at me, and I will never make it to that level. Some of us are not advantaged in that way. Any sports fan knows this. And yet they're really staking their claim here. They've spent tons of money to go to international court to defend this. And it's not great press in a lot of situations. It really, in particular, harms World Athletics’ relationship with African nations, who really see this very strongly as a way to keep African women out of competition. And so I don't know. I don't really understand why you would sort of stick your neck out for this particular thing.
If we lived in an alternate universe in which women's sports were thriving and had equal opportunity and had equal pay, and everything was great, maybe this question of a little bit of advantage might be something to look at. But we don't live in that universe. We live in a universe where women are being sexually harassed and assaulted when they're trying to go to meets and events. They're being harmed by doctors and coaches. They're being taken advantage of by agents. They are not getting enough resources. They are not being paid the same. I mean, the list of things that are hurting women's sports is so long, to focus on this at the expense, I would argue, of those other things, feels just so short-sighted.
And I talked to so many female athletes in and out of track and field, and when I asked them ‘What are the things that you want your governing bodies to be talking about?’ This is not on the list for most women.
It makes me question the other claims that sports organizations make about how much they care about women's sports. Because if they really did, this would not be the top priority. I find it really challenging to figure out, what does sports look like when you're only allowed to be so good, right? And as soon as you get a little bit beyond that, and you look a certain way, perhaps then you're not allowed to compete. And it's so patronizing, and it makes me think that you don't actually care that much about women succeeding in sports. Sebastian Coe is the head of World Athletics, and this has been a cause that he has really championed. It will be very interesting to see what happens in a couple years when his term ends.
MM: So if they are to go back to mandatory sex testing for all women athletes, what are the risks and harms associated with that?
RE: That's a great question, because I've seen some people be like, ‘Oh, it's just a cheek swab.’ And it's certainly better than the nude parades1, right? But yeah, the bar is in hell, but there are a couple of things.
So it's worth thinking through how this actually works. You show up to the Olympics. The way that this has worked in the past is that you show up to this event, you're probably nervous, because it's the Olympics, and it's kind of a big deal. You have to go to the gender verification place. Often a little trailer-type thing, and you get this cheek swab or blood test, depending on what they end up doing. And so what you've now done is you've given World Athletics a bunch of biological information and you have to trust them to keep that biological information secure. I would argue they haven’t earned that trust, given that they have leaked information about athletes in the past.
Then if you were to, quote, unquote, “fail this test,” if they did detect some Y-chromosomal material — which, by some estimates, one in 500 women are going to have some Y-chromosomal material in their cells — you get called back. Then you have to submit a blood test. But in order to be diagnosed with these specific DSDs that are being regulated, you can’t do that just in a blood test, you need a physical exam. You have to go to a doctor. There's all of these other things that happen and that are invasive, and often expensive, and often athletes have to pay for this themselves. And many athletes, especially women in track and field, are not making that much money.
And then let's say you have a DSD, but not one of the ones that is relevant. Going through all of that takes time, and you probably aren't competing in that time. The track world is so small. Everybody knows each other. So as soon as you get flagged for this, and you stop coming to meets, the rumor mill starts. So there's just all of this potential stigma that's happening, potential privacy violations that are happening, and for what, is my question.
It just feels like the argument World Athletics makes is that if they don't do this, women will stop participating in sports. And I would argue that perhaps women are going to stop participating in sports because they don't want to do this.
MM: That's super interesting. Can you tell me just a little bit about how did you first get interested in this topic? How did this particular story catch you?
RE: So I was an intern at Scientific American in 2012 and I was writing a lot about really fancy prosthetic devices, like bionic arms. And in doing that, I came across this debate about Oscar Pistorius. (This is before he had killed his girlfriend. This was just when he was like ‘The Blade Runner.’) And there was this sort of perfect, science-y story, because there were these two labs that were rival labs, and they had come to different conclusions about whether he had an advantage or not. He really wanted to run in the able-bodied Olympics, and the IOC said no, and they said, you have this advantage. And I found this fascinating. How do you measure an advantage when you only have this one person? And it sort of feels counter-intuitive, that a guy who doesn't have lower legs would have an advantage.
In researching that story, in 2012, I came across Caster Semenya, another South African athlete, and another person who's been argued to have an advantage. I remember just reading these quotes from people and being like, ‘What are you talking about?’ The head of the IOC saying ‘Yes, she is a woman, but maybe not 100%’ Or, ‘She is a man.’ ‘No, she's not a man.’ ‘Oh, she's a woman, but she has this advantage.’ And as soon as I started looking into the history of it. I had no idea that people had to have these femininity cards for 30 years2. And so just seeing where all of it came from and how it was coming back, it hooked me then. And I just have not been able to stop thinking about it.
MM: That's actually really interesting, because, I know you've thought about this too, but one of the things people talk about is whether gender categories need to change and the idea of looking at the Paralympics as an example of the possibility of having more broad, diverse competitive categories. So it’s interesting that your interest in this topic started from Paralympics advantage to gender advantage.
RE: I would argue that World Athletics seems to think of the women’s category as a disability. It’s a protected category. They argue that the only reason the women’s categories exist is because women are not competitive with men, and need to be protected.
MM: You have mentioned to me that it was hard to get cis women from the track world to talk to you for the podcast. What's been the response from the world of track to to TESTED?
RE: It's almost none. World Athletics did not respond at all. I sent it to them, and I sent them a very long email before it came out, giving them an opportunity to respond, offer corrections, anything. And they did not respond to that. I sent them the link. They have not responded to that. It's not super surprising. They don't tend to respond to things unless there is something that they really refute fact wise.
I heard from some folks who work in this field, on the academic side of things, who really liked it. But in terms of folks in track and field, I have heard nothing. I don't know if anyone has listened3. You know, in some ways, I knew that the chances that TESTED would change the minds of World Athletics, or the minds of runners who've already made up their minds about this on the track was low.
And my goal was really mostly to try and talk to people who are hearing about this and are genuinely confused, because it is actually quite confusing, and in some ways intentionally made confusing, I would argue, in order to kind of muddy the waters and get people to sort of misunderstand what's going on. And so the goal really was to get regular people who hear about this on TV or on the radio to actually understand it better. And on that front, I actually feel like we've had much more success. I get a lot of emails from people, especially during the Olympics last year, when the boxing thing happened4, it was so rewarding to get emails from people being like, ‘I actually knew how to talk about it because I listened to TESTED.’ And that's all I want. That's the best thing I could ever, ever get, is helping people be able to have nuanced, thoughtful conversations about this with people in their lives.
And frankly, you know, I don't know that even other runners are going to change their minds. They're on the track with people like Christine and Beatrice every day. These are their colleagues. They know them. They're friendly with them. They hang out with them when they're warming up. And if you can't see that person as an equal to you when you actually know them, I don't think I'm gonna be able to help you.
MM: Have you been in touch with Christine and Max, and some of the other runners that you interview in the podcast? And how are they doing, given this news?
RE: Yeah, it's tough. I mean, so I’ve been in touch with Christine and Beatrice. Beatrice, you don't hear on the show, but Christine, I've talked to a little bit. I've talked to Max a little bit. Max, obviously isn't competing. The court case that you hear about in TESTED is still in this very weird place that I am not allowed to talk about. You know, it is really hard.
I think one of the things that didn't make it into TESTED, but that I heard a couple athletes say, is even if the rules allow you to compete, if you take the drugs or this, that and the other, it's really, really hard to train your hardest knowing that they can change the rules at any time. That at any moment, you could be out, not because you did anything, not because you broke any rules, but just because they decided that actually the rules are different now. It is so hard to train at an Olympic level just period. You have to be so locked in. You have to be so committed. And it's really hard to commit like that when they could take this away from you at any moment, and there's nothing you can do about it.
So Christine is training. She's had a lot of family stuff come up, and so she's been training, but she hasn't been competing very much recently. Beatrice actually was competing, and was competing really well, and actually went to the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing in China a couple weeks ago, and had this totally terrible freak thing happen where she was setting up her blocks, and she tripped and fell and dislocated her shoulder, and so she couldn't run.
But Spring season is coming up and I don't know what's going to happen. It will be interesting to see if Christine and Beatrice will be allowed to compete, and if so, under what conditions. I think it's really it's really demoralizing to have your identity be treated this way. You're just waiting to find out what some people decide about whether your body is the right kind of body and is allowed to compete. I mean, that's just awful, right?
MM: And they don't want to focus on that. They want to focus on their sport. The uncertainty has to just eat away at you. I think you saw a lot of that following Caster’s career, and the way that she went in and out of kind of contention and eligibility, and that had to have just been such a mental load in a sport that is so mental.
RE: And you know, every time you step on the track, people are talking about it. People are introducing you as ‘The DSD athlete.’ I watch so many races of Christine's and almost every time the announcer said something about it. ‘This is Christine Mboma, the DSD athlete from Namibia.’ You would hear that over and over again. You don't even just get to be you, there's always a little asterisk. Christine is super tough. She can get through a lot, but at some point, this is just suffering. She wants to do it. She wants to be there. But I think it's an impossible situation.
MM: Are there any last things you want to talk about? Anything important on this that I didn’t ask?
RE: The other thing I want to say is the argument that they make in this recommendation and the argument that they will probably make, we don't know in the rules, this idea that so called “XY, DSD” athletes and trans women are the same is not only inaccurate, it's also actually dangerous for these athletes. You have athletes who come from countries where being trans is illegal and is punishable very brutally. You have athletes from Uganda, which has one of the world's most regressive laws around this. And so you have this push to redefine and to re-categorize these women as trans women, which they are not just definitionally, but also is dangerous, like it's something that actually puts them at risk. And I think that's something people don't talk about that much, and that is actually really important, and I worry about in terms of the ways in which World Athletics is really insisting on the equivalence of these two groups.
Thanks so much to Reo Eveleth for spending time with me this week to explain this important update in the track world and how it relates to gender, feminism, and the current political moment. If you want more from Eveleth, and couldn’t get enough of TESTED, their newsletter is worth a subscribe.
I have a few more spots in my class taught at Seattle’s Hugo House if you’re looking for ways to incorporate research into your prose. First date is April 23.
Hang in there, friends. More soon.
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens and on BlueSky @maggiemertens.bsky.social
You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads.
Ah, nude parades. When women athletes had to have their genders verified by literally walking in front of officials and show them their breasts and genitals!
Yes! Rose does some fascinating interviews with former athletes who had to carry around their “femininity cards” at the Olympics.
I would like to point out that trans-nonbinary athlete Nikki Hiltz has posted about TESTED in a positive way, yay Nikki Hiltz!
AKA the insane media storm around boxer Imane Khelif’s gender