The I love watching Simone Biles and the U.S. gymnastics teams with my daughters, just seeing

that excellence and them winning big, it's been just incredible to witness. Now it's part for the course for us to see

extraordinary female athletes on the international stage, but there's something many

people don't know about the women who compete in elite sports.

For nearly a century women athletes have faced questions about whether they were in fact women.

And over the years, they've had to take tests to prove it.

This is the subject of a new podcast series called Tested.

It's from NPR's Embedded and CBC in Canada. Tested

digs into the history of sex testing in elite sports and it focuses on a

particular group of runners who these days are labeled

DSD athletes. DSD stands for differences of sex development. As a catch-all medical term used to describe a condition in which a person's

chromosomes, sex hormone balance, internal anatomy or external genitalia don't develop as expected.

And sports authorities believe some women with DSDs have an unfair advantage in sports

because they have higher levels of testosterone than what is considered

average for a woman. These questions about fairness and who can compete as a woman are alive and well.

Just last week in Paris, two female boxers, Iman Kalif of Algeria and Lin Yu Ting from Taiwan, face questions and hateful

commentary about their gender.

Last year, the International Boxing Association had disqualified the two boxers

saying they failed unspecified sex eligibility tests. But the International

Olympic Committee known as the IOC, defended them and said they were eligible

to compete in the women's category in the Olympics.

Over in track and field, the people who govern the sports say that in order to be eligible for the female category,

...