Men Lurking Within/Gender Testing and the IOC

I have been hesitant to write this particular blog, despite the nagging sensation that it would be a public service. The nasty things said about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif over the past “16 days of glory,” aka the Olympics, have been like a recurring nightmare. I don’t want to add more noise. But I would like to provide a little perspective. That is, how did we get here?

You see, I just spent three months writing an article on the history of gender verification policies by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). When I read that the IBA and IOC are arguing over the gender testing of two boxers, I know why it’s so messy, disputed, and unclear. It’s because human beings don’t fit into neat little boxes, no matter how hard those (white wealthy gentlemen athletes) who started the Games have always tried.

It’s always been about what one researcher called “policing the binary.” It’s always been about Femininity Control.

“When Is a Woman Actually a Woman?” The question, according to LOOK [magazine], was a “chief worry among athletic officials.” LOOK added a particularly unflattering photo of Helen Stephens. “Is this a man or a woman?” the magazine asked. “Study the above picture closely and see whether you can tell if it’s a man or a woman.”

Helen Stephens won a libel suit over this LOOK magazine article from 1937. We’ve been here before. Quote from Defector.com, Michael Waters, June 2024.

1936: The Fear of Men Lurking Inside

Start here: Pierre de Coubertin and the IOC did not want women to compete. Women were first barred, then only allowed in sports where they could wear long skirts (archery, golf) or, grudgingly, where they could be graceful and balletic, “pleasing figures” to audiences (diving, gymnastics). There was a knock-down, drag-out donnybrook to let women compete in track and field, which was only resolved in 1928, after women successfully held three of their own Women’s World Games.

Right after women began running, jumping, and throwing things, complaints started about their masculine appearance. American sprinter Helen Stephens was six feet tall, wore size 10-1/2 shoes, and had the muscles of a Missouri farm girl. She also had fallen on a wooden necklace as a child, and her pierced larynx deepened her voice. Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic Committee (AOC), wrote in June 1836 that he’d received complaints about her and wondered if “hermaphrodites” were as common as in the ancient days.

There was a second trigger. Two athletes who had participated in the Women’s World Games, one British and one Czechoslovakian, had undergone gender reassignment surgery in 1936. TIME magazine featured the men in a summer pre-Olympic issue; Brundage told the IOC that testing was needed. The concern was called “gender fraud,” and while it’s tempting to think this was about transgender athletes or men in drag, it was not. There has never been an example of any man tucking and attempting to throw the javelin while wearing a skirt. What the IOC was worried about, as early as 1936, was women who were men on the inside.

It’s worth stopping to think about this for a minute. The assumption has always been that there are two clearly definable genders. Everybody can tell a man from a woman, simple biology, right? Long hair, purse, wearing a skirt, lipstick….? I’m joking, except that appearance still seems to be how people interpret and categorize. Does she have hort hair and a direct gaze? That must be proof of something. So, how about phenotype? That refers to what bodies look like on the outside (as opposed to genotypes, which are the genes on the inside). Breasts, vagina, easy peasy. What about facial hair? How large do the breasts need to be? What if a woman has a vagina but doesn’t menstruate? And, still, how do you tell if a woman is a man on the inside?

In Berlin, Helen Stephens won the 100m sprint. A journalist from a country whose athlete was beaten complained that Stephens was a man and that the American team knew it. The response was that Helen had been examined by a doctor, a gynecologist, and was all female. (Her mother also confirmed it to the press, which somehow was added to the list of proofs: “parents said…”) Because Brundage had received complaints before the Games about Stephens, Olympic historians believe Stephens was probably already examined before she got on the ship that crossed the Atlantic.

Still, LOOK magazine ran a post-Olympic, front-page story, insinuating that she was a man: “When’s a Man Not a Man?” Stephens won a libel case, but had to go on the witness stand and explain the doctor thing. No such thing as privacy.

1950: The Consequences of Opting Out

By the late 1940s, all female athletes had to bring a doctor’s certificate attesting to their gender for competitions. World War II cancelled two sets of Games, but women still competed, and certificates became mandatory. In 1950, European countries started upping the ante and requiring the doctor’s exam to be done by the national athletic union’s doctor.

That year, a Dutch woman named Foejke Dillema was a rising teenage sprinter, setting records in the 100m and beating her more famous teammate, Fanny Blankers-Koen. Blankers-Koen had earned legendary status by earning four track gold medals in 1948, the first post-war Games. However, in a biography of Blankers-Koen, her family members claimed she was told by her coach/husband to spy on other women, to look for gender frauds. Maybe she peeked in the showers, maybe not. In 1950, Dillema was told she must get a doctor’s certificate from the Dutch Athletic Union, and she refused to make the doctor’s appointment. Maybe Dillema did not fit easily into the 100% female box.

But when Dillema opted out of the mandatory visits, the consequences were harsh. After being pulled off a train going to a track meet, she was thrown off the Dutch team, barred from competition for life, had her national sprint records wiped out, and publicly vilified for being a gender fraud. Everyone in her tiny Dutch village was told she was really a man. She did not leave her house for a year. The stakes for any woman to compete were becoming higher. Hard enough for a woman to compete, but part of the competition led to an examination of her private life, held up to extreme public scrutiny. (Is her nose too male? Is that a moustache?)

1966: The Nude Parades

The Soviets and Eastern Europeans entered the picture in the 1950s and the “problem” intensified for the IOC because the Soviets did not adhere to the same beauty standards as the Americans and Western Europeans. They didn’t mind finding six feet, 250-pound women to throw the shot put. Tamara and Irina Press, who won a stack of medals between them in 1960 and 1964, were called lumberjacks, stevedores, linebackers…. “When’s a Gal Not a Gal?” said the Chicago Daily News. It was the Helen Stephens headline, with different nouns.

Eastern European female athletes likely had been given synthetic testosterone. There were no rules against doping at the time. By the 1970s, the Soviets and East Germans were pumped so full of synthetics that it caused massive medical problems later. But the IOC opted not to develop chemical testing, and instead, used gender verification tests, assuming that such tests would catch both drug use and men lurking on the inside. They ignored that perhaps the Soviets were vastly better trained.

For the 1966 championships, the IOC began to require “on-site verifications.” The Press sisters, nearing their thirties, recovering from injuries, and caring for an aging mother, chose to retire from sport. Like Foejka Dillema, they have been called gender frauds ever since. There’s no proof that either Tamara or Irina were ever anything but big and muscular. But the way the exams were conducted, they were probably better off.

The on-site tests became known as the “nude parades,” run by an organization (I am not making this up) called Femininity Control. Women would line up outside a room at the event and enter, one at a time. They would either simply drop their trousers and lift up their shirt, or they might be told to lie on a couch or a table with their knees up. The exam was conducted by three doctors; maybe all female, but does it matter? Athletes later reported that it was the most humiliating thing they ever experienced. And, women were excluded based on too much hair, not enough hair, and for being flat chested.

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.”

A British runner reflecting on the 1966-7 nude parades.

To recap, if you were flat chested, you would be kicked out of competition, barred for life, and publicly labeled a gender fraud.

1968-1988: The Barr-Body Test

Complaints about the nude parades quickly became loud. The IOC turned to the new science of DNA. For the 1968 Winter and Summer Games, the IOC abandoned the group gropes and instituted chromosome tests. Trying to fit women into neat little boxes based on the hundreds of variations in female bodies led to a humiliating process. But the new scientific process, a DNA cheek swab, would turn out to be no better.

The method was called Barr-Body Testing; if you were XX, you could compete. If you were not, you were banned for life, publicly called a gender fraud, etc. Worth noting is that the new process still didn’t rule out six feet tall women winning the shot put. East Germany’s Margitta Gummel passed the 1968 tests, while on steroids. All the East German swimmers in the 1970s passed the tests, pumped full of synthetics. Dr. Barr, who invented the test, said that the IOC’s use was wrong, that there was a spectrum of genetic variation of athletes who would inappropriately be excluded, and that it wasn’t catching the real cheaters.

What the test did “catch” was women who might be phenotype female, who passed gynecological tests, but were not XX. First, an Austrian skier, then a Polish sprinter… a swimmer… another sprinter. Women who had lived as women all their lives (and would continue to live as women afterward) were told they were not women; they were something else. It turns out that, as Darwin noted, variability is part of life. You could be XX0; X; XXY; XXY with CAIS, with AIS–a female athlete might have one of many genetic conditions. The headlines referring recently to an XY woman are using a misnomer. A person with X and Y chromosomes is likely XXY, where the chromosomes couldn’t make up their mind. It’s rare by percentage but might reflect a lot of people, now that there are eight billion of us. All of these are called “disorders,” but there are so many of them, that it’s hard not to see what seemed like a single pole of “female” turning into a bell curve, one much flatter than the simple idea of “I know a woman when I see one.”

1993-2012: The End of Barr-Body Tests

The damage to women’s reputations continued with chromosome testing until the late 1980s. The situation of Maria José Martinez Patiño, a sprinter from Spain, signaled the beginning of the end, though not soon enough for her. She had passed the Barr-Body and gynecological tests in 1983. Unfortunately, for a 1985 meet in Japan, she forgot her badge.

The Japanese athletic authorities did another test and told her she failed. The Spanish team told her to fake an injury and retire, but she responded with anger: “Only me, medicine, and God can tell me that I am not a woman… If I had not been an athlete, my femininity would never have been questioned.” The Spanish team threw her case to the press, and the Catholic Spanish press hounded Patiño as a gender fraud until she lost not only her athletic career, but her job and her place of residence.

The scientists picked up Patiño’s case and pleaded with the IOC, to no avail. But, by 1988, so few scientists were willing to participate in what they saw as a fraudulent process, that the Nagano Games couldn’t find people to do the testing. By 1993, the IOC decided to stop mandatory chromosome testing once and for all. They stopped testing everybody.

What Does All This Have To Do with Khelif?

What replaced the IOC’s mandatory gender testing, and is still in place today, is blood tests on “suspected” athletes, which measure natural testosterone levels. This created two new problems. First, between 1993 and 2021, when they started testing female testosterone levels, there was no definition of what was suspicious, other than an athlete who had improved their capabilities quickly. Even those athletes had all passed drug tests. Yet, if someone complained, a woman could be tested, even though none of the accusers accusers were themselves tested.

Secondly, the IOC as late as 2016 had never conducted scientific studies to determine whether high testosterone conveyed any benefits. Everyone assumed it did. Again, this is high natural testosterone; tons of studies had been done showing benefits from synthetic testosterone, which was a banned substance by 1993. It turns out that non-XX women (the ones with men lurking inside) might have low testosterone or even high testosterone that their body doesn’t process (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome). The IOC lost Court of Arbitration case, changed the rules again, misused scientific studies, and in 2022 abandoned gender testing and pushed the responsibility back on to the sporting bodies.

So here we are. The IOC has a policy of accepting all kinds of athletes, but the sporting bodies–swimming, track, boxing–administer whatever tests they want to whomever they want and report any results publicly in any way they want. They can dangle damaging information as the IBA did, then hold back other information, claiming privacy. The IOC can shake their finger, but they created the process. A hundred years later, the media is still jumping to label women as gender frauds, sport bodies are not respecting people’s privacy, and athletes are subject to a firestorm based on how they look.

Imane Khelif (gold medalist since I started this post) is not transgender. If she is XXY, which is what the IBA has hinted, she may have a condition which creates a high presence of natural testosterone in her blood and it may–or may not–give her an advantage. We could debate whether it does, but I would suggest strongly that advantages or improved abilities aren’t proof of anything. I would take an educated guess that neither Simone Biles nor Katie Ledecky has ever had a PCR test (if you have evidence to the contrary, please let me know. We all know Biles passed gynecology tests, since her gynecologist assaulted her.)

For some athletes dominance is suspicious, but not apparently for others.

Of course, there’s more. There isn’t even space here to go into the cases of Stella Walsh, Dora Ratjen, Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, and the list goes on. So many women, lives ruined and did it really improve sport to do so?

If anything, the IOC’s attempts to clamp down on variation all these years has run counter to their own motto. What we ought to rejoice in is not that they eliminated gender frauds, but that over the last century we have seen women broadening the narrow image of femininity by blazing down the track, soaring high off the vault, and fending off a pack of rugby defenders–Citius! Altius! Fortius! indeed.