For over 100 years, women in elite sports have been sex-tested to verify that they’re actually women. A new podcast from NPR’s Embedded and CBC digs into that history and how it affects women’s athletics today.
It’s titled, “Tested: A Surprising History of Women’s Sports.” Hosted by Rose Eveleth, the podcast speaks with athletes, scientists, historians and doctors to explore the question: What’s fair, and who decides?
The first episode comes out July 15, and new episodes will drop in NPR’s Embedded feed every Monday and Thursday.
WUFT’s Kristin Moorehead spoke with Eveleth about the show.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kristin Moorehead: What inspired this series? Why did you decide to tell this story, and why now?
Rose Eveleth: I'm a huge sports nerd. I love sports. I've been a sports player and watcher forever. And I'm also a science person. I came across the case of Castor Semenya, who in 2009 ran this incredible race in Berlin at the World Championships and won. And instead of being able to celebrate this victory, was immediately sort of thrust into this media circus around these ideas and allegations that she was somehow not really a woman, and that she had this unfair advantage because she was somehow male-like.
I remember just doing this reading and being like, ‘What?’ Like, what does that mean? Like, what are we talking about? Like, why are people saying these things? And so, from there, I started getting quite obsessed with this story, so I've been on it for a while.
KM: I listened to the first two episodes. The series follows a Namibian track star, Christine Mboma. Why does the story start with her, and how does her story fit into the larger picture?
RE: I started with Christine because she's kind of the modern face of this, whether she likes it or not. I think she would probably prefer to not be the modern face of this. She would like to be able to just run.
She won a silver medal in Tokyo in the 200 meters, and she is an athlete who is impacted by these most recent regulations, so called DSD regulations, differences of sex development regulations. I think she's just a great example of an athlete who sort of bursts onto the scene, has a really promising start to her career, and then is kind of told, ‘Oh, actually, you can't run without restrictions, you can't run the races you want to race, you can't run unless you do this, unless you do that, unless you change your biology.’
Which is something that so few other runners ever have to deal with. And she's been on this quest to make it to Paris to get back to the Olympics, now having changed her biology, taking these medications, altering her body's chemistry so that she can comply with the rules. She is one of a handful of athletes who have been trying to comply with these new regulations that came out last year, and so we wanted to start with her.
Throughout the series, you'll meet a bunch of other athletes as well, some of whom have said, ‘No, I'm not going to take these drugs. I want to challenge these rules for trying to go to court.’ You'll meet athletes who have given up, who have said, ‘this is just too much and I just need to go find something else to do,’ sort of walked away. But Christine is kind of the most successful and high profile of the modern athletes since Castor, with her silver medal in Tokyo.
KM: And the last question I wanted to ask you is about the title of the podcast. It's called ‘Tested: A Surprising History of Women's Sports.’ What exactly is it about this history that surprised you?
RE: Oh my goodness, so many things. I love women's sports. I've been a women's sports fan for my whole life. And I did not know that women were being sex tested for decades, and had to carry around little femininity cards for 30 years, if you wanted to compete at the Olympics. That just seems so wild to me. And I think a lot of sports fans I've talked to had no idea that that was a thing. And once you see these strings tracing all the way back to the beginning of the Olympics, it's hard to unsee them, and it really makes you think about, I think, our current situation and these current conversations really differently.
That's what I think was really compelling to me in researching this, and I hope that people who listen to it kind of come away with this bigger understanding of like, the world is complicated and messy and also very cool and interesting and these sort of ties to the past are still with us.