The Convoluted History of Sex Testing in Elite Women’s Sports

KQED's Forum

KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who gets to compete in women’s sports? Since the very conception of elite athletics, there has been controversy over who qualifies for the women’s category. Rose Eveleth is the host of “Tested,” a new podcast from NPR’s Embedded and CBC radio that explores the practice and history of sex testing in women’s sports. Eveleth follows the stories of a handful of world-class runners who have been told they can’t race as women because of natural variations in their biology. In their quest to qualify for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, these women face hard choices: take drugs to alter their naturally-occurring hormones, abandon the sport that they excel at, or fight the rules made by World Athletics. We speak with Eveleth about the 100-year history of sex testing, the evolution and flaws of modern biology, and try to understand how we arrived at this convoluted moment in women’s sports. Guest: Rose Eveleth, podcast host, Tested Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:46.4	From KQED.
0:48.9	Music. From KQUD in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:03.3	Olympians are, by definition, some of the freakiest athletes on Earth, which is to say
1:09.0	they have bodies that are unlike yours and mine.
1:11.6	Swimmers with those ultra-long torso, shot putters with those huge fast-twitch muscles, the tiny speedy marathoners.
1:19.6	And by and large, we celebrate the ways that these people differ from the norm.
1:24.6	That is, however, except when a woman's body complicates the
1:28.8	binary that defines Olympic competitions, men and women. Journalist Rose Eveleth has
1:35.0	been working on the story about sex testing in sports for nearly a decade, and
1:39.7	they'll share it with us right after this news.
1:51.8	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:57.6	At its core, today's show is about the idea of fairness in women's sports.
2:00.6	Not just what is fair, but to whom, and what harms might be considered
2:03.1	tolerable in pursuit of, quote, fairness. Our guest this morning, Rose Avaleth, is the host of
	...

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