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Member FDIC. Welcome

0:34

back to Tested. This is episode two.

0:37

And just so you know, there is one

0:39

bad word in this episode. Let's

0:42

begin in the summer of 1928. Almost

0:47

100 years ago now. That

0:49

August, the Olympics was held in Amsterdam,

0:52

and almost every day the Olympic stadium

0:54

was packed with fans. And

0:57

those fans were watching something historic. This

1:00

was the first Olympics where women were

1:02

allowed to compete in track and field.

1:07

Women had been allowed in the Olympics before 1928.

1:10

They could play tennis or swim, sports

1:13

that were considered delicate and feminine.

1:16

But track and field had always

1:18

been completely off limits. And

1:22

on August 2nd, a particularly

1:24

exciting race happened. The

1:26

800 meters. Two laps.

1:29

Half a mile. This was

1:31

the longest distance women were allowed

1:33

to run. There

1:38

is some silent footage from the race that

1:40

still survives. And as the camera pans across

1:42

the crowd, you can see fans cheering, waving

1:44

hats and leaning over the railings to get

1:46

a better look. The

1:49

gun goes off, and the women round the

1:51

first bend as a pack, looking strong. Over

1:54

the two laps around the track, the group

1:57

mostly stays together. But coming

1:59

out of the final bend, and Linda

2:01

Radke from Germany pulls ahead and manages

2:03

to outkick her competitors and come away

2:06

with the gold. ["The

2:13

Gold shield

2:16

metrics and incredible success. The

2:19

first three women came across the

2:21

line in world record-breaking times. But

2:25

it wasn't the multiple world records

2:27

that made an impression on newspaper

2:29

reporters and sports officials. It

2:31

was the fact that the women looked tired

2:35

after doing it. A

2:38

few of the women put their arms over their

2:40

heads or on their knees. One

2:42

falls to the ground and gets back up

2:44

with some help. If

2:46

you've ever watched a race on a track,

2:49

it's all fairly normal stuff.

2:52

But that is not how the

2:54

newspapers reported it. The

2:56

800 meters race yesterday for women was

2:58

a disgrace. The first five women crossing

3:01

the finish line collapsed. They burst into

3:03

tears, falling onto the grass unconscious. Very

3:05

feminine traits. Even this distance makes too

3:07

great a call on feminine strength. It

3:14

seems as though these reporters were

3:16

seeing what they expected to see.

3:19

Evidence of all the fears they

3:21

already had about women competing in

3:23

sports. It was too

3:25

taxing, too grueling, too

3:28

manly. In

3:30

the wake of this race, sports officials

3:32

considered banning all athletics for

3:34

women. Athletics being the term

3:36

most of the world uses for track and

3:38

field. But eventually, they decided

3:41

that that was perhaps a bit much.

3:43

So they simply banned the 800. Women

3:46

were not allowed to run the half

3:48

mile at the Olympics again until 1960.

3:58

The history of women's sports

4:00

is full of men doubting

4:02

women's sports. But it's

4:04

more than just being skeptical of

4:06

women as athletes, or the marketability

4:08

of women's sports, or even whether

4:11

sports might damage women's health. From

4:14

the very beginning of women's inclusion

4:16

in the Olympics, the

4:18

men in charge doubted that they

4:20

were even women at all. From

4:23

CBC and NPR's Embedded, this

4:25

is Tested. I'm

4:28

Rose Evelyn. Tested. This

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6:00

Money, power, tacos, white colacron,

6:02

green parts, black reparations. More of

6:05

the perspectives that make your world a

6:07

more vibrant place. NPR podcasts,

6:09

more voices, all ears. Find NPR

6:12

wherever you get your podcasts. After

6:17

winning an Olympic silver medal in Tokyo in

6:19

the summer of 2021, Christine

6:22

Boma went on an absolute tear

6:24

in the 200 beaters. She

6:27

won in Nairobi. I feel he's giving

6:29

them a run for the money, but it is in

6:31

Boma pulling away. Brussels. Boma will take

6:33

the win. Zurich. She's charging,

6:35

her mother's coming very, very quickly,

6:38

and she just gets it on the line.

6:41

Christine ended the 2021 season with 10 200-meter wins. And

6:46

Boma for the victory, and Boma. But

6:50

with every victory came a hint

6:52

of something else. At

6:56

that time, the rules for athletes with differences

6:59

of sex development, or DSDs,

7:01

said that they couldn't race the middle distances. 400,

7:03

800, and the mile. Christine

7:08

had planned to run the 400 in Tokyo. It

7:11

was her primary race. But

7:14

a few weeks before the games, after

7:16

those tests we told you about, she

7:19

learned that she was now considered a

7:21

DSD athlete, which meant that she

7:23

wasn't allowed to run the four in Tokyo. So

7:26

she dropped out and enrolled in the two. Doing

7:29

so essentially meant outing herself as

7:31

a DSD athlete, because

7:33

anybody who was paying attention to track knew

7:36

that there was really only one reason she

7:38

would drop out of the 400. And

7:41

so suddenly, Christine went from an amazing

7:44

runner to an amazing runner with

7:46

an asterisk. A

7:48

lot of people felt, oh

7:50

well, that explains, huh? This

7:53

is Celestine Karony, the BBC Africa

7:55

reporter. It's the wording in

7:57

the narrative of how we tell her story.

7:59

story as well. If then she

8:02

becomes this athlete that every time we speak

8:04

about her, we speak about, well,

8:07

you see, she's

8:09

still fast despite. Sometimes

8:12

the announcers calling these races would

8:14

explicitly note Christine's status as a

8:16

DSD athlete. We're going

8:19

to see Christine Obama from Namibia, one of

8:21

the DSD athletes. We've had to change event,

8:24

couldn't run in the 400. In

8:26

the comments under videos of her races,

8:28

you see some people saying things like,

8:30

Boma is a man, and

8:32

Christine is one lucky dude.

8:35

Now that they knew that Christine

8:37

had high testosterone, these people

8:40

credited her entire success to it,

8:42

not her training or mentality

8:45

or dedication, but her

8:47

hormones. Christine's fastest

8:49

200 meter time is 21.78 seconds, which

8:51

despite what these commenters online

8:57

might say, isn't even

8:59

close to the men's times. In

9:02

fact, she would still lose to

9:04

the fastest high school boys in the

9:06

United States. And

9:09

yet, watching these races

9:11

in 2021, there was this

9:13

pervasive sense that Christine was

9:15

on borrowed time. The

9:19

announcers at the race in Zurich even say

9:21

so out loud. If Boma

9:24

continues like this, there's a lot of

9:26

questions as to what world athletics will

9:28

do going forward now that Boma, for

9:31

instance, is running at lesser distances. One

9:35

online commenter said that the

9:37

organization governing track and field

9:39

shouldn't allow, quote, this charade

9:41

to continue too much longer.

9:45

Christine told me that the only thing she could

9:47

do was try her best and try

9:49

to ignore all of the people online telling

9:52

her that she was too fast to be

9:54

a girl, too good that

9:56

she had to secretly be a man. And

9:59

it turns out, that idea that

10:01

elite women are actually secretly men

10:04

goes all the way back to

10:06

the very beginning of women's competition

10:08

in sports. When

10:14

I started researching the history of gender

10:16

verification policies over 10 years ago, one

10:19

of the first and most surprising

10:21

things I learned was that sex-testing

10:23

policies are not new. In 1928,

10:27

in the Olympics I was

10:29

just telling you about, people immediately

10:31

started pointing fingers at athletes,

10:33

accusing them of being too

10:36

manly. That's

10:41

how newspapers wrote about Hitomi Kinwe, the woman

10:43

who won silver in that 800 meter race.

10:47

Another reporter said that Hitomi was

10:49

taken aside and examined to make

10:51

sure she was actually a woman.

10:54

A few years later, the American

10:57

Helen Stevens was hit with the

10:59

same accusations. Polish scribe Douts

11:01

Helen Stevens' sex, claims she runs too

11:03

fast to be normal woman. In

11:06

response to these accusations, American officials

11:08

put out a statement saying that

11:10

they had indeed verified that Helen

11:13

was a woman. That

11:16

same year, 1936, the governing

11:19

body of track and field created

11:21

the first official policy

11:23

on the books to

11:25

allow for examination of

11:27

suspicious women. And

11:30

for years I've wanted to understand why.

11:33

Why did these sports officials decide it

11:36

was necessary to confirm a woman's sex

11:38

in the first place? What

11:40

were they so worried about? What were

11:42

they trying to achieve? Okay

11:48

so we are walking into

11:50

the Olympic campus I would

11:52

say. To

11:55

try and answer that question, producer

11:57

Ozzy, Linus Goodman and I went

11:59

to swim. Switzerland, to the Olympic

12:02

Studies Center in Lausanne. Okay, let's

12:04

see what is this thing saying. The grounds

12:06

are meticulously maintained and covered

12:08

in statues, mostly of men.

12:12

Uh, of a naked man, a naked muscular man. But

12:16

there are a few women. Oh, there's

12:18

a lady holding the Olympic rings. Very

12:21

prominent nipples. Yes,

12:24

the Olympic Studies Center. Your

12:26

source for Olympic knowledge. Oh, here we are. The

12:29

Olympic Studies Center houses over a million

12:32

pages of archival documents, going all the

12:34

way back to the very beginning of

12:36

the modern Olympics in 1894. We

12:40

spent a week there, in a

12:42

cozy and extremely quiet little room

12:45

looking out onto Lake Geneva, going

12:47

through thousands of pages of old

12:49

meeting minutes and correspondences. Folders

12:52

and folders and folders of

12:54

delicate, sometimes hundred-year-old paper, all

12:57

organized into sometimes confusingly

12:59

labeled boxes. Am

13:01

I doing this wrong? Is it page? Oh

13:04

no, it's box number 99. Not

13:06

page number 99. Here we go. I'm

13:09

gonna figure this out eventually. Leaping

13:12

through these folders, we found a

13:14

whole lot of procedural discussions within

13:16

the International Olympic Committee, peppered

13:19

with backslapping. Language like, We

13:21

are very glad and satisfied with the work which has

13:24

been done here. People with goodwill

13:26

have assembled from all parts of the world

13:28

to carry out a noble ideal. You

13:31

also get a sense of this tight-knit group

13:33

that made up the IOC over the years.

13:36

Some of this is people being invited to

13:38

Edwardo Hay's birthday party and saying they can't

13:40

come. And

13:42

from the very beginning, these committee members had

13:44

a few key things in common. They

13:47

were all men. The first woman

13:49

wouldn't be appointed to the IOC until 1981.

13:53

And they all had money. And

13:55

not just like, regular money. Old

13:58

money. I mean, they're kings who are members of the United

14:00

States. of the IOC, they're princes who are members of the

14:02

IOC, and then they're just kind of

14:04

like titled nobility, often with wealth going

14:06

back centuries. This is Michael

14:08

Waters, author of a recent book called

14:10

The Other Olympians. He went

14:13

to the archives too, with a similar mission, to

14:16

try and find explanations for why

14:18

sports officials were so adamant that

14:20

they had to check the sex

14:22

of female athletes. And

14:25

he never found any, neither did

14:27

Ozzy and I. But I

14:29

checked all the other correspondence files where it might

14:32

be, and it wasn't in there. Yeah, I'm

14:34

looking to see if there's just like When they

14:36

do talk about sex testing, they do so vaguely.

14:40

The only thing we found from

14:42

these early days that directly referenced

14:45

these women is a letter from 1936, from

14:48

a man named Avery Brundage. He

14:51

was the president of the American Olympic

14:53

Committee. The letter referenced

14:56

female, question mark, athletes.

14:58

And Brundage wrote that he felt

15:01

compelled to pass along a correspondence

15:03

he'd received, in which an

15:05

observer describes a woman's appearance, called

15:07

her a borderline case, and went on

15:10

to say, rules should

15:12

be made to keep the competitive

15:14

games for normal, feminine girls, and

15:17

not monstrosities. Other

15:20

than that, mentions

15:22

of sex testing in the archive

15:24

from this era are sparse. Here's

15:27

Meghan Waters again. I mean,

15:30

it's kind of a wild experience where you're

15:32

going through this like folder after folder of

15:35

just dozens and dozens of letters arguing

15:37

about the rules around like

15:39

how much an athlete could get paid as

15:42

a travel stipend. But then when it comes

15:44

to this policy around sex testing that we're

15:46

really living with today, it's

15:48

really just a few letters back and forth. I

15:50

mean, there just wasn't very much thought at all

15:52

into it. But after talking to

15:54

a bunch of historians who taught me how

15:57

to read between the lines of these stories, documents,

16:01

I can say that the men in

16:03

charge of sports seemed to be concerned

16:05

about three different things. The

16:08

first was straight up cheaters, men

16:11

dressing up as women and sneaking

16:13

into women's sports to win medals.

16:17

The second was this idea that

16:19

women who did sports might actually

16:21

turn into men, which was

16:23

a thing they really thought could happen. And

16:27

the third was the most complicated,

16:30

this idea that women who were drawn

16:32

to sport, women who wanted to compete,

16:35

were actually not really women in

16:37

the first place. But

16:41

I couldn't find any set of

16:43

letters or meeting minutes in which

16:45

they untangle these things or grapple

16:47

with the fact that they aren't

16:50

all the same, not

16:52

in the IOC archives, nor in any

16:54

of the records I was able to

16:56

see from track and field history. The

16:59

experts I talked to about

17:01

this told me that probably

17:03

that's because these conversations weren't

17:05

happening at official meetings. You

17:08

know, they had some very close friendship that

17:10

evolved around beer drinking. They

17:12

would meet in a hotel lobby or

17:14

wherever it would be and would gather

17:16

and chat. This is Jorg

17:18

Krieger, a sports historian and the

17:20

author of Power and Politics in

17:22

World Athletics. And in his

17:25

research, he found that these men in the 1930s

17:28

literally called these get-togethers the beer

17:30

drinking society. So we can only

17:33

imagine how they talked about, you

17:35

know, these women in those informal

17:37

settings. So they didn't

17:39

write this stuff down. But there

17:42

are a few bits of context that

17:44

can help us all understand their worldview

17:46

a little bit better. The

17:50

first thing to know is that ideas

17:52

around sex and gender were really different

17:54

in the early 1900s. Scientists

17:57

were just starting to figure out.

26:00

broke in Prague newspapers, announcing

26:02

Zdeniek Kobek's name and gender

26:04

change. Checo-Slavakian world champion

26:06

track star will shortly become a

26:09

man. Here, finally,

26:11

in black and white newsprint, was the

26:13

proof that the men in charge of

26:15

sports had been seeking. To

26:17

them, Kobek represented everything that

26:19

was wrong with women's sports.

26:25

In response to Kobek's public transition,

26:28

many of these men jumped at the chance to

26:30

weigh in. One of them

26:32

was a prominent Nazi sports doctor named

26:34

Wilhelm Noll. He wrote an

26:36

op-ed in the magazine, Sport. Accusing Kobek

26:38

of being a fraud and

26:40

insinuating that he, in some way,

26:43

had been cheating the whole time. And

26:45

Noll wasn't alone in his complaints.

26:48

Here's Lindsey Piper again. They

26:51

point to Kobek and say, see, if

26:53

you compete in elite sport, look what

26:55

can happen to you. Sport

26:57

will turn you into a man. Some

27:01

people believed that Kobek represented a

27:03

threat to real women on the

27:06

track. The manager of the

27:08

Canadian women's Olympic team, a woman named

27:10

Alexandrine Gibb, wrote that it was not

27:12

fun to watch the games, quote, when

27:15

you were there and saw real

27:17

feminine Canadian girls forced to compete

27:19

against that sort of a manish

27:21

athlete in track and field events,

27:24

end quote. Those

27:26

real women had to

27:28

be protected. And

27:31

so in August of 1936, a

27:34

year after Kobek's public announcement, the

27:37

governing body of track and field instituted

27:39

a new policy. As

27:41

far as we know, this was

27:44

the first ever official rule on

27:46

paper that allowed sports governors to

27:48

pull aside female athletes and examine

27:50

them. And the rule

27:52

went like this, as read by

27:55

Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians.

27:58

If a protest concerns questions of a... to

32:00

compete in the 1966 Commonwealth Games. This

32:04

was her first ever international

32:06

competition. And I mean,

32:08

hello? That was a little bit of a hi. But

32:11

then again, I didn't know anything from anything, and I

32:13

was just there having a good time, right? And

32:16

she was there to throw the discus. Let

32:19

me tell you, you don't want to choke when

32:21

you're throwing the discus because it won't go anywhere

32:23

if you're tight at all. You have to be

32:25

loose as a goose, fast as

32:27

blazes and stronger than, you know, a

32:29

pit bull. But before Carol

32:31

was allowed to throw a single disc, she

32:34

had to be examined to make sure she

32:36

was actually a woman. I

32:39

remember we were taken under the

32:42

stands before the

32:44

competition into a

32:46

large room and had to pull my pants

32:48

down in front of this woman so she

32:50

could see I had a vagina. These

32:53

inspections have come to be known as

32:55

the nude parades, or as

32:58

some of the athletes called them at the time,

33:00

peak and poke tests. I

33:03

remember thinking, what

33:06

the fuck is this? And

33:09

I was a nice person. I never said

33:12

that at the time, but I remember thinking,

33:15

whoa, this seems a

33:17

little invasive. This seems

33:19

a little inappropriate. I

33:21

mean, can't you see I'm a girl? Every

33:26

single woman who competed in elite athletics in

33:28

1966 and 1967 had to undergo this exam.

33:35

Those who refused were not allowed

33:37

to compete. And to

33:39

this day, people argue that refusing to

33:41

show up for a nude parade was

33:43

an admission of guilt. When

33:46

in fact, we have no idea if

33:48

the women who didn't want to be

33:50

peaked and poked were guilty

33:52

of anything other than embarrassment.

33:55

Another program

34:00

Nude parades only lasted two

34:02

years. They were,

34:04

unsurprisingly, deeply unpopular. Many

34:07

athletes from the era have since spoken

34:10

about how humiliating and terrible they were.

34:14

Sporting bodies knew that if they

34:16

insisted on testing everybody to verify

34:18

their sex, they

34:20

would have to come up with another way. Something

34:23

less invasive and more

34:25

reliable. Something

34:28

objective, ideally, that was beyond

34:30

reproach or accusations of bias.

34:34

And they were in luck, because

34:36

science was about to deliver

34:39

something that seemed like salvation.

34:45

Coming up, sports thinks it

34:47

has found the perfect scientific test

34:50

that could tell, once and for

34:52

all, who was male and

34:54

who was female. And then

34:56

we got to carry a card that said, I

34:58

am female. You've

35:03

been listening to Tested from CBC,

35:05

NPR's Embedded and Bucket of Eels.

35:08

The show is written, reported and hosted

35:10

by me, Rose Evelyn. Editing

35:13

by Alison McAdam and Veronica Simmons. Production

35:15

by Ozzy, Lena Scudman, Andrew Mambo and

35:18

Reina Cohen. Additional development,

35:20

reporting, producing and editing by

35:22

Lisa Pollack. Sound design

35:24

by Mitra Kaboli. Our production

35:26

manager is Michael Kamel. Anna Ashite

35:28

is our digital producer. This

35:30

series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

35:33

Fact-checking by Danya Suleiman. Our Intersex

35:35

Script Consultant is Hans Lindahl. Legal

35:38

support from Beverly Davis. And archival research

35:40

by Hilary Dan. The

35:43

voice actors you heard in this

35:45

episode were Loretta Chang, Keith Houston,

35:47

Amir Nakhjavani and M. Solorova. Special

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35:52

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