Front Burner - Olympic boxing and sex testing’s fraught history

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Last week’s boxing match between Italy’s Angela Carini and Algeria’s Imane Khelif lasted just 46 seconds. But it has ignited a firestorm online, and led to a slew of misinformation about Khelif���s sex and gender — leading commentators from Elon Musk to Donald Trump to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling to allege that the International Olympic Committee is allowing a man to compete in women’s boxing.Those claims are not true. Imane Khelif is a cisgender woman, something both she and the IOC have been extremely clear about. But these debates around sex and who qualifies for women’s sports are nothing new. In fact, they’ve been going on for nearly a century. Today, we speak to Rose Eveleth, host of the new podcast Tested, from CBC and NPR, about the controversial 100-year history of sex testing in women’s sports, and the many complex questions this story raises.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. With my hook from Karini. The boxing match lasted just 46 seconds. Angela Carini of Italy faced off against Iman Khalif of Algeria.

That's a lead up from Khalif. Then Khalif threw a punch. Solid straight right hand from Khalif there. And Karini called a timeout. And then she called the match off. Karini looking angry in the corner there with a corner. You can hear Karini yelling in Italian again and again. Noni giusto.

It's not fair. She's not happy about something. Waiting the results here. The winner by abandon, in red from Algeria, Iman Khalif. Karini refused to shake her opponent's hand and fell to her knees crying. She later said she withdrew due to the intensity of Halif's punches. Karini apologized to Halif later, and considering that this is a sport where a guy once bit off a piece of another guy's ear, this might sound pretty tame to you as boxing matches go. But it has ignited an absolute firestorm of controversy and misinformation, with many people

claiming that Khalif is a man or that she is transgender. This young girl from Italy, a very, a champion boxer, she got hit so hard she didn't know what the hell hit her. It's a person that transitioned. He was a good, he was a good mailboxer. People have been posting things on X like, men don't belong in women's sports, I stand with Angela Carini. That one was quote posted by Elon Musk, who said,

absolutely. Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling, who has a history of transphobic comments, claimed that the International Olympic Committee had allowed a man to compete in a women's event and that, quote, we object because we saw a male punching a female.

Let's just be crystal clear here. Iman Khalif is not a man. She is not trans. She is a cisgender woman, something the International Olympic Committee has been very clear about as well. The Algerian boxer was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case.

But the claims stem from a decision last year by the International Boxing Association, who disqualified Halif and another boxer, Lin Yu-Ting, saying they had failed an unspecified gender eligibility test, which some have interpreted to mean that these women have XY chromosomes or male chromosomes, a hot topic in elite women's sports. There is a ton of controversy about that decision. But heated debates about sex testing and women's sports are nothing new. In fact, they've been going on for nearly 100 years. And that's what we're going to talk about today with Rose Evolev.

They're the host of a new podcast from the CBC and NPR called Tested about the story of elite female runners being told that they can't compete because of their biology. Rose, hi. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. So to understand the uproar around these two boxers, Iman Khalif and Lin Yu Ting,

we really need to understand more about this decision that the International Boxing Association made in 2023. So this happened just a few hours before the World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. And they said that both athletes had failed gender eligibility tests and couldn't compete. So what were these tests? Do we know what the International Boxing Association was testing for and what they found? So right now, as far as I know, we do not know what tests were done. There's been a lot of, I think, misinformation, confusion around what exactly we know here. All they said in the meeting minutes at this meeting are that they failed to meet eligibility rules, followed by a, quote, test conducted by an independent laboratory. But they never at any point say what test we're talking about here.

And that really matters because we don't know really anything at all, essentially, about these women's biology. And there have been a lot of people making quite confident claims about what's going on here. We don't know, for example, their testosterone levels.

So this idea that we know that these women have, you know, quote, unquote, high testosterone levels is untrue. We really don't know. What we've heard is that they may have a Y chromosome, which can happen in, I think some studies estimate, you know, one in 15,000 women have Y chromosomal material and some are all of their cells. It's a thing that can happen for all sorts of reasons. It can have a variety of impacts on the body. But the short answer is we really actually do not know at this point what test was done. And what has the International Olympic Committee said about these two women, about why they're

allowing them to compete when the IBA didn't? Yeah. So one thing that makes the story sort of messy and confusing is that the International Boxing Association, just a couple months after this decision to strip these two women of their eligibility, got taken over by the IOC because they had failed to make changes that had been asked of them since 2019 in their organization structure, in their ethical practices. It's sort of a very messy story. So two months after they disqualify these women, the IOC essentially takes over and creates what's called the Paris Boxing Unit to essentially run boxing for this

Olympics. And so when they stepped in, one of the things they did was they looked at this decision and they said, well, these women have not failed any kind of Olympic-based eligibility requirement. They've not failed any kind of test that we would ever issue or, you know, ask them to do. And so they reinstated these women. And so they have been able to fight in Paris, even after being disqualified by the IBA. I want to get into all of this more with you today because I'm sure people are listening. They have so many questions around all of this. I think maybe the best way to ground all of this is to understand the history of this debate around sex and sex testing in elite sport.

And as your podcast lays out, sex testing at the Olympics really takes off in the late 1920s, right? Early 1930s, after women are first allowed to compete in track and field. And back then, interestingly, that was considered like a very manly, not delicate or womanly sport, right? So at that time, what was the conversation around sex testing in women's sports and what were sports officials so concerned about? Yeah, so women are allowed to compete in the Olympics before 1928 in things that are deemed more feminine, like swimming and, you know, tennis, things like that. And 1928 is the year when you see women on the track. And at the time, track and field was really like the manly sport. It was where all the real men went to compete. So having women there was, to some people, quite distasteful.

And, you know, women went out and they ran. They ran hard. And they, you know, did what you do when you run in a track meet, right? You get tired at the end. You exert yourself. You, you know, look like you're trying hard because you are. And this was very upsetting to many men. And one of the things that you see people saying almost immediately, as soon as these women compete, is pointing fingers

at certain ones and saying, that woman doesn't look like a woman to me. She is too strong. She is too muscular. There was a in 1928, the 800 meters, the woman who came in silver was a Japanese woman named Hitomi Kinue. And she was written about in the newspapers as having, quote unquote, all the power of a halfback. She should play for the Chicago Bears was something that was written about her. And, you know, the sort of implication was like, just look at them. They don't look like women. to do something, we being the sports organizers and officials, need to do something in order to keep these women that are not really women in our eyes out of sport. And that's really the sort of gut impetus for where all of these eligibility policies

and sex testing comes from, starting all the way in 1928. 1936 is when you first get an official policy on the books, where they say, you know, if there are questions of a physical nature, is the way say, you know, if there are questions of a physical nature is the way they phrase it. And if there are these questions and they're very vague about what those questions might be or how you might answer them, but you know, you can examine a In talking about how sports officials went about verifying who is a quote-unquote woman, there were also these things called nude parades, right? And what were those? Tell me about those. Yeah, so 1936, you get this very vague policy that I mentioned,

and those allow for essentially visual examinations, which is a very kind way of saying asking someone to get naked and looking at her body and seeing if she looks like a woman. And that is really case by case. It's sort of a spot check situation. It's suspicion based until 1966. And in 1966, the governing body of track and field says, actually, instead of just abandoning this, we need to test every single woman to make sure she's really a woman.

And we're going to do that by doing what are called nude parades. They, you know, not officially called nude parades. Nobody in charge of sport was calling them nude parades. But the women were calling them nude parades. The other thing they called them was the peak and poke tests, which is exactly what it sounds like, which was that you had women, every single one was asked to go into a room, get naked and be examined. And for the podcast, I spoke to a couple of women who had to do this and who all found it like incredibly baffling, very invasive. In that era, the women who competed in the Olympics of track

and field were much younger than they are now. So we're talking about like 15, 16, 17 year olds who are going through these visual examinations. And those are short lived because they are unsurprisingly quite unpopular amongst the athletes and truly anyone who hears about them. And so they replace those eventually with chromosome tests, which sort of is relevant to today, this idea that, okay, all we have to do is look for a Y chromosome, and that's going to tell us who is really a woman. And, you know, spoiler alert, that is not true. Well, just flesh that out more for me, because that sounds very scientific, right? But pretty much right away in the 60s, a lot of people, including scientists, start saying that this is totally unethical, that we should not be using these chromosome tests to decide who should and shouldn't qualify

to compete in women's sports. And just tell me more about that. Right. Like I think many people, perhaps listening and myself included, you know, you learn in high school biology that human sex is very simple and it's XX and XY. Right. And that's the thing. Right. That's how we tell. And of course, like many things that many of us learned in high school, that is not quite true. Things are actually a bit more complicated than that. So, you know, today we know that there is no singular biological marker that makes someone a quote unquote biological female or quote or biological male.

And in fact, you know, many medical organizations, including the Endocrine Society, advise not even using those terms, biological female, biological male, because it is complicated and there are all sorts of traits that people might have. So some women have Y chromosomes in some of their cells. Some women have Y chromosomes in all of their cells. Sometimes that impacts the body. Sometimes it really has very little impact. Sometimes those women have really high levels of testosterone and sometimes their bodies can use it and it actually, it makes a difference. And sometimes it doesn't, right? There are women who have what's called androgen insensitivity syndrome. So they have really high levels of testosterone if you test their blood, but their bodies can't process it. So it's not really doing anything for them. And so there are

all of these, you know, it's like, I think I've heard intersex folks describe this as a rich tapestry, right? It's like a weaving, sort of any of them, sex and gender is kind of all these different strands. You have, you know, your chromosomes are one small piece of what makes you potentially female or male, a man or a woman. And it's just one of them. And there are all kinds of other things that also, you know, contribute to this sort of assemblage of traits that might put you in one category or another or in between, which is sort of one of the challenges, right, is that we have sports that are very binary and we have human bodies that don't really ascribe to that binary because nature's complicated and interesting. Y chromosome sounds very scientific. And that's part of why sports organizations for many years really loved it, because it sounds totally foolproof, right? It sounds like a scientific test that we can do that. There it is. Bing, bang, boom, we're done. And, you know, the scientists who know say, actually, it's not so simple. And I just want to come back to Iman Khalif and

Lin Yu-Ting. Like, as you said, we don't know what the IBA, the International Boxing Association tested for what the test results said. But in theory, this is perhaps the test that they're talking about or? Maybe and even even within testing for chromosomes, there are a variety of ways you might get at that. So in the 60s and 70s, they used what's called the bar body test, which is a cheek swab, and then a microscope, You look under a microscope and look for a little dot. Unlikely that's the test they're doing in 2024. But we don't know. Is it a PCR test?

Like, we really just do not know what test they did. And it's sort of a little bit baffling to me that they aren't providing that information. Because, you know, some tests are more or less reliable for these things. The bar body test, for example, was very easy to contaminate. So one of the things you had to do if you were running a sex testing clinic at the Olympics between, you know, 1968 and 1999, is that only women could handle the samples. Because if a man handled a sample, he could very easily contaminate it with Y-chromosomal material. So these tests, the actual specifics of the test kind of do shed different lights on what this result may or may not be.

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Certificate of femininity. You are a woman. Yeah. Weird. But that is obviously not the end of it. Right. And when would you say this really came to the forefront again? So, yes.

So the IOC drops the Certificate of Femininity in 1999. And there is this very messy 10 year period where there is something that sort of is very much like if someone is suspicious, sort of akin to the 1936 rule, if someone seems kind of suspicious, then maybe we should do something. And that card doesn't get pulled until 2009. And that is when a South African athlete named Kastor Semenya sort of breaks onto the world stage, wins the world championships in Berlin. 155.46. Well, that smashes the world list by almost two seconds. As this athlete goes on a lap of honor.

155.45, smashing the national record, of course. An amazing performance. We'll be hearing a lot more of that, no doubt. And instead of being able to celebrate, that is sort of thrust into this media circus in which, very similar to what we're seeing right now, all these people are asking questions about her gender, her body, her sex.

Is she really a woman? Some of those say how she looks and sounds are proof enough. This is her talking back in March. If I win, I win. If I came second, yeah, it would be a surprise. If I go there, top five, maybe top three. But others, including her family, say, of course, she's a woman. And that sort of reignites this desire among some people to have some kind of policy, have some kind of test, because they essentially wind up asking Castor to regulate her testosterone.

And eventually they then come out with new policies. And in track and field, at least, those policies have really centered around testosterone. according to Track and Field's World Governing Body. It wants to force Semenya and other female athletes to undergo hormone treatment to suppress their testosterone. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, or CAS, said it found the proposed testosterone rules discriminatory, but necessary reasonable means in preserving the integrity of female athletics. And so these new rules come into place from World Athletics, and they affect one of the main characters in your podcast. And she is a young Namibian woman named Christine Boma, right? An incredibly fast runner.

She won silver in the 200-meter race in Tokyo. Christine Boma, 2181. Christine Boma, 2181. She ran three rounds here and each time she set a new world under 20 record, 2181 in the final. And tell me a little bit more about Christine Boma and what happened to her. in, you know, the last Olympics wins the silver medal in Tokyo. And a couple months before Tokyo, she gets sort of flagged as being what in the sort of sports world often gets called a DSD athlete. So DSD stands for differences of sex development. And some people have speculated that, you know, Imane Khalif and Linu Ting are also DSD athletes. We don't we don't know that again, because we don't really know what's going on there.

But Christine Boma gets flagged as a DSD athlete. She actually has to drop out of her main event, the 400, and run the 200 in Tokyo. And she wins silver, which is really exciting. It was joy and celebrations in the small village of Xinyongwei when Boma raced past experienced athletes to claim the silver medal. The residents gathered in this tiny thatch-proof structure as early as this morning

to witness one of their own performing in the women's 200-meter spot. And she becomes this kind of superstar in Namibia. I was in Namibia with her, and I mean, I knew she was famous, obviously, but I did not quite realize how famous she was until I got there. And it's like traveling with Beyonce. Like, everybody recognizes her. Everybody knows who she is. Everyone's asking for a photo with her. You know, you can't go anywhere without being kind of mobbed by people. And when World Athletics updated their rules in the spring of

2023, which is right around the same time the IBA was stripping these boxers of their recognition, they updated their rules saying that athletes like Christine, athletes with certain DSD conditions, can only compete in elite women's track and field if they lower their testosterone level to below a certain number. And so Christine is faced with this choice. She chooses to take the drugs and try and do this because all she wants to do is run. And I sort of spent a while following her around as she kind of tries to get her regimen right, the drugs correct, and then tries to get back out on the track. And unfortunately, she was not able to kind of get back into it and get up to a qualifying

level. So she did not qualify for the Paris Olympics. In fact, no DSD athlete, as far as I'm aware, qualified for the Olympics in Paris this year. I think that this gets us to the crux of the argument here, which is whether or not these differences of sexual development, you know, DSD, gives you an unfair advantage or an advantage that is more unfair than other advantages, right? So I want to, I want to, like, go through some of those arguments with you. So the fact that Christine took these drugs and they lowered her testosterone, could that not be seen as a sign that these rules on testosterone levels are leveling the playing field right now, considering that she didn't make it to the Olympics, that her

testosterone levels gave her an unfair advantage and that now it's more fair? Yeah, some people would certainly say that, right? I think some people would absolutely look at this and say, great, success proof, right? We don't know that that's true. Christine was coming back from a lot of different things. She has not run really for two years because she was injured in 2022. 2023, the news rules come out. And so they haven't, she wasn't able to run while she was trying to figure out, you know, the medication and all of that. And so it's, you know, at a bare minimum, it's very challenging to go from not training to training at an elite level and getting back to an Olympic level after not being after not running in two

years. And she only had a couple months to do so because, you know, she basically had from January to June to kind of get back into shape for the Olympics. And that's just a really big challenge. And then also, I mean, like there are side effects from taking these drugs, some of which, you know, world athletics would argue are the intended side effects, which means, you know, slowing you down. But some of them are that, you know, and she's not the only one who's talked about the side effects of these drugs. Castor also has talked about this. Other athletes have talked about it, is feeling really tired all the time, having trouble with your weight, which as an elite track and field athlete is a really big deal. You know, getting headaches.

You know, Castor talks about nausea. There's all these other things that are also happening. Um, anyone who has taken over the counter birth control might relate to some of these symptoms because this is part of, you know, what's happening is you're changing your hormonal profile. And so it's possible that, you know, the drugs do reduce her speed in some way, which is sort of, uh, the argument. It's also possible that that is one of 12 other things that is going on here. And I think, you know, I'm a science reporter at heart, and this sample size is simply not big enough for us to actually make any meaningful conclusions here. And so I think

just looking at Christine individually and saying whether or not her case proves or disproves this unfair advantage question and testosterone suppression, I think would just be sort of scientifically invalid. Well, broadening it out a little suppression, I think would just be sort of scientifically invalid. Well, broadening it out a little bit, I have seen research that found that, for example, women with XY chromosomes are overrepresented among elite athletes. So, you know, some people might look at that and say, well, then obviously that that shows that that that there's a real advantage there. Right.

And just explain to me a bit more what the science really does say about how much these specific genetic variations, these differences in sexual development give you an edge in sport. Yeah, unfortunately, and this is sort of frustrating for me as, again, a science person, is that we really don't know. So people say, yes, like, okay, women with a Y chromosome are quote unquote overrepresented in sport. There are lots of physical configurations that are overrepresented in sports. Tall people are overrepresented in basketball, right? Like, you know. Yeah, people say Michael Phelps has like

an abnormally long arm span, right? I mean, that guy has more gold medals and he knows what to do with. Totally. And even at the genetic level, right, there are certain mutations. Like there's a mutation in something called the EPOR gene, which if you're a sports fan and you've ever heard, you know, EPO is like a doping thing. But if you would naturally have higher blood oxygen, that's great. And that gives you a wonderful advantage. And there's a very famous Finnish skier named Eero Monteiranta who had that and who won a bunch of gold medals at the Olympics.

I think a bunch of medals in general at the Olympics. And so, you know, we know that I say this with all love for athletes. I find, I mean, I'm in Paris to see the Olympics. I love it, but they're freaks of nature. That's like, that's what we're doing here. We're looking at people who can do things that are just absolutely unreal. And so I think that, you know, when we ask this question of, is there an advantage? I think there are two. I think you have to kind of break that question into two different parts. One is some physical traits might be an advantage in some sports, but not in another. Right. There's a reason why gymnasts are all quite short.

There's a reason why basketball players are all quite tall. Right. So I think, you know, painting with a broad brush across all athletics or all sports is really challenging. broad brush across all athletics or all sports is really challenging. And the other question is, you know, what kinds of advantages do we deem fair and what kinds of advantages do we deem unfair? Now, some of the answers to that part is easy, doping, right? That's cheating. But if you are naturally born in a certain way, what does that mean? What does that, is that an unfair advantage? And I think that is really the crux of this debate. And I think there can be a lot of really interesting conversations about that. But you have to actually know what you're talking about in order to have that conversation, which is what makes I think this conversation, just to take it back to the boxers, really

frustrating for me is that there's so much misinformation floating around about these women. But the other, you know, we don't, just to go back to your actual question is what does the science say? It's tough because there's very little actual science that looks at specifically elite athletes in specific sports to see whether what what advantage this might confer. Is it huge or is it a one to two percent, which is kind of the same as any other, you know, athletic advantage? And we don't know. Right. Is it any more of an advantage than having long arms

or being tall? Like we can't we can't say right what you're saying yeah coming back to the boxers uh do you think that it ups the ante a little bit when we're talking about a sport where people are essentially beating up on each other, right? Like, and where the argument is more, is this not only fair, but is it safe if these differences in sexual development potentially give boxers a big physical advantage over their competitor? You know, I think a lot of people watching this debate are saying, what do you do about that? watching this debate are saying, what do you do about that? Totally. I think boxing really makes this intense for people. I totally confess, like, boxing is not a sport I love. I don't really enjoy watching people beat each other up. It's not fun for, like, I don't, no, it's not a sport that I'm, like, generally watching. But I do think that the boxing of it all absolutely increases the intensity and the sort of emotional stakes here because people see this, you know, and can I think it also some of the worst actors who don't actually care that much about women's

sports or about boxing at all can make this play that it's about safety, that it's about, you know, a man beating up a woman, which again, is not what is happening here. But it's a really spicy headline. And it's a really spicy headline and it's a really intense tweet that you can share that people will get all riled up about and I think it makes it easier to froth people up yeah we've talked about how this conversation has been happening for over a century now but I am wondering if you also feel like it it it feels different to you right now even even than it did a few years ago because of the moment that we're in, because of this kind of anti-trans panic, because of a lot of laws being introduced in the U.S. and Canada that have to do with regulating the lives of transgender people. about today are not trans. But tell me more about how you think the discourse we're in right now and that panic is being projected onto the stories of these female athletes right now.

Absolutely. I think it's really, it's interesting, right? Because in some ways, you know, I'm seeing the same thing said over and over and over again, right? There's this like echo through history from 1928 to 1966 to 1999 to 2009, right? You're seeing the same things. And then also at the same time, there is this shift in the last five to seven years. And, you know, I've been researching this story for 10 years. I spent five years reporting my podcast, Tested. And even in that time, it has really shifted. I used to be able to say things like, you know, no one's accusing Katie Ledecky of like, you know, no one's, no one's accusing Katie Ledecky of being, you know, secretly a man. And that's not the case anymore. Now, if you look

at, you know, on, and you know, I don't want to over index on like Instagram commenters or whatever, but like, if you look at ESPN on Instagram, every time they post about Katie, now, all of a sudden, you're seeing people in the comments being like, that's a man, that's a trans person, which is absolutely bizarre to me. And so I do really think that there is this intensity around the groups of people who are trying to vilify and exclude and essentially eliminate trans folks from the discourse and from existence, really have jumped on sports as a sort of a place to have that debate. And so now what you're seeing is, again, all of this sort of misinformation and disinformation around athletes. And I think a lot of confusion and some of it,

I think, is very not necessarily nefarious. I think a lot of people just don't actually know the difference between, say, an intersex person and a trans person. And I think also there is some intentional muddying of the waters here by various groups because it would be really convenient if those could be the same because then you can have kind of one conversation you don't have to kind of think about things you know in more detail with more nuance and so I do think the conversation has really shifted both in just sort of like who is having it but also in in intensity there is just this it's it's a little bit terrifying, actually, the like, sort of vitriol with which people have really jumped on this topic. And that's not to say that people didn't say terrible things about, you know, Castor or even Christine or, you know,

people in the past, but the tone is different. Rose, this was great. I want to thank you so much for this. I feel like you've cut through just an incredible amount of noise for me. And we've mentioned your podcast, Tested. It's fantastic. I just want to say to people, I crushed like basically the whole thing last night. It was up very late. It's great. And so if people want to hear more about this subject, which is really, really interesting,

they should go listen. So thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. This is great. I'm glad we could connect. All right. That's all for today. I am Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.