Radiolab - Gonads: Dutee

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

In 2014, India’s Dutee Chand was a rising female track and field star, crushing national records. But then, that summer, something unexpected happened: she failed a gender test. And was banned from the sport. Before she knew it, Dutee was thrown into the middle of a controversy that started long before her, and continues on today: how to separate males and females in sport. First aired in 2018, Dutee and the story of female athletes in sport are back in the spotlight this week, at the Tokyo Olympics. Join us for an update on Dutee’s second Olympic games, and the continued role testosterone has in shaping who is on the track, and who is off.  This story was originally released as part of Gonads, a six-part series on the parts of us that make more of us. It is a companion piece to Gonads, episode 5: Dana. This update was reported by Molly Webster, with reporting and producing by Sarah Qari. "Dutee" was reported by Molly Webster, with co-reporting and translation by Sarah Qari. It was produced by Pat Walters, with production help from Jad Abumrad and Rachael Cusick. The Gonads theme was written, performed, and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington. Special thanks to Geertje Mak, Maayan Sudai, Andrea Dunaif, Bhrikuti Rai, Joe Osmundson, and Payoshni Mitra. Plus, former Olympic runner Madeleine Pape, who is currently studying regulations around female, transgender, and intersex individuals in sport. Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Hey, this is Chad. Before we start, case kids are listening. Just know that this episode contains, well, Molly curses a little bit in this one. I do too. Oh, wait, you're listening. OK. All right.

OK. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W and Y. See. See. See. See. See. from WNYC. Hi, this is Radio Lab, I'm Lotha Fnassar. I'm Molly Webster.

And today we have in the spirit of what's going on right now, we have an Olympics flavored episode to play for you. It's older, but actually still in the running, maybe? I mean, it was three years ago. So not old, but maybe not young. And it's probably still changing, yeah. And Molly was the one who reported it. Yeah, we did this series. It called Go Nance. That's right. And this was a part of that. And it really hits you in the heart.

Yeah, it is an interview that has stayed with me in the three years since we first aired it. It involves someone who is at this year's Olympics and I have a little bit of updates, but I want to do them at the end. So let's just listen to the episode and then we can pop back in at the end. All right. Hello. Anji, Bully. Namaste, Dutti, Kessian. I take it.

My son of Olinian Radio Lab say. Ha ha. Dutti Chand is a world-class runner from India. My son Molly Vibhati Mia. Hello, Duty. Hi. How are you? KKD.

I called her with more perfect producer Sara Kari. I was having Sara translate. Duty speaks Hindi. We caught up with her in Hyderabad where she's currently training. And I called her because a few years ago Right as her career was taking off She got caught up in this male strum That almost ended it

And throughout the series we've been asking all these questions about biological sex inside the body and This moment in her life takes all of those questions and thrusts them out into the world in a very public way. Just to start at the beginning. I'm from a village in Orisa called Chaka Gopalpur. There are nine people in my family. Six sisters, one brother, six sisters, one brother and my parents. And my oldest sister is the one who got me into running when I was five years old. Duty sister was a track star in school. And as I got older, she started training me. There was no track to run on, so I would run along the edge of the river or on the road

or in the village. Our family was poor and we couldn't afford shoes, so I would run barefoot. And the tiny pebbles in the road would get stuck in my feet. My sister pushed me. She didn't let me slack off when I would complain or not want to train. Years went on, she kept training with her sister, and she just got faster and faster and faster. Until 2012, she had this big break. I'm trying to think of how old she was then. I think she was 16. This is a journalist who has spoken to and written about Dutti Ruth Pattower.

Contributing writer at the New York Times magazine. And Ruth says what happens in 2012 is Dutti qualifies for the National Youth Championships in Bangalore. And she wins the 100 meters in 11.8 seconds. And usually Indian female runners are running that same race in 12.2 or 12.3 seconds, like grown-up professional runners, while she's still a teenager. And then the next year, she goes back to the Youth National Championships. When it's gold, in the 100 meters, and the 200 meters. That same year, still 2013,

Bayley Barmen, a. Penasal Kinniglegea. Dutti starts racing internationally. Who are the youths and the people? The World Youth Championship. She ran her best 100 meter time yet. Quite well, As is Chandevin, during line number two. And 11.62, only about a second slower than the world record.

And in June 2014, she wins gold again at the Asian Championship in Taipei. My coach and my family started saying She wins gold again at the Asian Championship in Taipei. My coach and my family started saying to me, Dutti, you're going to go to the Olympics. So Dutti is basically the hottest young female runner in India. And then, 2014 was preparing for the Commonwealth Games, which are sort of like a warm-up to the Olympics for certain countries.

And as she's preparing for the Games, she gets sent to the team doctors for a doping test. And she said this was kind of a normal part of her life. I had blood tests done ever since I was little. We to take a dope test a month before every tournament and also after the race. So she goes to see the team doctor and he's like no blood we're gonna do an ultrasound. Which is not normal. And so she asked them, why? And they just said, oh, we're like looking at your bone density.

And so she's like, okay, whatever. Eventually, she does do a normal blood test. Goes back, keeps training for the games. A couple of weeks later, picks up the newspaper and sees her picture on the front page in the newspaper. and sees her picture on the front page of the newspaper. There was a picture of me with a huge headline screaming, Dutti disqualified from the team. Followed by a new story that said that,

I was a male, not a female. She has no idea what's going on, but she said at that point her phone starts blowing up. The media called me and told me all the details like there was this gender test that happened saying is it true is it true you failed a gender test. There was this hyperandrogenism test this gender test and the results said that I wasn't a woman, that I was a man, and couldn't compete with the women. I was shocked, I didn't understand how this could happen.

And the media kept asking me, what are you actually? And I said, I don't know, my parents gave birth to me and I grew up the way that they raised me. I'm a girl, I'm a woman, and I don't know. My parents gave birth to me and I grew up the way that they raised me. I'm a girl. I'm a woman. And I didn't know about anything that was being reported about me. You feel the gender test? Is that what was happening in the MRIs in this ultrasound? Yeah. What exactly is the gender test? Is that what was happening in the MRIs in this ultrasound?

Yeah. What exactly is the gender test? I think what is that exactly? I, yeah, I did, I did, duty saying it was the first time I had ever heard that phrase, but it's actually this thing that's been happening in sports for a long time. And I'm going to take you on a journey back to the beginning of it. So I didn't know this but the sort of first modern day Olympics was 1896, which seemed very recent. And there were no female athletes. And apparently like the

one of the people who was charged with sort of like restarting the Olympics said something like this was like no place for women. But, sure enough, by 1900... I made great controversy. It was decided to allow women to compete for the first time. You have 22 female athletes. Which... Fires were expressed that athletic competition could physically damage the weaker sex. It was not uncontroversial, but by the 1960s...

Rome welcomes the summer games of the 17th Olympia. Which were the Olympics in Rome. There were 600 female athletes. And so two things can play at the same time, which is a lot of women now participating in the Olympics and the Cold War. You know, the Soviet Union, the US, a lot of posturing, and there was this like fear, not very merited, it turns out that maybe the Soviets

were taking men and putting them into female athletics to win more medals or that the US was doing that also. And so what started were these things that everyone calls the nude parade. What is that? So women would line up wearing bras and panties and they would go in front of three doctors, often men, and they had to lower their underpants. And are you serious?

Yes. And they were examined, palpated, and measured. And this makes me very uncomfortable. Yeah. So invasive. So invasive. Invasive is the first word that comes to mind. So this is happening all throughout the 60s. People start to complain rightly.

And the IWF, which is the International Association of Athletics, Federation and the International Olympic Committee, both come under criticism. And so in the late 1960s, they come up with another approach. Another test. Okay, and that's a chromosome test. Hello! The test is called the Barbati test. Cell is scraped from the inside of the cheek,

a place under a microscope. And then tested for X's and Y's. This dark spot shows up only on female tests. And so anybody who has XX is okay? Because that supposed legal's female. And anybody who has something other than XX is suspect. If they find a Y chromosome in there, that means you're male. Here you have a test that's theoretically less invasive.

People don't have to pull down their underwear and way more precise. The idea at that point was, will IOC in 1968 said that the chromosome test, quote, indicates quite definitively the sex of a person. Except when it doesn't. Like we talked about in our last episode, there is a gene on the Y chromosome that if you

have it and if it turns on, you will likely become a male. But there are a lot of XY women in the world. These are women who had a Y chromosome, which is associated with male, but that little gene it didn't turn on. Conversely, you can have XX males, meaning that little piece of the Y chromosome got onto an X. There are all of these different chromosomal, like, aberrations. You could be XXX. You have two X's? You can have three X's. As a woman. As a female, yeah. You could be XXY. You could be XYY. And these are perfectly healthy people. It runs the gamut. You could be XXY, you could be XYY.

And these are perfectly healthy people. It runs the gamut. You could have fertility issues or developmental issues or no issues at all. And so the debate was, there were a lot of geneticists and endocrinologists who were saying sex isn't determined just by chromosomes. It's determined by hormones and by physiology and you know Totally getting away from gender, which is even more complicated

But just because you don't have XX doesn't mean that you aren't a woman And eventually all of the sports governing bodies came around to that conclusion and by 2000 everybody was like no more chromosome testing. In fact, you have this moment where it looks like gender testing is going to go away. Cold war is over, those fears are gone. Maybe we didn't need it anymore. But then this other idea walked into the room that had actually been there all along, this idea of fairness. Because the fact of the matter is, if you compare male athletes to female athletes in pretty

much every track and field event except for a few, there's a big difference in performance. I've been again at the beginning of his spawn, I've already been paying going well. Like, take the 800 meters. Women's record is 1 minute 53-28, whereas the men with a world record, a world record, 1-40. 9-1 is shown on the clock. Almost 13 seconds faster. In fact, I talked to to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win.

I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win.

I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win.

I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. I'm going to win. And so if you're a female athlete, or even like a spectator who's watching this sport, you wanna make sure that females and males aren't racing each other. And so what you saw when this sort of organized, gender testing went away, is that whenever someone got really, really fast, whenever a female got really fast,

there was finger pointing. And this all came to a head in 2009. So now we go down to trackside after all that excitement as the women try and gather themselves for the 800 meters final. On August 19th of that year, a South African runner just 18, Caster Semenya, just crushes the field. So many up pushes on again and she's breaking away. So many of us over a shoulder and she's away.

On the final lap, she wins by so much. Well, that smash is the world list by almost two seconds and almost immediately after the race. My conclusion was, OK, something isn't, something's going on here, there was something not right. There was just a thought that there was a problem. Oh yeah, yeah. This is Madeline Peat.

I'm a PhD candidate in sociology and an Olympian for Australia. She ran against Castro Semenya in that heat. She's since become a big defender of Castro, but she says at the time, because Semenya's times were increasing so quickly, because she was kicking the fields, asked like so totally. People around me were talking about her, spreading rumors

and spreading, and what were the people around you saying? Oh, is she a man? Look, she just looks like a man. Because she's a tomboy. It wasn't that I was like, I didn't hold a strong opinion about it. I just was like, I just want the IWAF to deal with it and make it go away. And so you had gotten to the point where you were opposed to castor competing?

Oh, I was opposed to castor competing almost immediately at in Berlin. Over the next 24 hours, she says the rumors got louder and louder. Basically like a cacophonous level. Well, there was a very dramatic race in Berlin last night, but the drama had to do less with who won the race than who was in it, and whether they should have been there. There was discussion happening in the media. The big question this morning is whether one of the runners should be in the man's or women's race.

If she runs like a man and talks like a man, is she a man? Is the new world champion of the women's 800 meter race really a woman at all? That's when the IWAF, the sports governing body, the IWAF claimed that they had no choice, but to announce something at that point that yes, they were going to investigate Castro Semenya because they had concerns about her sexual development. If at the end of this investigation, it is proven that, yeah, Cliet, it is not a female, we will withdraw her name for the results of the competition today. It was one of those things I think where,

looking back, I feel like it makes me sad. Yeah it really makes me sad. What ended up happening to Kastra Semenya? Well the IAAF band her there are all these closed-door meetings that she didn't raise for like a year. What the IAAF testing revealed about Semenya's physiological makeup? Never has been confirmed actually. But what emerged from all the Michigas is that in the end the IWAF recommitted to gender testing. To try to figure out some clear, bright, measurable way to draw a line between male and female. We choose to have two classifications for our competitions, men's events and women's events. This means we need to be clear about the competition criteria

for those two categories. And the way they decided now to be clear was no longer about chromosomes, no more medieval nude parades. Instead, they were going to look at hormones, specifically testosterone. Testosterone, either naturally occurring or artificially inserted into the body, provides significant performance advantages. I think there is little question about that. The idea was, we know that testosterone causes muscles that are faster, stronger, leaner.

Men have 10 to 30 times more testosterone than women, which is a byproduct of having testes. The concern was in these women that have that Y gene, either that they might have internal testes that haven't descended or a gonadal streak, like some reproductive tissue, that would be a meeting testosterone, giving them some sort of male-like advantage. And so in 2011, the IWAF decides that they will institute a test for high testosterone levels. And so if the testosterone level falls within,

quote, the male range, then there to be barred. And this is the first time they try and put a number on it. They say that your testosterone levels, if they're greater than 10 nanomoles per liter, you cannot run. Nanomoles per liter. I know. What does that even mean?

Wow. So this rule gets put in a place. And this is the rule that duty bumps into. And ultimately, pushes back against that part of the story after the break. I'm Kelly Ross, calling from King George Virginia. Radio Lab presents Go Nads, is supported in part by Science Sandbox. Assignments Foundation Initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Additional support for Radio Lab is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. We're back. I'm Molly Webster. This is GoNADS episode 4 with Indian runner Dutichon. So when Dutichon shows up in 2014, when they take her in for a secret gender test, because she's doing so well, it is to test for high testosterone. The Athletics Federation of India decided she did not count as a woman her natural testosterone levels were too high. And so, what do you think about the beauty? It gets banned.

I was just qualified three days before the Commonwealth Games. And I was told that I couldn't participate because of hyperandrogenism. Had you ever even heard about the idea that women could have high testosterone or something called hyperandrogenism? No, I didn't know anything about it. DUDEY's first thought was, basically, this is bullshit. My family and my friends and my fans kept saying to me, you must be the victim of some kind of politics. You are running so well, and that's why someone's trying to stop you.

So she gets her own doctor, and she does the tests again. The results in this test were the same. And I started to believe that there was something wrong with my body. She told me that she cried for days. I was mostly scared because I didn't know anything about it. She said, I felt naked. I am a human being, but I felt like I was an animal. I wondered how I would live with so much humiliation. In our village, children are born at home and no one goes to the hospital to deliver babies.

Had I been born at the hospital, maybe the doctor would have said what was going on inside my body and I would have probably understood this better as a child. But that wasn't the case. I was born at home and raised like a girl, and there were no issues surrounding that. And when suddenly the question was raised about my gender, calling me a male, it was very confusing. How could I have just become a man one day? Ultimately, duty decides I'm going to fight this. And Ruth says she sends a letter appealing her band to the Athletics Federation of India.

She writes, I was born a woman, reared up as a woman, I identify as a woman, and I believe I should be allowed to compete with other women, many of whom are either taller than me or come from more privileged backgrounds, things that most certainly give them an edge over me. And eventually, duty ends up at the court of arbitration for sport. Is that a higher body than the IAF? It's like the Supreme Court of Sport.

No. Everyone calls it CAS. So on the one side, you have duty. And on the other side, you have the IAAF. IAAF governs track and field around the world. So the way it breaks down is duties essentially making two main arguments. The first is that the hyperindrivingism rule

is discriminatory. It's discriminatory towards women. To which the IAAF essentially says, yeah, kind of is, but we're doing it for a reason. And that reason outweighs the risk, right? Definitely, there's definitely an argument that if you eradicated gender, you would be screwing over hundreds of thousands of women. Their big thing is like, listen, as a society, even in this court case, we all seem to agree, we want to separate men and women. We need to figure out some way to do this. Dutti's response to that, her second argument, is sure, okay, fine, we need to separate the sexes, but the

way you've chosen to do it is not solid. You have this number, 10 nanomoles per liter, which is supposedly the high end of testosterone for women. But if you actually look at the data, there's crazy variability. Like you will see women with levels that were like less than one, and levels that were above 30, which is typically considered 30s, like considered high for men. So there was these studies that came out where one study was like, we've looked at all these different testosterone levels

and there's an average for men and there's an average for women and they're on different ends of a spectrum, but what we saw is there's totally overlap. It's not like one end, the other end, never the two shall meet. That like there's that that some women go high and some end go low. And you've got, you know, men with low testosterone who are world-class champions, and you've got women with high testosterone that never win.

It's just it's not always clear the role that testosterone has in performance. Oh, really? I thought it would. I thought that was well-established that if testosterone will make you faster, like, is that what steroids do? Well, there's agreement that's synthetic testosterone. Steroids. Ramps up performance, helping both male and female athletes jump higher and run faster. But there's vehement disagreement about whether natural testosterone, one's own testosterone, has that same effect.

Why wouldn't it? Well, that's a really good question. The IWAF witnesses argue that logic suggests that natural testosterone is likely to work the way synthetic testosterone does. But some scientists argue that a sudden burst of testosterone is much different than sort of a natural level of testosterone that your body's calibrated to. The long and the short, the science is surprisingly contested. Furthermore, due to you argued, if you really want to talk about fairness, you need to look beyond sex.

There are all sorts of advantages that people have. You know, some people are born with increased aerobic capacity and others with resistance to fatigue or super long limbs or flexible joints or large hands and feet. And other people have disadvantages. Like Dutti said, I came from a village in Southeast India where I raced for years with no shoes and only had vegetables and rice. You know, like if you want things to be fair, then like we should all have the exact same upbringing,

the exact same coaching system, the exact same shoes. But the IWAF say, well, that's not about the division between men and women. If sports is divided by men and women, we need to find out what the thing is that divides men and women. July 2015. The court of arbitration for sport rule today that Dutti Chond could continue to race despite her higher than normal levels of testosterone. Court rules that Dutti can continue to race, and they say to the IWAF, like, you don't have enough scientific evidence to have this hyperandrogenism rule.

Go work on that. Let us know what you find. And through this whole controversy, at least a year goes by, Dutti never stops running. My coach told me, no matter what, just keep training. I wake up at 5am, train from 6 to 10, then we hit the grounds again from 4 to 6 for the third round of training with the coach. And this summer after the ruling at a big international meet in Kazakhstan,

Dutti ran 11.3 in the 100 meter, setting an Indian national record. And she makes the Olympics. India's Dutti chand has scripted history, becoming the first ever Indian woman to qualify for the field Olympics in the 100 meters event since 1980. Meanwhile, the IWAF, just like the court asked, they go back to the drawing board and they commission their own study.

And last summer, it was published. What they did was analyze blood samples from a couple thousand athletes at the 2011 and 2013 World Championships. And what they were looking for was to see if the women with high testosterone outperformed the women with low testosterone. And what they found is that if you are a female runner who runs the 400 meter, the 800 meter, the 400 hurdles, or the mile, you are conferred an advantage with high testosterone levels.

In only those events? In only those events. Oh, and there's also a throwing event in one other. Having high testosterone levels conferred an advantage of like 1.8% to 4.5% faster or like 2% to 4% roughly. And just to say like if you're a runner, 1% could be like 2 tenths of a second, 1 tenth of a second. Which is often how races are designed. And these distances are the higher distances, am I right? These distances are the middle distances.

Middle distances. Yeah. So the sprint, not the sprints and not the long ones. What their study finds is that the sprints do not, you do not get an advantage from testosterone. The long distance, an advantage from testosterone the long distance no advantage from testosterone these middle-distant races seemingly an advantage from testosterone and a throwing event. What a hammer throw? What a fucking mess. So you're saying to me that like we started with like the nude parade and now where we end up with like the line that we've chosen to draw is in these

middle distance races, that's where we're going to like make a big deal about trying to separate out the sexes. And then yes, like it feels like it just it feels like everyone's just arguing over change at this point. Even since that study was published, the data has been called into question. And there's a call for retraction and they published, there's a bunch of data errors. The authors still stand behind the study and in fact the IWAF is now using it as the basis for a new testosterone rule they introduced this past April. We reached out to the IWAF a few times so it didn't hear back.

But I mean right now we're arguing about testosterone, but I think that the bigger issue here is that we're like coming into a moment as society where we're more and more open to gender fluidity. But if we've all agreed on a whole that it's unfair to group women with men in sports. Then we do have to answer a real question, which is how do I keep the dichotomy, the binary in athletics, while the rest of the world is changing? Interesting.

And what you see with duty, or any of these female athletes, is their sort of caught at the place where these two worlds meet. Which is a hard place to find yourself. Do you know this? Do you told me when this whole thing blew up, she was only 18 years old.

I was at this age when boys and girls were falling for each other and there was a guy who fell hard for me and I fell for him too. We used to talk a lot on the phone and thought that one day when we got older we'd get married. But when the news in 2014 started appearing everywhere, he started asking me who I was for real. He said, if you're a boy, then how can the two of us, both boys, stay together in the future? How will our dreams of having children or creating a family ever come true? Eventually, I did tell him that the results confirmed that I had hyperandrogenism, and I asked him, are you going to love me and marry me or not? He said, no, I don't love you anymore, and I can't marry you, because my family doesn't approve of our relationship.

So I said, fine. So he forgot me and I forgot him too. After that guy left me, there haven't been any other guys that like me anymore. But now a lot of girls have started liking me and a lot of them say that they want to settle down with me. How do you feel about that? I guess I feel happy and sad. My childhood dreams of having a husband, creating a family with him, might not come true. But when I see all these girls still attracted to me, I often wonder if I could make a home with a girl. In India, only boys and girls get married. Girls don't marry girls. If it was more acceptable to marry a girl in India, do you think you'd want to do that?

Right now, I haven't thought about it. And I'm focusing on my sports career. But after I'm done with my career, I am going to need someone to spend my life with, right? So I'll see if there is any guy that likes me, I would marry him and settle down. But if there aren't any guys interested in me and girls still like me, then I would settle down with a girl. Whoever likes me, I would spend my life with them. Okay, so Molly is 2021, but the 2020 Olympics are going on. What, yeah, what has happened with Dutti?

So, Dutti is actually at the Olympics right now. She's in Tokyo. She got in for the 100 meter and the 200 meter, which is the sprints that she's known for. And as of this taping, she actually didn't qualify for the second round of either of the of the events. So she was in but now she's out. Yeah, so she was an athlete for India was in for the 100 meter and the 200 meter and then in the qualifying heats she came in last in one of her races and second to last in the other. And it's like the times are insane. I just wrote them down. But for the 100 meter, she clocked at 11.54 for the 100 meters and the winner of that heat clocked 10.84. So like a little over a second faster. And then for the 200 meter, she came in at 23.85. So 23.85 seconds 23.85 seconds and the winner came in at 22.11.

She's done and it's so and it was it was Running related not go nads related right because the one thing that's happening is there's still so much going on at the Olympic and elite athlete level and if you just even look at high school sports in the United States about who is allowed to compete on like a female roster. And so when we first did the story in 2018, Duty got by by this like sliver of a loophole, which is they're not going to look at testosterone levels for the sprints, for the 100 meter or 200 meters. Oh, right, right, the testosterone.

The testosterone's, yeah. Only the middle of distance ones. So now that's 400 meters to one mile. And so that barred a whole bunch of other athletes, including this woman, Caster Cemenia, who followed Dutti's lead and she challenged the regulation. And in all honesty, it's been the regulation came out in 2018. It's 2021. It's been three years.

Caster is still fighting. So it went to court. They came back and said Caster couldn't run. And the regulations still stand. Then she appealed. It went to a different court. They said the regulation still stands and she's now actually bringing it to the European court of human rights. Wow, but that's the like, that's a, that's not a sports court, that's like a real court. Right. And so the idea and, and I guess this came up in Dutie's case as well, like, should you fight this at

a sports level, or is there a greater human right injustice here? And the human right injustice is you're telling someone that something is wrong with their body and that they have to change it. So basically what's come out of this is that Dutie was not forced to lower her testosterone levels and she can still run. There are many, many other female athletes who do not fall into that camp. Interestingly, all of the female athletes that won the 800 meter that placed gold silver bronze in the Rio Olympics for the 800 meter, they are all banned from competition

this year because of testosterone levels. Really? Yeah, and so two of them, one is Caster Semenia. The other is an athlete from Burundi, and the third is an athlete from Kenya. And I think that's one of the things that I think is interesting is this is not one person. This is against the entire athletic field. This is not a rare case of a duty chand or a caster semenia. The top three finishers, you know, like everywhere you look at say in track and field, there's someone who has been banned. Wow.

So the rules have changed so much that all of a sudden the podium finishers last time aren't even allowed in the race this time? Well, when this happens, an athlete has a few options. One, to lower your testosterone level and your options for lowering your testosterone level are taking synthetic hormones or actually getting surgery where if you have like diffuse testes or I talked about that like testicular gonadal streak that might be giving you some sort of extra testosterone. You have to get that permanently. You get it taken out surgically.

And that has a really long-term effect. You take that out and you don't just go run the next day. You take that out. You have to take hormone supplements for the rest of your life to try and maintain a balance in your body because you've totally disrupted a hormonal system that you've grown up with. Do they have the option, sorry, a weird question, do they have the option of running as men?

Technically, yes. That being said, and we pointed at this in the piece, no level of testosterone in a woman, or no level of testosterone in a female is gonna make you competitive at a male level. The other option is you can change the event you race. So one of them finalists from Rio who ran the 800 meters woman Francine, she is the one

from Burundi. She tried to retrain to run the 5,000 meter race. But everyone talks about like you are so trained as an athlete for your event. Sure. Every single muscle and muscle development, the psychology you go through, how you start, how you finish, like the way you sort of pace yourself through an event. All of that is years and years and years, decades of finessing that you can't just switch events and just be fast. And so Francine tried to, but she was actually just disqualified in her race for, there's

some debate about, this is a very controversial call, but there was, but the official said that she stepped outside of her lane Or she stepped outside the truck. That was very metaphorical. Oh, I know that is really true, Lattiff It's we're just deep in it. We're like deep in a debate over how to deal with femininity and a definition of female. The last thing I wanna say though is, since we did the episode, some of our listeners may know this, but Dutti did find love,

and she is in a relationship with a woman from her hometown. Really? Yeah, and it was a huge, huge thing in India because gay sex was only legalized in 2018. And in 2019, she came out with the news that she was dating a woman. Wow. And I've heard from, I guess her friends,

I guess people that she works with, that it's going really well. She seems very happy. Just before we go Molly, I wanted to tell you about one thing. Have you heard this new episode from our colleagues at the show The Experiment? Um, their episode uh, about the seeds. No, it's, it's on my playlist. I've just been so busy with this duty update.

Okay, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me. It's so, it's actually very radio-lapy. Um, it's a kind of a mystery about something that happened last summer. Uh, all over the country. People started receiving strange packages in the mail from China and they were these seeds. And that plant seeds? Yeah, like little packages of seeds.

And thousands of people were getting these seeds and even the government started getting freaked out by these seeds. and I'm just going to play you a tiny teaser clip here of the host, Julia Longoria, talking to reporter Chris Heath. I'm wondering, people were claiming it might be bioterism. Like, is that a total overreaction, or is there a world where we would be sent biological material in the mail as like a attack on the country.

Well, I think the thing is, is that, you know, whether or not there was a real threat, you know, how seriously you judge the threat to be, you couldn't rule it out. Logically, it would seem a rather weird random way to do it. But could it be done? Of course it could. The USDA couldn't just rule that out. And they started taking this very, very seriously, and the advice that the USDA and local departments were giving out was pretty strict. Don't burn these seats, don't put them in the trash, and then more than anything else

whatever you do, don't plant them. But of course, some people already had. Chris goes on to be one of the first people to crack what was going on, and I'm not kidding you, you will not believe what he discovers. Highly recommend, you listen, it's just a fun who done it, and the culprit, it's sort of like a perfect, you know, Agatha Christie novel.

It's the last person you'd expect. I feel like you've sold it to me. I haven't listened to it yet and I'm so excited now. It's fun, it's really fun. So just look up the podcast. It's called The Experiment from W and Y C and The Atlantic. The episode is called The Great Seed Panic of 2020. I already have it queued up as we sign off here.

Okay, perfect. I'm Lathavnassar. I'm Molly Webster. Thanks for listening. Bye! This episode was reported by me, Molly Webster, with co-reporting and translation by Sarah Kari. It was produced by Pat Walters, with production help from Jada Bumrod and Rachel Kusik. The gonad's theme was written performed in produced by Major Connery and Alex Overing

Ten. Special thanks to Khia Chemak, Mayan Sudeye, Andrea Dunef, Burkutti Rai, and Paiashni Mitra. Plus, thanks to Joe Osmson and Madeline Pate, who is currently working on research about the regulation of female transgender and intersex athletes in sport. I'm Molly Webster, see you next week. Hello, my name is Amy Boyd,

and I am calling from Abu Jnai Jiria. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dealing Keef is our director of sound design. Maria Matassar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hapt, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielte, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Loughftiff Nostre, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

With help from Shima Oliai, Carter Hodge, and Lisa Yeager. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. you