How to tell if a woman is really a woman? (Spoiler: You cannot)
A primer on gender and sports, part 1
So, of course, I’ve been thinking about what I can do in the face of the onslaught of attacks on transgender people by this Republican administration, as well as the many Republican administrations at a state-by-state level. Sometimes I forget that I have written quite a bit about these topics. Sometimes I forget that I have some expertise on these topics.
Specifically, in my book Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy, I have several chapters that deal with gender in sports. It’s a very accessible book and I’d love it if you went out and bought it or checked it out of your library.
But I wrote the book (as well as my other nonfiction book about gender, She/He/They/Me: An Interactive Guide to the Binary) to get information about gender to a wider audience, so, fuck it. If this isn’t a wider audience, what is?
This week, I’m going to post chapters from that book that deal with gender and sports. The first is about the history of gender testing in sports, which touches on the plight of people with intersex conditions. Some legislation includes people with intersex conditions and some doesn’t. But if you’re attempting to patrol gender borders, people with intersex conditions get caught in the fray, as you’ll see here.
Some of this info is dated as the laws and rules are constantly shifting. But if you’re looking to educate yourself about gender and sports, this is a good place to start and stay tuned for the next chapter later this week.
Also, this is long, so it’ll get cut off if you’re reading it in your e-mail.
In 2009, South African runner Caster Semenya won the 800-meter race at the IAAF World Championship in 2009, clocking the thirteenth fastest time in the history of the event. During live coverage of the race, a statement from the IAAF was read, stating that there were concerns that Semenya “does not meet the requirements to compete as a woman.”[i] The IAAF asked Semenya to refrain from competition even though they didn’t explain which requirements Semenya had failed to meet. While she waited to be cleared for competition, critics, competitors and the media mocked Semenya as being too fast, too muscular, having a chest that was too flat, a jaw line too square a voice too deep and hips too narrow. [ii] A TIME magazine headline asked of Semenya, “Could This Women’s World Champion Be a Man?”[iii] In essence, Semenya was too good an athlete to be a woman. Semenya’s case, though certainly the most well-known example to date, is just the latest in a long history of gender testing for women in sports. There’s no parallel interest in making sure that the men competing are really men. What explains this concern with patrolling the gender lines in women’s sports, but not men’s?
Women applaud and men compete
For the first century of its existence as a modern sporting event, no women competed in the Olympics. Pierre de Coubertin, who re-started the Games in 1896, believed that the Olympics should be focused solely on “male athleticism…with the applause of women as a reward.”[iv] But even before the modern era of Olympic competition, there’s evidence of women being barred from any form of sports participation. According to Pausanias’ second-century, Description of Greece, a woman named Calipateira passed herself off as a male trainer in order to accompany her son to the gymnastic competition. When she was found out, she escaped the death sentence that was usually imposed for women who sneaked into the Games. But in response to her intrusion, a law was passed stipulating that future trainers had to strip before they entered the arena and thus, the history of gender testing in the Olympics began.[v]
It’s not surprising that women didn’t compete in the modern Olympic Games until the beginning of the twentieth century. Sports have long been defined as men’s domain (and more specifically, a white, cis, straight man’s domain), a place where the idea of masculinity can be both created and reinforced. Coubertin, the father of the modern Games, believed, like many of his time, that real women were incapable of participating in sports. The rigor and competition were too much for the fairer sex. This idea, that real woman aren’t capable of participating in sports, is one of the core assumptions that underlies the history of gender testing in sports. Women who can compete—and who excel—must not be real women, because real women are not athletes.[vi]
Nude parades and determining when a lady is a lady
Though there’s anecdotal evidence that gender testing was part of female athletes’ experience as early as 1936, the first documented case of gender testing began formally in 1966 at the European Athletics Championship. The formal testing might have been new, but the concerns about men passing themselves off as women were not. In the same year at the Berlin Olympics, American runner Helen Stephens was accused of being a man when she won the 100-meter race at the Berlin Games. Not surprisingly, these sorts of accusations often fell in line with existing global political tensions played out on the Olympic stage.[vii] During the Cold War, female athletes from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries were often accused of being men masquerading as women. Soviet women were depicted in the United States and British media as “muscular” and “hefty” while their male counterparts were “clumsy” and “working on weakness.”[viii] In other words, this gender reversal (manly women and womanly men) was used to demonstrate the inferiority of the Soviet Union as a place and communism as a political system.
At first, the gender testing used by the Olympics and other bodies overseeing international competition wasn’t much different from that of the Greeks in the second century. Female athletes lined up for “nude parades” in front of a panel of three female physicians. In the first year of its use, all 234 of the women passed, though some refused to undergo the test.[ix] The same method was used at the Pan-American Games in 1967 and American shot putter, Maren Sedler, remembers vividly how traumatic the experience was. Sedler was only sixteen at the time and later said, “[I]t was hideous…and though I wasn’t afraid of not passing, I just felt that it was humiliating.” [x] The Commonwealth Games in 1966 were even worse, as women were forced to undergo a gynecological exam before they could compete. The women lined up outside an examining room and were not informed ahead of time about what would be happening to them inside, where they underwent what one athlete described as basically a “grope.”[xi]
In 1967, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) moved to a “simpler” and “more dignified” test. The IAAF is the international governing body for track and field and in 1967, they switched to a chromosome-based assessment for testing gender. The Olympics used the same test at the 1968 Games. Athletes who passed the test received “certificates of femininity,” which were small, laminated licenses that they had to carry with them to all competitions and submit as proof of their female-ness. No corresponding “certificates of masculinity” were required of male athletes.
The shifting criteria for figuring out who was and wasn’t a woman meant that Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska passed the visual test in 1966 but then had the humiliating experience of failing the 1967 chromosomal test. Klobukowska had no knowledge of her chromosomal condition and so had not set out to cheat. One member of the commission who ruled Klobukowska was ineligible explained that, “A lady can not be a lady and not know it.”[xii] All of Klobukowska’s previous medals were taken away and at twenty-one, she could no longer compete at the international level, making her yet another victim of the gender testing policies.
In 1985, María José Martínez-Patiño forgot to bring her “certificate of femininity” to the World University Games. That she had a certificate demonstrated that she had passed one set of gender tests. But after being subjected to an even more sophisticated test, Martínez-Patiño was informed, much to her surprise, that she was genetically a male. Martínez-Patiño’s case came at a critical moment, as a growing number of voices argued against the practice of gender testing in sports. Many members of the international medical community found these tests “grossly unfair” and as early as 1969, specialists refused to administer the procedures. These medical professionals argued that the tests were both scientifically and ethically objectionable. Five Danish researchers in 1972 released a report stating that the use of gender tests in the Olympic Games should be canceled.[xiii]
In 1988, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formed a working group to examine the issue. Experts like Dr. Albert de la Chapelle, a geneticist and leading expert on gender testing, took up Martínez-Patiño’s cause and called for an end to gender testing. Still, it wasn’t until 1992 that the IAAF declared they would stop blanket gender testing. The IAAF reserved the right to investigate female athletes in the case of “occasional anomalies.”[xiv] The IOC continued to use gender testing and in 1992, once again changed the nature of the test. Their new test defined a woman not as someone who had two X chromosomes (XX), but rather as a person who lacked a Y chromosome. Once again, these criteria revealed the difficulty in figuring out exactly what they were testing for. As the Danish researchers had said back in 1972, the Olympic committee was essentially making its own definition of sex. Why was it so hard to settle on one definition for who is and isn’t a woman?
The trouble with chromosomes
The problem of figuring out who is a woman and who is a man isn’t unique to international sporting agencies. In American society, we mostly take for granted that there are two types of people—women and men—and that those are real, objective, and discrete categories. That means there are criteria that anyone can use to come to the same conclusion in order to sort people into one or the other of those categories, but not both at the same time. Prevailing norms tell us that you can’t be both a woman and a man. If gender really worked this way, there would be no problem with determining who is and isn’t a woman for the purpose of competition.
But the reality is much more complicated than that. Take the criteria of chromosomes, which both the IAAF and the IOC have used for gender testing. This test operates on the assumption that in men, the last pairing of their twenty-three chromsomes (what we call sex chromosomes) is XY while in a woman, that pairing is XX. Initially, the chromosomal test focused on the presence or absence of a second X chromosome, also known as a Barr body. So those with XX chromosomes were considered women, while those with only one X were not women.[xv] .
The problem is that not everyone lines up neatly into XX or XY. Some people are born with more than forty-six chromosomes. Individuals with Klinefelter Syndrome carry an additional X, so their chromosomes are XXY. Other people have fewer than forty-six chromosomes, like those with Turner syndrome, who would be XO.[xvi] Under the initial chromosomal test, female athletes with Turner syndrome would be ineligible to compete as woman, since they have no Barr body. Additionally, experts like Dr. de la Chapelle point out that abnormalities in the X chromosome may result in tests that are difficult to interpret.[xvii] In other words, sometimes it’s hard to determine exactly whether something is or isn’t an X chromosome. In 1992, the IOC switched away from the Barr-body test to a criteria that instead focused on the presence of a Y chromosome. Now, a woman would be defined not as someone with a second X chromosome but as someone without a Y chromosome.[xviii] Under these different criteria, those with Turner syndrome would now be considered women, but those with Klinefelter syndrome would no longer pass.
The shifting nature of these criteria are problematic, but as many experts repeatedly pointed out, they’re also troubling because there’s no clear link between chromosomal sex and athletic performance. If the point of gender testing is truly to prevent men from gaining a competitive advantage by passing as women, a chromosomal test of sex provides the least relevant information. For example, Martínez-Patiño failed the chromosomal test because she had androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). This condition affects an estimated one in five hundred athletes and one in twenty thousand in the general population. With AIS, a person’s cells cannot respond to testosterone, the “male hormone.” Genetically, these women seem to be male (with XY sex chromosomes as well as undescended testes), but they don’t develop the strength or musculature associated with testosterone because their bodies cannot process the hormone.[xix] Having AIS confers no competitive advantage whatsoever but was still the basis for barring Martínez-Patiño from participating as a woman.
Intersex conditions
The farther you delve into the history of gender testing in sports, the more confusing it seems to get. That’s because our biology is much more complicated than the simple categories of male and female imply. Chromosomal tests are problematic because our genetic makeups are more complex than the simple XX and XY which many of us presume. Turner syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome and AIS are some of the many conditions that fall under the umbrella term of intersex. An intersex person has some form of biological gender ambiguity, whether at the level of chromosomes, genitalia, internal anatomy, hormones or some combination of all of the above. When you combine all the different types of intersex conditions, estimates suggest that as many as one to two in two thousand people are intersex and these numbers may be higher among elite athletes. Some intersex conditions are discovered at birth, but as the gender testing in elite sports reveals, many go undetected. Many intersex infants are altered at birth by doctors who argue that this saves them the social and psychological distress of having gender ambiguity. Intersex activists advocate that no surgery should occur until children have reached an age to make their own decisions about their gender and their bodies. Being intersex is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Doctors often treat being intersex as a condition to be corrected, but in reality, it’s a simply a reflection of the natural biological diversity that exists around gender. Given that diversity, devising any biological criteria to definitively say who is and isn’t a woman is impossible.
Looking like the “right” kind of woman: gender testing, race and geography
That it might be impossible to use any biological criteria to determine gender didn’t stop the IAAF and the IOC from trying, though. In a story similar to that of Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, one of India’s fastest runners, was preparing for her first international adult track event when she got a call from the director of the Athletics Federation of India. The director was calling to ask Chand to undergo a series of medical tests to prove her gender. These tests forced Chand to demonstrate that she really was a woman rather than a man trying to gain a competitive advantage by competing as a woman. Chand had grown up her whole life never considering she was anything but a woman, so these demands that she prove her gender came as a complete surprise. By 2014, when Chand was informed she wouldn’t be able to compete, both the IAAF and the IOC had abandoned comprehensive gender testing. But the two organizations still retained the right to test “suspicious” individuals, despite widespread protests. In practice, this policy often meant targeting female athletes who didn’t fit notions of what a feminine body should look like or who were particularly successful in their sport.
These policies raise questions about exactly what a “feminine” body looks like and how that might intersect with notions of race. Many critics have pointed out the fact that the women who have been targeted for gender testing recently tend to be women of color from the global South. Supporters of both Semenya and Chand argue that their geography and race may be the real reason they’ve been targeted by the IAAF. Katrina Karkazis is a Standford University bioethicist and an expert on intersex issues who has pointed to the role of race in these two cases. "All of these [efforts] seem to coincide with the recent dominance by women from Sub-Saharan Africa in certain track and field events, and that wasn't the case before," Karkazis said. "That is one way this is racialized. Who is winning those events? Who has won historically?"[xx] Supporters like Karkazis wonder if the IAAF would have pursued Semenya for nearly a decade if she were a white runner from the global North. These critics suggest that it’s not coincidental that in events with a demonstrated correlation between testosterone and performance (like the pole vault and the hammer throw), officials haven’t targeted any female athletes as “suspicious.” That’s because in those sports, white women dominate rather than women like Semenya or Chand.
Semenya’s case also demonstrates the ways in which our ideas of femininity are racial and cultural. University of Toronto professor and longtime member of the Olympic movement Bruce Kidd points out the way differences in men’s sports are celebrated. “We encourage nations to send athletes regardless of how they look, their size and shape, and we celebrate those athletes who are at the extreme, the outliers," he said of men’s sports. "In women's sport, the dominant discourse is that woman should look like the European, North American, Caucasian expectation of femininity and that they should conform to a hormonal requirement that belies the science and is not expected of the men."[xxi] In other words, Semenya and Chand weren’t targeted because they don’t look feminine, but because they don’t look like a very specific version of femininity.
The truth about hormones
After Semenya’s humiliation in 2009, IAAF officials released an ambiguous statement clearing Semenya for further competition. Speculation that Semenya had elected to take medication to lower her testosterone levels was later confirmed. In the wake of the controversy over Semenya and Chand’s cases and the support they received from the public, many fellow athletes, physicians, politicians and legal counsel, in 2011 the IAAF announced that it would abandon all language of “gender testing” and “gender verification.”[xxii] Instead, a test for hyperandrogenism (high testosterone) would be implemented and only when they had “reasonable grounds for believing” that a woman may have the condition.[xxiii] Though officials argued this test had nothing to do with gender, the criteria for what constituted “high testosterone” were based on what was defined as “within the male range.” In other words, women who had testosterone levels that were similar to testosterone levels in men would be barred from competition. There were two exceptions to this rule: women like Martínez-Patiño whose bodies were unable to process testosterone; and women who took drugs in order to reduce their testosterone. Because Semenya’s tests revealed levels of testosterone that were above this limit, she was told she would have to take medication to lower those levels before she could compete in her event of the 800 meter.
Take a step back for a second to contemplate exactly all the implications of this new policy. First, for all its fancy language, the test is still about gender. The “normal” reference range for men is defined as between 10 and 35 nanomoles of testosterone per liter. For women, the range is .35 and 2.0. So for the purposes of testing, a female athlete must have less than 10 nanomoles per liter. Even without using the language of “gender verification,” the test is based on a biological definition of what a woman is, this time hormonal instead of chromosomal.
Second, the policy forces women whose testosterone is above the limit to either be barred from competition or undergo medical intervention in order to compete. That is, women must medially alter their natural bodies in order to count as women. At the least interventionist end of the spectrum, this might involve taking drugs to suppress their naturally high testosterone levels. At the most extreme end of medical intervention, some women had their internal testes surgically removed, even though the organs posed no health risk. In at least four other cases, sports officials referred female athletes with hyperandrogenism to a French hospital where these procedures took place. The doctors also suggested the athletes have surgery to reduce the size of their clitoris, making them appear more gender “typical.” In other words, the new policy led to at least some female athletes surgically altering their bodies in order to be able to compete.
But perhaps the biggest flaw in the policy is that it is based on the assumption that a certain level of testosterone in these women’s bodies confers an unfair competitive advantage. If a woman has testosterone levels that are within the “male” range, she must be a better athlete than women with testosterone levels in the female range. But is that actually true?
What’s the “sex” in sex hormones?
What is testosterone, anyway? Testosterone is a hormone and hormones are essentially messengers in the chemical communication system in our bodies. They’re released by glands or cells in one part of our bodies and carry instructions to the rest of our body. Testosterone is a kind of androgen and along with estrogen, these are often referred to as sex hormones, even though both androgen and estrogen have many effects in our bodies that have nothing to do with reproduction or other biological markers of sex. Androgen, the “male hormone” is present in women’s bodies and testosterone specifically is crucial for well-being in both women and men, where it contributes to heart, brain and liver function, among other things.[xxiv] Likewise, estrogen, the “female hormone,” is in men’s bodies and even though it’s a “female hormone,” it can have masculinizing effects. For example, some studies have shown an association between estrogen and dominant behavior in women. Estrogen and testosterone sometimes perform identical functions.[xxv] As feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has pointed out, it would probably make more sense to call estrogen and androgen “growth hormones” as opposed to “sex hormones.”[xxvi]
Testosterone may not be a sex hormone, but does it still provide a competitive advantage for female athletes? As far as current research tells us, the answer is no. There is no evidence that successful athletes have higher testosterone levels than less successful athletes.[xxvii] Studies do tell us that testosterone (in concert with many other factors) can help individuals to increase their muscle size, strength and endurance.[xxviii] All of that seems to imply that testosterone would confer a competitive advantage, but the reality is more complicated. For example, women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) are unable to process testosterone, which means the testosterone in their body has no effects on their musculature or endurance. Yet, women with CAIS are overrepresented among elite athletes, with some estimates suggesting one in five hundred female athletes are affected by CAIS.[xxix] That women who can’t process testosterone are more likely to be elite athletes doesn’t match with the argument that testosterone increases athletic ability. Additionally, women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) have elevated levels of testosterone and therefore should have a competitive advantage. But women with CAH are more likely to have shorter statures, suffer from obesity, and face unpredictable, life-threatening crises due to loss of salt in their bodies.[xxx] These effects hardly seem compatible with success as an elite athlete.
The truth is that any single person is likely to have a very different reaction to the same amount of testosterone and testosterone is just one element in a complex system of communication between hormones and our bodily processes. On top of that, competition itself, and especially winning, increases the level of testosterone in our bodies. This is true even for fans watching a game or in experimental subjects who are randomly assigned as winners. In fact, studies suggest that the relationship between testosterone and competitiveness might be the exact opposite of what we expect. In both male and female athletes, levels of testosterone in their body rise before a competition. The social situation of standing at the starting line has a biological effect in the form of increased testosterone. This finding is part of a growing body of research demonstrating that our hormones might be driven as much by social contexts as they are by biology.[xxxi]
Dora or Heinrich?
There is no corresponding story about the gender testing of male athletes because male athletes have never been tested for gender. Unlike “real” women who are seen as suspect if they succeed at sports, “real” men are expected to excel at sports. Assumptions about female and male athletic ability tell us that there’s no advantage to be gained by women trying to pass themselves off as men. All of the anxiety about sports and gender is directed at the phantom of the man passing himself off as a woman, but has that actually ever happened?
In the known history of international athletic competition, there’s only one documented case of a man passing himself off as a woman, and even this story is more complicated than it at first appears. At the same 1936 Berlin Olympics where Helen Stephens was accused of being a man, Dora Ratjen took fourth place in the high-jump event. Ratjen was later accused of being a man and quietly returned his medal. Ratjen claimed that Nazis had forced him to pose as a woman for three years, “for the sake of honor and glory of Germany.”[xxxii] Dora’s real name was Heinrich and when his story came out, it confirmed growing anxiety about gender fraud and international sports. This was true despite the irony that Heinrich’s competitive advantage had only earned him fourth place, not a strong case for masculine superiority in sports.
For years, this story of Heinrich competing as Dora went un-questioned. Then in 2009, a German magazine reported on their investigation of Ratjen’s medical and police records. Apparently, Ratjen had been born with ambiguous genitalia, or as an intersex person, and his family raised him as a girl. Ratjen dressed in girl’s clothes and went to an all-girls school. He lived as a woman until two years after the 1936 Olympics. In 1938, Ratjen showed up in police records when he was arrested on a train for looking suspiciously like a man dressed in women’s clothes. With relief, Ratjen informed the police that though his parents had raised him as a girl, he long suspected he was really a man. A police physician examined Ratjen and agreed with his assessment—Rajen was a man—but also noted that his genitals were atypical. Ratjen changed his name from Dora to Heinrich, but all of those details were unknown until recently.[xxxiii] Was Ratjen, then, a man passing himself as a woman?
It all depends on how you define gender and that’s the critical question for sports. If you use the criteria of Ratjen’s own internalized sense of who he is—his gender identity—then, yes, he was a man. We’ll never know whether Ratjen would have passed any of the many versions of gender tests that have come and gone since then. But his case demonstrates one reason why attempts to determine once and for all who is a woman and who is a man are always bound to fail. The biological reality of human biology, as well as how that biology interacts with the social world, is much more complex than any simple test allows for. Any attempts to sort athletes into neat categories of female and male are bound to fail.
What’s more, assuming that the particular set of biological characteristics that we think of as connected to gender are the most important in conferring athletic advantage is short-sighted. There are all kinds of ways in which some athletes are better equipped for their sports than others that have nothing to do with gender. Studies show that several elite runners and cyclists have rare conditions that give them extraordinary advantage when it comes to their muscles’ ability to absorb oxygen and their resistance against fatigue.[xxxiv] Some basketball players have a condition called acromegaly, a hormonal condition that results in very large hands and feet. This condition is surely a genetic advantage in the sport, but these players are not banned.[xxxv] More baseball players than in the average population have perfect vision which allows them to see the ball better than the average person when they’re batting.[xxxvi] According to some speculation, elite athlete Michael Phelps may receive competitive advantage from having Marfan’s syndrome, a rare genetic mutation that results in long limbs and flexible joints, two features that would provide quite the advantage in the pool.[xxxvii] In none of these sports are athletes tested for these conditions which quite clearly confer competitive advantage. Why should the genetic differences related to intersex conditions be any different than these other differences?
Finding a better way
As of this writing, Dutee Chand has been cleared to compete. The re-worked IAAF regulations released in November of 2018 apply only to those female athletes who compete in distances between 400 meters and a mile. As a sprinter who competes in the 100 meter and 200 meter races, Chand is safe.[xxxviii] But under these new rules, Caster Semenya, whose event is the 800 meter race, would have to use medical intervention to lower her natural testosterone levels before she can compete. Her case went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and in May of 2019, the court ruled against her. This was despite the fact that Semenya revealed in her report that when she did take drugs to suppress her hormone levels between 2010 and 2015, they had adverse affects on her physical and mental health, as well as suffering from regular fevers and constant internal abdominal pain.[xxxix] Semenya has stated that she will not use these medications again, saying, “I will not allow the IAAF to use me and my body again. But I am concerned that other female athletes will feel compelled to let the IAAF drug them and test the effectiveness and negative health effects of different hormonal drugs. This cannot be allowed to happen.”[xl]
The newest regulations upheld by the CAS in 2019 are based on a French study, commissioned by the IAAF. The study of 2,127 female and male competitors at world track championship events found that women with the highest levels of testosterone performed slightly better (1.78 percent to 2.73 percent) compared to women whose testosterone was in the “normal” range.[xli] But as with most of what we’ve discovered about the relationship between hormones and competition, the results are more complicated than that. The biggest advantage for women with higher levels of testosterone were in two events—the pole vault and the hammer throw—which the IAAF decided not to regulate. Additionally, men with lower levels of testosterone performed better in those two events, demonstrating again that the effects of testosterone are complicated. Those effects are more complicated than simply always and straightforwardly providing a competitive advantage to those with more of the hormone in their bodies.
The long history of gender testing in the Olympics reveals the truth about gender as a social category in general—any biological component of gender is much, much more complex than our simple dichotomies can describe. Every biological criteria which we believe allows us to easily sort people into two types of people—male and female—ends up failing in the face of the great variety of our bodies. Genitalia didn’t work as a criteria and neither did chromosomes. The IAAF’s insistence on hormones as a better measure is also deeply flawed.
If all the biological criteria fail in the end, perhaps a better way might be to abandon them altogether. Some officials have suggested simply allowing athletes to compete as whatever gender they were socialized into. If an athlete was raised as a girl, she should compete as a woman. Or maybe athletes should compete based on their gender identity rather than their gender assignment. That is, athletes who feel like they are women should be able to compete as such.
As we’ve seen, gender testing of women in athletic competition is about much more than competitive advantage or ensuring fairness. The evidence that having higher levels of testosterone make you a better athlete is weak if not non-existent. Sports competition by its nature isn’t fair, as athletes bring all kinds of different genetic (as well as social and economic) advantages with them onto the field. Michael Phelps’ was born with the long arms and legs that make him a better swimmer just as Caster Semenya was born with her particular mix of hormones. The gender testing of athletes has less to do with athletic competition and more to do with ensuring our belief in a strict and infallible gender binary. It is a way in which we create and re-create the idea that there really are women and men and that they really are different. Because we test only female athletes, it also helps to reinforce the idea that women are inherently inferior at sports. Women are the ones who need to be protected from unfairness, not men. Clearly, there are no sports in which women would have a biological competitive advantage over men, right? Or are there? That’s one the questions we’ll explore in the next chapter.