Throughline - Tested: Questions of a Physical Nature

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started mandatory examinations of all women athletes. These inspections would come to be known as "nude parades," and if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn't compete.We're going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed to compete in Olympic track and field games, and to a time when a committee of entirely men decided who was a female and who wasn't.Today on the show, we bring you an episode from a new podcast from CBC and NPR's Embedded called Tested.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Hey everybody, it's Rand and Ramteen. In 1966, the governing body of the Olympic track and field event started something that's still hard for me to fathom. Mandatory examinations of all women athletes. And they were doing this because of how the women looked or performed. These inspections would come to be known as nude parades. And if you were a woman who refused the test, you couldn't compete. Not only that, for a

long time, being a female athlete also meant you had to carry a card that said you were female. And some were told they were not. Even though the cards went away, you might be surprised to know that a version of that is still happening in today's Olympics. We're going back almost a century to the first time women were allowed to compete in Olympic track and field games, and to a time when a committee of entirely men decided who was a female and who wasn't. To learn more, we wanted to share the second episode of a new podcast from the CBC and NPR's Embedded called Tested.

Here's the show, hosted by Rose Eveleth. Welcome back to Tested. This is episode two. And just so you know, there is one bad word in this episode. Let's begin in the summer of 1928. Almost a hundred years ago now. That August, the Olympics was held in Amsterdam, and almost every day the Olympic Stadium was packed with fans. And those fans were watching something historic. This was the first Olympics where women were allowed to compete in track and field.

Women had been allowed in the Olympics before 1928. They could play tennis or swim, sports that were considered delicate and feminine. But track and field had always been completely off-limits. And on August 2nd, a particularly exciting race happened. The 800 meters. Two laps. Half a mile. This was the longest distance women were allowed to run. There is some silent footage from the race that still survives. And as the camera pans across the crowd, you can see fans cheering, waving hats,

and leaning over the railings to get a better look. The gun goes off, and the women round the first bend as a pack, looking strong. Over the two laps around the track, the group mostly stays together. But coming out of the final bend, Linda Radke from Germany pulls ahead and manages to outkick her competitors

and come away with the gold. This race was, by modern track and field metrics, an incredible success. The first three women came across the line in world record-breaking times. But it wasn't the multiple world records that made an impression on newspaper reporters and sports officials. It was the fact that the women looked tired after doing it. A few of the women put their arms over their heads or on their knees.

One falls to the ground and gets back up with some help. If you've ever watched a race on a track, it's all fairly normal stuff. But that is not how the newspapers reported it. The 800 meters race yesterday for women was a disgrace. The first five women crossing the finish line collapsed. They burst into tears, falling onto the grass unconscious. Very feminine trait. Even this distance makes too great a call on feminine strength. It seems as though these reporters were seeing what they expected to see. Evidence of all the fears they already had about women competing in sports. It was too taxing, too grueling, too manly. In the wake of this race, sports officials considered banning all athletics for women, athletics being the term most of the world uses for track and field.

But eventually, they decided that that was perhaps a bit much. So they simply banned the 800. Women were not allowed to run the half mile at the Olympics again until 1960. The history of women's sports is full of men doubting women's sports. But it's more than just being skeptical of women as athletes or the marketabilityting women's sports. But it's more than just being skeptical of women as athletes or the marketability of women's sports or even whether sports might damage women's health. From the very beginning of women's inclusion

in the Olympics, the men in charge doubted that they were even women at all. From CBC and NPR's Embedded, this is Tested. I'm Rose Evelyn. Fair. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. This message comes from The Lever, producers of the chart-topping history podcast Master Plan. Named a must-listen by The Guardian, Master Plan investigates the 50-year plot to legalize corruption in America. Listen to Master Plan wherever you get podcasts. After winning an Olympic silver medal in Tokyo

in the summer of 2021, Christine Boma went on an absolute tear in the 200 meters. She won in Nairobi. Ophelia is giving them a run for their money, but it is Mboma pulling away. Brussels. Mboma will take the win. Zurich. Mboma is charging. Mboma is coming very, very quickly.

And she just gets it on the line. Christine ended the 2021 season with 10 200-meter wins. And Boomer for the victory! And Boomer! But with every victory came a hint of something else. At that time, the Rules for Athletes with Differences of Sex Development, or DSDs, said that they couldn't race the middle distances, 400, 800, and the mile. Christine had planned to run the 400 in Tokyo. It was her primary race.

But a few weeks before the Games, after those tests we told you about, she learned that she was now considered a DSD athlete, which meant that she wasn't allowed to run the four in Tokyo. So she dropped out and enrolled in the two. Doing so essentially meant outing herself as a DSD athlete, because anybody who was paying attention to track knew that there was really only one reason she would drop out of the 400. And so suddenly, Christine went from an amazing runner to an amazing runner with an asterisk. A lot of people felt, oh, well, that explains her. This is Celestine Karony, the BBC Africa reporter. It's the wording in the narrative of how we tell her story as well. If then she becomes this athlete that every time we speak about her, we speak about, well, you see, she's still fast despite.

Sometimes the announcers calling these races would explicitly note Christine's status as a DSD athlete. We're going to see Christine Mboma from Namibia, one of the DSD athletes who had to change event, couldn't run in the 400. In the comments under videos of her races, you see some people saying things like, Boma is a man, and Christine is one lucky dude. Now that they knew that Christine had high testosterone, these people credited her entire success to it, not her training or mentality or

dedication, but her hormones. Christine's fastest 200-meter time is 21.78 seconds, which, despite what these commenters online might say, isn't even close to the men's times. In fact, she would still lose to the fastest high school boys in the United States. And yet, watching these races in 2021, there was this pervasive sense that Christine was on borrowed time. The announcers at the race in Zurich even say so out loud. If Obama continues like this, there's a lot of questions as to what world athletics will do going forward now that Obama, for instance, is running at lesser distances.

One online commenter said that the organization governing track and field shouldn't allow, quote, this charade to continue too much longer. Christine told me that the only thing she could do was try her best and try to ignore all of the people online telling her that she was too fast to be a girl, too good, that she had to secretly be a man. And it turns out that idea, that elite women are actually secretly men, goes all the way back to the very beginning of women's competition in sports. When I started researching the history of gender verification policies over 10 years ago, one of the first and most surprising things I learned was that sex testing policies

are not new. In 1928, in the Olympics I was just telling you about, people immediately started pointing fingers at athletes, accusing them of being too manly. She had all the power of a halfback. That's how newspapers wrote about Hitomi Kinwe, the woman who won silver in that 800-meter race. Another reporter said that Hitomi was taken aside and examined to make sure she was actually a woman. A few years later, the American Helen Stevens was hit with the same accusations. Polish scribe doubts Helen Stevens' sex, claims she runs too fast to be normal woman. In response to these accusations, American officials put out a statement

saying that they had indeed verified that Helen was a woman. That same year, 1936, the governing body of Track and Field created the first official policy on the books to allow for examination of suspicious women. And for years, I've wanted to understand why. Why did these sports officials decide it was necessary to confirm a woman's sex in the first place? What were they so worried about? What were they trying to achieve? Okay, so we are walking into the Olympic campus, I would say.

To try and answer that question, producer Ozzy, Linus Goodman, and I went to Switzerland, to the Olympic Studies Center in Lausanne. Okay, let's see what does the sign say. The grounds are meticulously maintained and covered in statues, mostly of men. Uh, of a naked man, a naked muscular man. But there are a few women. Oh, there's a lady holding the Olympic rings. Very prominent nipples.

Yes, the Olympic Studies Center. Your source for Olympic knowledge. Oh, here we are. The Olympic Studies Center houses over a million pages of archival documents, going all the way back to the very beginning of the modern Olympics in 1894. We spent a week there in a cozy and extremely quiet little room looking out onto Lake Geneva, going through thousands of pages of old meeting minutes and correspondences. Folders and folders and folders of delicate, sometimes hundred-year-old paper, all organized

into sometimes confusingly labeled boxes. Am I doing this wrong? Is it page? Oh no, it's box number 99. Not page number 99. Here we go. I'm going to figure this out eventually. Leafing through these folders, we found a whole lot of procedural discussions

within the International Olympic Committee, peppered with back-slapping. Language like, We are very glad and satisfied with the work which has been done here. People with goodwill have assembled from all parts of the world to carry out a noble ideal. You also get a sense of this tight-knit group that made up the IOC over the years. Some of this is people being invited to Eduardo Hayes' birthday party and saying they can't come. And from the very beginning, these committee members had a few key things in common.

They were all men. The first woman wouldn't be appointed to the IOC until 1981. And they all had money. And not just, like, regular money. Old money. I mean, there are kings who are members of the IOC, there are princes who are members of the IOC, and then there are just kind of, like, titled nobility, often with wealth going back centuries. This is Michael Waters, author of a recent book called The Other Olympians.

He went to the archives, too, with a similar mission. To try and find explanations for why sports officials were so adamant that they had to check the sex of female athletes. And he never found any. Neither did Ozzy and I. But I checked, like, all the other course weapons files where it might be, and it wasn't in there. Yeah. I'm looking to see if there's just, like... When they do talk about sex testing, they do so vaguely.

The only thing we found from these early days that directly referenced these women is a letter from 1936 from a man named Avery Brundage. He was felt compelled to pass along a correspondence he'd received, in which an observer describes a woman's appearance, called her a borderline case, and went on to say, Other than that, mentions of sex testing in the archive from this era are sparse. Here's Michael Waters again. I mean, it's kind of a wild experience where you're going through this like folder after folder of just dozens and dozens of letters arguing about the rules around like how much an athlete could get paid as a travel stipend. But then when it comes to this policy around sex testing that we're really living with today, it's really just a few letters back and forth. I mean, there just wasn't very much thought at all into it. But after talking to a bunch of historians who taught me how to read between the lines of these documents, I can say that the men in charge of sports

seemed to be concerned about three different things. The first was straight-up cheaters, men dressing up as women and sneaking into women's sports to win medals. The second was this idea that women who did sports might actually turn into men, which was a thing they really thought could happen. And the third was the most complicated. This idea that women who were drawn to sport, women who wanted to compete, were actually not really women in the first place.

But I couldn't find any set of letters or meeting minutes in which they untangle these things or grapple with the fact that they aren't all the same, not in the IOC archives, nor in any of the records I was able to see from track and field history. The experts I talked to about this told me that probably that's because these conversations weren't happening at official meetings. You know, they had some very close friendship that evolved around beer drinking. They would meet in a hotel lobby or wherever it would be and would gather and chat. This is Jörg Krieger, a sports historian and the author of Power and Politics in World Athletics. And in his research, he found that these men in the 1930s literally called these get-togethers the beer-drinking society.

So we can only imagine how they talked about, you know, these women in those informal settings. So they didn't write this stuff down. But there are a few bits of context that can help us all understand their worldview a little bit better. The first thing to know is that ideas around sex and gender were really different in the early 1900s. Scientists were just starting to figure out human genetics. At the time, the dominant idea around sex was something called balance theory. The idea here was that every person is born with a mixture of male and female elements in them. If you have a bit more male stuff, you are a man.

If you have a bit more female stuff, you are a woman. And this is where the percentages come in, that people aren't 100% one or the other, that we're seeing people, quote unquote, in the middle. That's Lindsay Piper, a professor at the University of Lynchburg and the author of Sex Testing, Gender Policing in Women's Sports. What she's saying is that in the world of balance theory, someone might be 70% woman or just 55%. Ironically, this is in some ways more accurate than the really rigid sex binary we tend to think about today. But anyway, back then, if you believed in balance theory, you also believed that this balance could be tipped, that someone who started out as 70 percent woman, but who exercised like a man and ran on the track and competed in sports, but then also there's this undercurrent, too, that sport's going to masculinize women as well. So there's that going on.

It's also worth remembering when we are in time. Women first competed in track and field in the Olympics in 1928. Just five years later, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. In 1936, the Nazis hosted the Olympics in Berlin. Through these flagged bedecked streets rides Adolf Hitler, host to the worldwide gathering of sport enthusiasts

to open the 1936 Olympiad. Some of the men in charge of sports at the time were fans of Nazi ideologies, a particular vision of purity and perfection, and the value of traditional conservative gender roles. So all of these beliefs are kind of colliding when you see men make these oblique references to the problem of women who are maybe men or maybe turning into men in sport. Here's Michael Waters again. Knowing that a lot of the people involved have this fascist belief system, I think lets us see just like why that was so confused

and so poorly thought through from the start. Scholars of this period have argued that for sports officials, the point of all this concern, all this talk about fraudulent, incorrect women wasn't accuracy or logic. It was control. In fact, they would later officially call the policies created to address these women sex control. Here's Jörg Krieger again. I think what their position is,

we have to form regulations so that those women who are participating come as close to our expectations as we want them to be. There is one problem for these men. They don't have proof. They don't have an athlete they can point to and say, see, this is what we're talking about. But that was about to change. helped usher in a new generation of political hope and optimism. Now he lets his innate curiosity guide his exploration around Internet culture and its effects. Listen to Offline every Sunday. This message comes from Slow Burn, the Rise of Fox News, Slate's podcast that explores how a cable news channel became a cultural and political force, and how a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it. Follow wherever you listen to podcasts.

This October, heal your existential dread with Shortwave. We're going to talk about the science of why we die, and come out the other side with answers to live better as we live longer. Hear about the innovations when you subscribe now to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. In November of 1935, the men of athletics opened up their newspapers and saw a story that gave them an almost perfect example of everything they had been looking for. Evidence that their ideas about women in sports had been right all along. And that evidence came in the form of a Czechoslovakian athlete named Zdeněk Kóbek. Woman track star decides to change sex through a rare phenomenon of nature. Czechoslovakian world champion track star will shortly become a man

and in all probability will retain the two women's running records she set in London in 1934. The modern women I'm following in this series are not transgender. And these days, track and field has separate policies for trans and DSD athletes. But when you trace these kinds of policies back to the origins, they lead you to Zdeněk Kóbek, an athlete who competed and won as a woman and then transitioned. Zdeněk Kóbek is a Czech athlete who was born in 1913. He was from this poor family, and he spent a lot of his life basically working retail.

As part of his book research, Michael Waters had Koubek's memoir translated into English. In the memoir, Koubek writes poetically about all kinds of things, including his love of running. The greatest reward for the hard life of track and field is, of course, victory. When the announcer names the winner over the megaphone, it is as though someone very dear and close to you gently stroked your cheek. In 1934, Kovac was at the peak of his career. By that point, he had broken the Czech women's record in the 800 meters. Later that year, he'd break the women's world record in the 800 and win gold at the women's world games.

But instead of being able to celebrate these wins, Kovac was inundated with accusations. In his memoir, he writes about receiving anonymous letters accusing him of being a man in disguise. And about newspaper columnists and other athletes who would make comments about his physique, here referring to himself in the third person. It was said in jest that she wasn't a girl, but a boy with the devil in her body. And he even talks about being stopped at a border crossing. At passport control, an inspector was taken aback

by Zdenka's masculine appearance. Kovac returned from the 1934 Women's World Games a national hero of women's athletics. But privately, Kovac had been struggling for years with his gender. Once the 1934 season ended, he began quietly contacting lawyers and doctors in his home country and started the process of transitioning. Which brings us back to November of 1935, when the story broke in Prague newspapers announcing Zdeněk Kóbek's name and gender change. Czechoslovakian world champion track star will shortly become a man. Here, finally, in black and white newsprint, was the proof that the men in charge of sports had been seeking.

To them, Kovac represented everything that was wrong with women's sports. In response to Kovac's public transition, many of these men jumped at the chance to weigh in. One of them was a prominent Nazi sports doctor named Wilhelm Knoll. He wrote an op-ed in the magazine Sport. Accusing Kubek of being a fraud and insinuating that he in some way had been cheating the whole time. And Knoll wasn't alone in his complaints. Here's Lindsay Piper again. They point to Kubek and say, see, if you compete in elite sport, look what can happen to you.

Sport will turn you into a man. Some people believed that Quebec represented a threat to real women on the track. The manager of the Canadian women's Olympic team, a woman named Alexandrine Gibb, wrote that it was not fun to watch the games, quote, when you were there and saw real feminine Canadian girls forced to compete against that sort of a mannish athlete in track and field events, end quote. Those real women had to be protected. And so in August of 1936, a year after Kobeck's public announcement, the governing body of track and field instituted a new policy. As far as we know, this was the

first ever official rule on paper that allowed sports governors to pull aside female athletes and examine them. And the rule went like this, as read by Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians. If a protest concerns questions of a physical nature, the organization responsible for carrying through the meat shall arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert. The athlete must submit to the inspections as well as the decision taking on account thereof. Yeah, so what does that actually mean? It really, to some extent, doesn't mean anything.

It can mean whatever these officials want it to mean. It's really, we'll know it when we see it. It's not a one-to-one to today, but I do think what Noel is really doing is creating a script that we're living out in various forms sort of later in the 20th century today. The organization responsible for this policy, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, is now known as World Athletics. That's the same organization that passed regulations requiring Christine to alter her body if she wants to compete. For decades, a series of vague policies like this hung over women's sports. Sex testing happened in the shadows, mostly on a case-by-case basis, without any official

guidance from sports officials about who exactly they were trying to keep out. But then, in the 1960s, a new era of sex testing began. It was the Cold War, and tensions were high between the Soviets and the West. The rivalry was playing out in all kinds of places. In space, in research labs, in the press, and in sports. And the women of the Eastern Bloc decimated the West. They were bigger, faster, and stronger. Here's how the New York Times News Service wrote about some of them at the 1964 Olympics.

A shot and discus double was achieved by Tamara Press, who's big enough to play tackle for the Chicago Bears. At the rate the Bears are going this season, they could probably use her too. There had been a lot of ideas swirling around about the appearances of the Soviet athletes. There's an unfortunate number of quotes where a female athlete say something along the lines of, well, just look at her. There's no way. Here's Sheila Lerwell, a British highjumper, speaking with the British Library for an oral history project. We came from an era that had all these big, beefy Russian girls. And they were, oh God, they were gross. They really were. Did you think these are blokes or did you think they were on drugs?

No, drugs. Wouldn't have known what a drug was. I would have said they were just freaks of nature. Some of these women were probably doping. Lots of people were at the time, including Europeans and Americans. And so the big sporting organizations established medical commissions and gave these commissions two main tasks. Figure out what to do about doping and handle their so-called sex control. They're given oversight of both. And you can see some examples where the members don't really know the difference. They think that some of these doping tests will prevent male imposters. So you have this surge in suspicion that some athletes aren't really women.

And you also have the establishment of doping tests at competitions where everybody is potentially being tested for something. So why not throw a little sex testing in there, after 30 years of case-by-case, suspicion-based testing, the governing body of track and field rolled out a new policy. Mandatory examinations of all female athletes. Today, Summer Sound of Sports visits the 8th British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. Everything is so soft and warm and lush. Beautiful. Carol Martin was 18 when she landed in Jamaica to compete in the 1966 Commonwealth Games. This was her first ever international competition. And I mean, hello.

That was a little bit of a high. But then again, I didn't know anything from anything. and I was just there having a good time, right? And she was there to throw the discus. Let me tell you, you don't want to choke when you're throwing the discus because it won't go anywhere if you're tight at all. You have to be loose as a goose, fast as blazes, and stronger than, you know, a pit bull. But before Carol was allowed to throw a single disc, she had to be examined to make sure she was actually a woman. I remember we were taken under the stands before the competition into a large room and had to pull my pants down in front of this woman

so she could see I had a vagina. These inspections have come to be known as the nude parades, or as some of the athletes called them at the time, peek and poke tests. I remember thinking, what the fuck is this? And I was a nice person. I never said that at the time, but I remember thinking, whoa, this seems a little invasive. This seems a little inappropriate. I mean, can't you see I'm a girl? in elite athletics in 1966 and 1967 had to undergo this exam. Those who refused were not allowed to compete. And to this day, people argue that refusing to show up for a nude parade was an admission of guilt, when in fact, we have no idea if the women who didn't want to be peeked and poked were guilty of anything other than embarrassment. Nude parades only lasted two years. They were, unsurprisingly, deeply unpopular. Many athletes from the era have since spoken about how humiliating and terrible they were.

Sporting bodies knew that if they insisted on testing everybody to verify their sex, they would have to come up with another way. Something less invasive and more reliable. Something objective, ideally, that was beyond reproach or accusations of bias. And they were in luck, because science was about to deliver something that seemed like salvation. Coming up, sports thinks it has found the perfect scientific test that could tell once and for all who was male and who was female. And then we got to carry a card that said, I am female. You've been listening to Tested from CBC, NPR's Embedded, and Bucket of Eels. The show is written, reported, and hosted by me, Rose Evelyn. Editing by Allison McAdam and Veronica Simmons.

Production by Ozzy Linus Goodman, Andrew Mambo, and Raina Cohen. Additional development, reporting, producing, and editing by Lisa Pollock. Sound design by Mitra Kaboli. Our production manager is Michael Kamel. Anna Ashite is our digital producer. This series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman. Our intersex script consultant is Hans Lindahl.

Legal support from Beverly Davis. And archival research by Hilary Dan. The voice actors you heard in this episode were Loretta Chang, Keith Houston, Amir Nakjavani, and M. Solarova. Special thanks to Sonia Erekinan, Sharon Kinney-Hansen, Elaine Tanner, and Soundworks Recording Studio. Special thanks also to Yeezer. Additional audio from World Athletics and CBC. At CBC, Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez are executive producers. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. At NPR, Katie Simon is supervising editor for Embedded. Irene Noguchi is executive producer.

NPR's senior vice president for podcasting is Colin Campbell. We got legal support from Micah Ratner and Ashley Messenger. And thanks to NPR's managing editor for standards and practices, Tony Cavan. This series was created with support from a New America Fellowship. If you want to learn more about anything you've heard on the show, see behind-the-scenes stuff, and keep up with what's happening to these athletes right now, go to

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