In 1948 Foekje Dillema seemed to be well on her way to international fame. Born in a poor village near Friesland, in the Netherlands, Dillema grew up in a bed she shared with three of her sisters. To earn money for her family, she began working as a domestic servant before she was even a teenager. By the time she was 22, however, she had set out on a path to bigger things: That year, she shocked sports watchers when she ran the 100-meter sprint in 12.7 seconds. Dutch officials whispered that she could reach the Olympics.
Her first major event, two years later, was the European Championships—a pre-Olympic event governed by the track-and-field association, the International Amateur Athletic Federation (today’s World Athletics). Dillema seemed likely to sweep. There was just one problem. The IAAF had a new policy on the books requiring that all women receive a doctor’s note validating that they were “female” before they could compete. The test was crude and hardly scientific, involving stripping before a gynecologist. When Dillema refused to sit for a sex test, the Dutch Athletic Union summarily disqualified her. A representative told the press that “due to a medical condition Foekje would never be able to compete again.” It would take decades for Dutch sports fans to discover that their rising star disappeared from sports not because of an injury or an illness but because of a sex test. To protect her privacy, Dutch officials had simply kept the incident quiet.
Today you’re probably familiar with a few high-profile athletes who’ve been disqualified from the Olympics over sex testing: Caster Semenya, perhaps Dutee Chand. But the athletes whose names we know about represent only a tiny sliver of the women and transfeminine people disqualified under the Olympics’ sex-testing policies. Stories like Dillema’s are likely much more widespread than we realize—cases of athletes on the rise who are quietly sidelined out of sports for failing or refusing a sex test. The evidence in the archives suggests, in fact, that sex testing had bearing not just on the Olympics; these mandates actively shaped who could make it in even the lower rungs of the sporting world. Countless women like Dillema were pushed aside long before they could even get to that hallowed highest competition. And as we approach the 33rd games this summer in Paris, that history of disqualification should give us pause. Sex testing has not only denied immensely talented athletes a chance to appear before fans, but also enshrined a troubling precedent of surveillance into sport itself.
“I think it goes pretty deep,” Lindsay Parks Pieper, a professor of sports management at the University of Lynchburg and the author of Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports, told me over the phone. “I have concerns that there are a lot more individuals who were disqualified before they even made it to [the Olympics].”
Part of the difficulty in knowing is the total secrecy of disqualifications. After sports federations publicly expelled Poland’s Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967 for failing a chromosome test, they adopted a policy of strict confidentiality. Athletes would be tested ahead of the Olympics, and if they failed, they would be sent home without comment. The rule was about protecting privacy, but it had the effect of rendering the real scope of sex testing invisible.
When I started researching my book, The Other Olympians, on the origins of sex testing and the way it informs the contemporary battle over trans and intersex people in sport, I had hoped to pull together data on just how many athletes have been affected by these policies. I was surprised to learn that no such number exists. We do have the estimate, based on population-level genealogical patterns and not hard evidence, that 1 in every 504 Olympic athletes has failed a sex test. But the International Olympic Committee has never publicly acknowledged how many athletes it disqualified for failing to meet its highly subjective (and ever-changing) definition of female. What seems like a simple question—how many people had their careers cut short because of sex tests?—is apparently unanswerable.
By Michael Waters. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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What we know, however, doesn’t look good. The first type of disqualification is the better documented kind: the athletes who made it all the way to international competitions only to be dismissed for failing a sex test right before they could compete. The archival evidence suggests that these cases were more common than the public has ever really known. In one tantalizing letter written in 1967, David Burghley—the head of the IAAF—proudly stated that at the European Championships, the IAAF had “managed to keep out six who were hermaphrodites” and was on track to “frighten the doubtful ones away.” Who were those athletes? We don’t know their names.
I found other letters like this in the International Olympic Committee archives. A document outlining sex tests at the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, implies that one athlete of the 217 who were tested failed the test. Pieper, meanwhile, located a letter she shared with me from IOC Medical Commission member Eduardo Hay. In 1981 Hay wrote that he knew of “about a dozen cases” of athletes failing sex tests over the past decade and a half. Rather than broadcast that they had failed the test, these athletes simply faked an injury and left their sports. Hay later said—seemingly guessing—that the number of disqualified athletes was around “one to two per Olympics.”
Rose Eveleth, host of the forthcoming podcast Tested, which explores the history of sex testing in elite sports, told me that many Olympic athletes knew of people who were dismissed for failing a test. “The athletes we talked to, all of them knew at least one person who had been sent home,” Eveleth said. “We talked to an athlete named Debbie Brill, who is a Canadian athlete. She said that she knew several women who were told to go home at the 1970 Commonwealth Games and then later at the Olympics.”
Yet the effects of sex-testing policies go much deeper than just the Olympic hopefuls who were turned away. The true goal of the project was a kind of trickle-down enforcement: In 1968 Alexandre de Mérode, the head of the IOC Medical Commission, assuredly reported that at that year’s Olympics, “there were several competitors who stayed home rather than risk being checked.” Sex testing wasn’t solely about keeping already high-achieving intersex and trans women from competing in the Olympics. It was a punitive policy designed to discourage intersex and trans women from ever attempting to pursue elite sports in the first place. The tests, in other words, were a big, flashing sign that they weren’t welcome.
There’s plenty of evidence that it worked. Sometime in the 1980s, a sports doctor reached out to Albert de la Chapelle, a Finnish geneticist who had repeatedly criticized the IOC’s sex-testing policies, and told him a disconcerting story. A young female skier, de la Chapelle learned, was given a chromosome test and determined to be ineligible because she was found to have XY chromosomes (as part of androgen insensitivity syndrome). “Her coach had told her she should not try to make a career in skiing, and I could do little to help her, because she would indeed always ‘fail’ in the IOC’s tests,” de la Chapelle wrote in a letter to de Mérode. He relayed this because to him the story felt symbolic. “This woman represents the invisible part of the iceberg: those numerous unfortunate women who are subjected to sex chromatin screening and eliminated from sports long before they reach a major competition.” De la Chapelle knew enough to understand that the skier was far from alone in that regard. “There must be hundreds if not thousands of women who have been silently shuffled aside this way,” he said.
When Pieper discovered this letter in the archives, it unsettled her. For decades, certain federations have tested even teenage athletes, effectively cutting short their careers if—for one reason or another—a test flagged them as insufficiently female. Pieper told me she has been researching the archives of the volleyball federation, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball. According to the professor, the FIVB began sex testing adult athletes in 1974. “By 1977, they were testing at the Juniors,” Pieper said. The FIVB even had suggestions for what young athletes should do if they failed a sex test. When results were inconclusive, the FIVB told federations, “those athletes should fake an injury or pretend to be sick,” Pieper said. More recently, Eveleth pointed me toward the former professional golfer Kendra Little, who identifies as intersex and who decided to quit golf rather than face down the inevitable scrutiny about her gender.
That many young athletes—trans, intersex, or cis—may have been, for decades, pulled out of elite sports for failing sex tests is already troubling. But it is especially damaging when you consider how astonishingly subjective the tests themselves were. The sexed nature of the human body exists on a spectrum: As one endocrinologist put it to journalist Katie Barnes, sex is the result of the complex “interplay and the collective of your sex chromosomes, sex hormones, your internal reproductive structures, and what gonads you have, and your external genitalia.” Yet sports officials have, since 1936, invented and reinvented ways to enforce a strict binary anyway. The first rendition of sex testing involved crude gynecological exams, like the one Dillema refused to take part in. By the 1960s, sports officials embraced chromosome testing, but this too received criticism from scientists. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to have a difference in sex development, for example, and never even know it. The pivot to hormone testing presents its own problems, seeing as all women have a natural range of testosterone levels.
Today, these long-running efforts to keep trans and intersex women out of sports have become a mainstream political weapon. Twenty-three states now restrict the ability of trans girls and women to participate in school sports. It is the more explicit and draconian version of what has been playing out, again and again, throughout competitive sports for over half a century: Trans and intersex athletes, and potentially others who failed these highly subjective tests, are being pushed out of sports before they even get a chance to become stars.
If there is a lesson the history can offer us, it is that these policies have a way of hiding their casualties. Just because we don’t know the names of the girls who are told to fake an injury and never play again doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. But while understanding the scope of the damage can sharpen a critique of these policies, we shouldn’t get too lost in the math. Sex testing is inhumane, whether it affects four people or 4,000.
“There’s something about the numbers game that I always sort of struggle with because, like, how many people need to go through this in order for it to be not OK?” Eveleth said. Sex testing, they noted, “is the canary in the coal mine for what we’re allowing people to tell us about ourselves. That this organization and their scientists and doctors can tell you who you are,” they said, referring to athletic federations—that is a dark signal of our times no matter what. For it to matter, “there doesn’t need to be 1,000 impacted by that.”