SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
The World Athletics Council approved new regulations this past week requiring athletes who wish to compete in the female category at world championships to undergo genetic testing to confirm their biological sex. This comes after the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee updated its policies, barring transgender women from competing in women's events. Since the beginning of women's sports, there's been a struggle over who qualifies for that category. The series Tested from NPR's Embedded podcast and the CBC delved into the history of sex testing and what's considered fair in sports. And host Rose Eveleth joins me now. Welcome.
ROSE EVELETH, BYLINE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
MCCAMMON: So when you heard the news that World Athletics would now be requiring gene testing, what went through your mind?
EVELETH: Well, on the one hand, it's not very surprising because this is sort of a formalization of something they've voiced and that they've said that they want to do. But sort of in the more broad sense, my mind goes to just kind of, ugh, here we go again, right? We've done this before, actually. We've done genetic testing just like this, in fact, from the '70s through the '90s. And now we're back.
MCCAMMON: You know, I want to go back a little bit. Sex testing in sports and the Olympics is not new, as you say. I mean, how far back does it go?
EVELETH: It goes really far back. It goes as far back almost as inclusion of women in the modern Olympics. As soon as the Olympics exist, women say, hey, we want to do that too. And as soon as women start competing, especially as soon as women start competing on the track, there are immediately questions saying, that's not a woman, that's not a woman, and you have these kind of one-on-one tests - someone saying, that person, and they'll sort of pull them aside. The first sex testing policy comes into effect in 1936, so a long time ago. We've been doing this for a really long time.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, I want to play a clip from your podcast that speaks to that. This is where Michael Waters, the author of the book "The Other Olympians," is reading from a policy that was instituted in August of 1936.
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MICHAEL WATERS: (Reading) If a protest concerns questions of a physical nature, the organization responsible for carrying through the meet shall arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert. The athlete must submit to the inspections, as well as the decision taking on account thereof.
EVELETH: Yeah, so what does that actually mean?
WATERS: It really, to some extent, doesn't mean anything. It can mean whatever these officials want it to mean. It's really, we'll know it when we see it. It's not a one-to-one to today, but I do think what Knoll is really doing is creating a script that we're living out in various forms, sort of later in the 20th century and into today.
MCCAMMON: So Michael Waters just said the policy from 1936 isn't a one-to-one to today, but how does it compare, for example, to the policy announced by World Athletics this past week?
EVELETH: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the ways in which people talk about this today are similar. They say, just look at those women. Clearly, something is wrong with them. That's the sort of tenor of the conversation. Now, World Athletics now is saying, we're going to do this test, and it's going to be very scientific, and it'll be, you know, extremely clear who is a, quote-unquote, "biological woman," which to be clear, is not a term that scientists use or doctors use. It's a term that World Athletics uses and sporting bodies use. Some women are not allowed. Some women are too powerful, some women are too strong, and they shouldn't be allowed to compete on the track. And it's just a different way of enforcing that same idea.
MCCAMMON: You know, one of the reasons that women's sports was created was to give women a space where they could compete against each other fairly and safely, given the biological differences between male and female athletes that exist on average. From your reporting, what are researchers saying about those differences and what they might mean for the relative advantages or disadvantages between men and women when it comes to sports?
EVELETH: Well, I'll say two things. The first is that women's sports were not necessarily created to give women a space to fairly compete and not have to compete against men. Women's sports were created because men didn't want to have to see women doing anything, and they kind of gave them their own categories so they could ignore them. The second thing is that we have to sort of disambiguate a little bit of this question. We talk about males and females. When we're talking about tested, we're talking about women with biological variations in their sex biology. They don't fit neatly into this binary way of thinking.
So when you (ph) ask the question of - what is the advantage? What do we know about the advantage? - when it comes to women with variations in sex biology in sports, we know very little about the advantage. There have been very few studies actually done. In fact, I would argue there have been almost no studies done that actually look at women with sex variations in their biology compared to women without on the track. So we don't know. And this is why I think it's so frustrating sometimes to have these conversations as people assert, oh, well, there's clearly this big biological difference between these women and these other women, but we don't have any evidence of that. And so, how can we say that? How can we make policies around that?
MCCAMMON: Isn't the debate around gender and sports, though - isn't it talking about a couple of different things? I mean, on the one hand, there's the question of how to categorize or how to handle some of the athletes that you talk about in your podcast, who I want to be clear are cisgender women with naturally occurring higher testosterone levels or what's known medically as a difference in sex development. So there's - there are people who fall into that category. There's also the question of transgender women and where they fit in the landscape of sports, whether they should be allowed to compete with cisgender women. How do you think about those two sort of buckets of questions?
EVELETH: Yeah, it's hard - right? - because they are different, right? These are different people with different biologies (ph) that we're talking about. And I think that right now, what's happening is that World Athletics is actually trying to collapse those things down. So in this new policy that they announced this week, they have combined their so-called DSD policy and their transgender policy - right? - saying that these are the same. They're not the same.
But also, when you asked earlier - what is the evidence that we have for advantage? - there are a couple of studies now looking at trans female athletes, trans women, and actually, it's not cut and dry that they an advantage, assuming they've been on gender-affirming care and sort of gone through some hormonal treatments. Some things they are better at. Other things they're actually worse at. I always like to go to the science and see what the science says to help us inform our decisions about what's fair. And there's not a ton of research on trans women, but it's not as clear cut, I think, as people like to potentially present it as. But yes, this collapsing down of two different things into one policy is part of the problem.
MCCAMMON: What did you hear from the athletes that you interviewed about some of these larger questions around both fairness and inclusivity when it comes to sports, especially women's sports?
EVELETH: Yeah, I mean, from the athletes themselves who are being sidelined, you know, they just want to run. They want the same chance as all the other women to do the thing they love. When I talk to women who aren't impacted by these policies, you know, they're often baffled by this assertion that this is something that they care about, that they need to be protected, right? We often hear places like World Athletics say they have to protect the female category, that these women need to be protected. And the women that I talk to say, well, we would like to be protected from things like exploitation, sexual assault by coaches and trainers that you've heard about in the news. They want equal pay, right? And so I think a lot of folks are frankly just kind of baffled when they're on the track saying, look, I just want to run, I want them to be able to run. I would like to be paid equally. You know, I'd like all these other things, but this is not my primary concern.
MCCAMMON: What else will you be looking for as this World Athletics policy unfolds?
EVELETH: I'll be really interested to see how the International Olympic Committee responds. So the IOC has a policy. It's actually called a framework, so it's not technically a policy, but they have a framework on inclusion that this new World Athletics policy pretty clearly violates, I would argue. But the question is whether the IOC is going to do anything about that. The previous World Athletics policy also violated the IOC framework for inclusion, and the organization chose to not do anything about it. It will be very interesting to see if this changes anything.
So Caster Semenya is probably the most famous athlete who's been impacted by these so-called DSD policies. She sort of burst onto the scene in 2009. She won this amazing race in Berlin, and immediately, all sorts of people were saying, oh, she's not really a woman. She's not a woman. And they made her actually take - sort of secretly take medication to lower her testosterone. They asked her to do that in order to compete, and she did. She's been fighting these policies for years and years now, and she's sort of become this activist and this face of trying to push back on these policies. She's recently won a big case at the European Court of Human Rights around sex testing. It was more of a procedural win. It wasn't really about whether these policies themselves violate human rights. But it is sort of a signal that some of these international human rights organizations may take this seriously. But it's really hard to say.
MCCAMMON: That was Rose Eveleth, host of the series Tested by NPR's Embedded and the CBC. Thanks so much for breaking down this history with us.
EVELETH: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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