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Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women's Sports
In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender --a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood. Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.
264 pages, Paperback
Published April 20, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 8, 2020
Topical Updates via news:
September 8, 2020: Semenya loses appeal against CAS ruling over testosterone regulations, BBC reporting
"The tribunal found that subjecting female athletes to drug or surgical interventions as a precondition to compete does not amount to a violation of Swiss public policy." --WTF!
July 30, 2019: Semenya to miss World Championships, BBC reporting
"The IAAF said it wanted the suspension of the rules to be reversed to avoid "serious confusion" among athletes and event organisers and "to protect the integrity of the sport".
June 3, 2019: Caster Semenya Hopes to 'Run Free' Again After Swiss Supreme Court Offers A Reprieve, NPR reporting
"This is an important case that will have fundamental implications for the human rights of female athletes," Schramm said."
May 1, 2019: Reuters reporting, CAS dismisses Semenya's appeal over IAFF testosterone rules
October 16, 2018: Again. IAFF this time legislating female bodies and defining gender. If they imposed like rules for men, then I wouldn't have issues. Legislating one sex is WRONG. BBC reporting, Caster Semenya could miss most of 2019 as testosterone rules delayed.
February 2, 2018: The Larry Nasser abuse travesty is completely unsurprising considering the Olympics' history and their treatment of female bodies. BBC reporting timeline
June 6, 2017: BBC reporting on soccer tournament in Omaha, Nebraska
Mili's club team was booted from Sunday's final tournament in Omaha, Nebraska, even after her father showed identity documents proving her gender.
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When they say women's sports they mean the Olympics as the arbiter with other world events as ancillary. The IOC is thrown under the bus as its origin's being a gentlemen's circle jerk. From the onset the idea of femininity and athleticism were antithetical with the ideal based on white, western, and heteronormative standards. Therefore class, race, and sex played roles in how women's sports and specifically, Olympic track and field, a bastion of masculinity, was regulated.
The book addresses the effect politics has on the game and the consequences of it were often played out on women's bodies. The purpose of sex/gender testing had always been vague in its goals with the recurring theme of fairness and "scandals" exposed used to validate the IOC's latest ongoing test mechanism. Even when vigorously derided by the medical community over decades.
Citing gender reassignment surgery for past winners to Cold War rhetoric the IOC kept playing selective femininity with athletes from nude parades to swab tests to chromatin testing to gynecological exams all for "fairness". Reality is, any athlete could tell you that there is no equality in performance: height, weight, affluence all affect training and the probability of success.
And one would like to say that it's finally resolved. No. The latest femininity test is androgen levels. All humans have androgen, each body produces it. Some produce more, other less, but if this is such a crucial element defining "fairness" then why is it only a determiner in women's sports? Males who have higher levels are naturally at an advantage, too.
Why? Because it's not about "fairness", it's about women and what they should look like.
And I kid you not, but when a component of competition demands artificially lowering hormone production and vaginoplasty to "correct" questionable genitalia then I really want a dick measure. Because clearly if it isn't at least eight inches long then they're clearly not men.
Overall, the Olympics misguided, ignorant, and egregious attempts to regulate and reinforce "fairness" via testing for womanhood and nascent performance enhancement substances.
September 8, 2020: Semenya loses appeal against CAS ruling over testosterone regulations, BBC reporting
"The tribunal found that subjecting female athletes to drug or surgical interventions as a precondition to compete does not amount to a violation of Swiss public policy." --WTF!
July 30, 2019: Semenya to miss World Championships, BBC reporting
"The IAAF said it wanted the suspension of the rules to be reversed to avoid "serious confusion" among athletes and event organisers and "to protect the integrity of the sport".
June 3, 2019: Caster Semenya Hopes to 'Run Free' Again After Swiss Supreme Court Offers A Reprieve, NPR reporting
"This is an important case that will have fundamental implications for the human rights of female athletes," Schramm said."
May 1, 2019: Reuters reporting, CAS dismisses Semenya's appeal over IAFF testosterone rules
October 16, 2018: Again. IAFF this time legislating female bodies and defining gender. If they imposed like rules for men, then I wouldn't have issues. Legislating one sex is WRONG. BBC reporting, Caster Semenya could miss most of 2019 as testosterone rules delayed.
February 2, 2018: The Larry Nasser abuse travesty is completely unsurprising considering the Olympics' history and their treatment of female bodies. BBC reporting timeline
June 6, 2017: BBC reporting on soccer tournament in Omaha, Nebraska
Mili's club team was booted from Sunday's final tournament in Omaha, Nebraska, even after her father showed identity documents proving her gender.
||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||==||
When they say women's sports they mean the Olympics as the arbiter with other world events as ancillary. The IOC is thrown under the bus as its origin's being a gentlemen's circle jerk. From the onset the idea of femininity and athleticism were antithetical with the ideal based on white, western, and heteronormative standards. Therefore class, race, and sex played roles in how women's sports and specifically, Olympic track and field, a bastion of masculinity, was regulated.
The book addresses the effect politics has on the game and the consequences of it were often played out on women's bodies. The purpose of sex/gender testing had always been vague in its goals with the recurring theme of fairness and "scandals" exposed used to validate the IOC's latest ongoing test mechanism. Even when vigorously derided by the medical community over decades.
Citing gender reassignment surgery for past winners to Cold War rhetoric the IOC kept playing selective femininity with athletes from nude parades to swab tests to chromatin testing to gynecological exams all for "fairness". Reality is, any athlete could tell you that there is no equality in performance: height, weight, affluence all affect training and the probability of success.
And one would like to say that it's finally resolved. No. The latest femininity test is androgen levels. All humans have androgen, each body produces it. Some produce more, other less, but if this is such a crucial element defining "fairness" then why is it only a determiner in women's sports? Males who have higher levels are naturally at an advantage, too.
Why? Because it's not about "fairness", it's about women and what they should look like.
And I kid you not, but when a component of competition demands artificially lowering hormone production and vaginoplasty to "correct" questionable genitalia then I really want a dick measure. Because clearly if it isn't at least eight inches long then they're clearly not men.
Suspicion based exams overtly criminalized strong-looking women and established athleticism and femininity as polar opposites.
Overall, the Olympics misguided, ignorant, and egregious attempts to regulate and reinforce "fairness" via testing for womanhood and nascent performance enhancement substances.
June 12, 2017
One of sports great myths and one of its fundamental institutional definitions is the need for total distinction between men’s and women’s sport. More often than not this is justified on the ground of equity (men are held to be faster, stronger, more sporty than women so, of course, the argument goes if they competed together women would lose out). Now, there is a common-sense logic to this: we live in social order that privileges male strength and power and women’s grace, gentility and elegance: they’re not required but expected and woe betide those who don’t comply. It’s a common-sense instilled by the social and cultural rules of the way we live: there is nothing absolute here. It is also highly contested.
We see this common sense in the institutionalisation of sport during the latter half of the 19th century as women athletes and events were side-lined, with the result that when women began to participate again in sport there was profound opposition, derogation and contempt. Within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and elsewhere we saw the notion that women should watch and applaud; from within the medical profession we saw the idea that sport was a threat to women’s reproductive systems; and so it continued. Yet, women forced their way into competitive sport with professional football teams in the UK in the 1890s, with the Women’s World Games in the 1920s and 1930s leading to women athletes (as in track & field) in the Olympics, into swimming, tennis and various forms of basketball – but aside from some equestrian events these competitive women were shunted off to competition with other women in a class of sport deemed inferior by the view that men’s sport provided the reference point for and measure against which women’s sport would be judged.
All this came with a very specific vision of what women, and especially women athlete’s, should be, where a class-derived vision of women-hood premised on ideals of a Euro-American vision of gender identities held sway. These women were expected to be genteel, not at all muscular and constrained by suitably modest clothing. More importantly, the powers that be of sport decided that they needed to ‘ensure’ that women athletes were ‘women’ once it became clear that not all participants complied with this ideal: these anxieties emerged from the 1920s onwards, and are still with us. It is this desire to ‘ensure’ the ‘womanhood’ of women athletes that Lindsay Parks Pieper explores in this engaging review of sex testing/gender policing since the 1930s.
She builds her analysis around three key themes: 1) the impact of Cold War politics and the rivalry between the Soviet- and USA-led global blocs; 2) the conflation of sex testing and anti-doping practice where both are constructed as steps to prevent illicit performance enhancement; and 3) the science of sex/gender as unclear and imprecise. The first is likely to be fairly well-known; it has been well-rehearsed in discussion of Cold War cultural politics and in more recent constructions of the eastern blocs’ ‘systematic doping programmes’ (constructions that tend to ignore the systematic use of performance enhancing substances in big bits of the capitalist world’s sport systems). In this case, however, Pieper highlights a core strand of the argument being the dominant image of the suitable body shape of women athletes. Cold War politics shape the debate and actions of sports governing bodies such as the IOC or the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) from the end of World War 2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The other two strands – the conflation of sex testing and the imprecision of medico-scientific definitions of gender – are likely to be less widely known. Pieper is especially good on the debates within and between scientists, but even more so between the institutions of sports governance and scientists. She focusses mainly on the IOC and IAAF and draws out the weaknesses both in their definitions of sex/gender and their tests, highlighting repeatedly the complexity of factors making up both sex & gender that cannot be subsumed in a single test as well as the ethical and psychological dangers of defining and determining non-normative genders (that is, telling a woman athlete that according to some specific test she is not ‘actually’ a ‘woman’).
The book is structured around debates regarding sex/gender in the world of sports medicine as well as developments in testing régimes imposed or by the IOC and IAAF. Each chapter sets up the issues and then explores the testing systems in place at various Olympic and a few other major sports competitions during that era. This structure leads to some repetition, but also serves to make most chapters free standing (this is good for those of us who teach, of a little frustrating for those of us who read).
She is also good on the shifting terms of the issue in the last 10-15 years, building on the IOC and IAAF decisions in the 1990s to shift from blanket sex testing to testing is cases where concerns are raised. It was this approach that saw the high profile testing of and debates about Caster Semenya, and the less high profile exclusions of Santhi Soundarajan and Duttee Chand from track and field events, and Chand’s successful case in 2015 to the Court of Arbitration in Sport that had the IAAF’s rules over so-called hyperandrogenism overturned. This brings the book right into the present, and if anything shows us that sex testing not only hasn’t gone away but is shifting and transforming in a desperate attempt to maintain gender distinctions in sport.
The book has been really well received in academic circles (with good reviews, and an honourable mention in the 2017 book award by the North American Society for Sports History), and should be easily accessible for non-academic readers as well. Pieper has a clear and direct style, building on and through individual cases to draw in readers as well as (as noted) a real skill at making clear the meaning and significance not only of complex medical and scientific debates, but also in unpacking debates within that community. She is able to unpack these debates clearly by focussing on their effects, rather than the detail of debates between geneticists, psychologists and endocrinologists.
All in all, it is an impressive synthesis and extension of the scholarly literature about an issue that just won’t go away, even though it should.
We see this common sense in the institutionalisation of sport during the latter half of the 19th century as women athletes and events were side-lined, with the result that when women began to participate again in sport there was profound opposition, derogation and contempt. Within the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and elsewhere we saw the notion that women should watch and applaud; from within the medical profession we saw the idea that sport was a threat to women’s reproductive systems; and so it continued. Yet, women forced their way into competitive sport with professional football teams in the UK in the 1890s, with the Women’s World Games in the 1920s and 1930s leading to women athletes (as in track & field) in the Olympics, into swimming, tennis and various forms of basketball – but aside from some equestrian events these competitive women were shunted off to competition with other women in a class of sport deemed inferior by the view that men’s sport provided the reference point for and measure against which women’s sport would be judged.
All this came with a very specific vision of what women, and especially women athlete’s, should be, where a class-derived vision of women-hood premised on ideals of a Euro-American vision of gender identities held sway. These women were expected to be genteel, not at all muscular and constrained by suitably modest clothing. More importantly, the powers that be of sport decided that they needed to ‘ensure’ that women athletes were ‘women’ once it became clear that not all participants complied with this ideal: these anxieties emerged from the 1920s onwards, and are still with us. It is this desire to ‘ensure’ the ‘womanhood’ of women athletes that Lindsay Parks Pieper explores in this engaging review of sex testing/gender policing since the 1930s.
She builds her analysis around three key themes: 1) the impact of Cold War politics and the rivalry between the Soviet- and USA-led global blocs; 2) the conflation of sex testing and anti-doping practice where both are constructed as steps to prevent illicit performance enhancement; and 3) the science of sex/gender as unclear and imprecise. The first is likely to be fairly well-known; it has been well-rehearsed in discussion of Cold War cultural politics and in more recent constructions of the eastern blocs’ ‘systematic doping programmes’ (constructions that tend to ignore the systematic use of performance enhancing substances in big bits of the capitalist world’s sport systems). In this case, however, Pieper highlights a core strand of the argument being the dominant image of the suitable body shape of women athletes. Cold War politics shape the debate and actions of sports governing bodies such as the IOC or the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) from the end of World War 2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The other two strands – the conflation of sex testing and the imprecision of medico-scientific definitions of gender – are likely to be less widely known. Pieper is especially good on the debates within and between scientists, but even more so between the institutions of sports governance and scientists. She focusses mainly on the IOC and IAAF and draws out the weaknesses both in their definitions of sex/gender and their tests, highlighting repeatedly the complexity of factors making up both sex & gender that cannot be subsumed in a single test as well as the ethical and psychological dangers of defining and determining non-normative genders (that is, telling a woman athlete that according to some specific test she is not ‘actually’ a ‘woman’).
The book is structured around debates regarding sex/gender in the world of sports medicine as well as developments in testing régimes imposed or by the IOC and IAAF. Each chapter sets up the issues and then explores the testing systems in place at various Olympic and a few other major sports competitions during that era. This structure leads to some repetition, but also serves to make most chapters free standing (this is good for those of us who teach, of a little frustrating for those of us who read).
She is also good on the shifting terms of the issue in the last 10-15 years, building on the IOC and IAAF decisions in the 1990s to shift from blanket sex testing to testing is cases where concerns are raised. It was this approach that saw the high profile testing of and debates about Caster Semenya, and the less high profile exclusions of Santhi Soundarajan and Duttee Chand from track and field events, and Chand’s successful case in 2015 to the Court of Arbitration in Sport that had the IAAF’s rules over so-called hyperandrogenism overturned. This brings the book right into the present, and if anything shows us that sex testing not only hasn’t gone away but is shifting and transforming in a desperate attempt to maintain gender distinctions in sport.
The book has been really well received in academic circles (with good reviews, and an honourable mention in the 2017 book award by the North American Society for Sports History), and should be easily accessible for non-academic readers as well. Pieper has a clear and direct style, building on and through individual cases to draw in readers as well as (as noted) a real skill at making clear the meaning and significance not only of complex medical and scientific debates, but also in unpacking debates within that community. She is able to unpack these debates clearly by focussing on their effects, rather than the detail of debates between geneticists, psychologists and endocrinologists.
All in all, it is an impressive synthesis and extension of the scholarly literature about an issue that just won’t go away, even though it should.
Want to Read
April 17, 2021Note: I received a digital review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.
May 17, 2016
You can't base a book review on how you feel about the topic. Basically, the concept that a woman has to prove she is a woman in a variety of degrading ways is deplorable. The book presents this need through tinted glasses. The theory is that outward appearance colored how the IOC viewed whether someone was female enough to compete as a woman. I don't feel that this concept was adequately supported. Sure there were examples where people complained about having to compete against larger Eastern European competitors but never a point where it was stated that a smaller Western woman was passed over for testing because of her outward appearance. Likewise, the concept that those Eastern European woman were larger and stronger because they were supported by a government that let them train full time (like a professional) instead of pretending that they were amateurs. The other train of thought was that competition was unfair because some women were stronger or had more testosterone or were taller, etc. I kept waiting for the obvious to be stated: Life is not fair. Athletics are not fair. Some people are born more disposed to physical ability. I will never qualify for the Olympics unless they add a reading or perhaps cross stitch division. Does that mean the competition is unfair? These athletes are called the best of the best for a reason. Yes, if you are a man and are competing in a woman's category that is wrong. But if you are a woman who is stronger because of genetics or your ability to train better then you should not get criticized for winning.
A thought provoking book. I felt like it wasn't laid out as logically as I would have liked. I felt there was a lot of unsupported repetition and bouncing around in time. But, I am not sure I could have included all that information in a better format.
A preview copy of this book was provided by NetGalley and University of Illinois Press in exchange for an objective review.
A thought provoking book. I felt like it wasn't laid out as logically as I would have liked. I felt there was a lot of unsupported repetition and bouncing around in time. But, I am not sure I could have included all that information in a better format.
A preview copy of this book was provided by NetGalley and University of Illinois Press in exchange for an objective review.
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May 26, 2025Shelved for the podcast series Tested.
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