Why women's sports have had 'sex testing' (look back to the 1930s)

Reading this forthcoming release: The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters.

The book is about how, in the 1930s, international attention was drawn to four trans men athletes. If their existence seems improbable, there's a cognitive bias at play. The reason that sports authorities, and hence journalists, spotted trans men among athletes is that athletics was a major arena where fascists scrutinized femininity. This was a 1930s thing. It was a hallmark of fascism. In general, trans men tended to be private, but fascist spectacle and power play drove them to the surface.

Casting doubt on athletes

I've previously written about why fascists target gender transition. Fascists don't want us to exist because we disrupt their mythic past.

Now I want to elaborate on that. As I wrote for Gender Identity Today about The Other Olympians:

"If we took literally the accusation of Cis Man in Disguise, cis men athletes would be the villains of that tale. But that’s a superficial understanding. The trope isn’t meant to be taken literally (especially as it’s based on something that doesn't happen). And indeed, no one does take it literally."

If we took the trope literally, we'd be casting skepticism on cis men, and the trope wouldn't serve a transphobic function.

The trope becomes transphobic when someone loosens its meaning and becomes willing to impugn the image of every athlete who isn't a cis man: cis women, intersex people, trans people.

A definition of sex isn't really useful

If you try to define sex, you'll run into complexities like:

1. A given physical trait may be objectively measurable yet may convey no objective advantage in a given sport.
2. The trait may be difficult to assess. (Have you had a chromosome test?)
3. It may be rude to ask for the information, and then it may require effort to manage the privacy of what we've learned, as we generally aren't entitled to know others' intimate physical traits.
4. For all the above reasons, information about someone's sex may have been, and may continue to be, socially irrelevant.

That's my list. It could be expanded.

Unfortunately, once someone proposes a strict definition for sex segregation in sports, they'll feel the need to defend their definition. They'll become less open to admitting the complexities of the topic.

But you must regulate sex, or else

Otherwise, you see, the trans man will gobble up all your sports medals when you aren't looking. This sounds like the trope that Jews will take your money. Never mind whether the trans man might have earned that sports medal or the Jew might have earned that Mark. They weren't to be allowed to have it. Transphobia is linked to antisemitism. It always has been.

The panic started the same year that testosterone was chemically isolated. One of the first things we, as a human species, collectively knew about testosterone is that this hormone, and its effects on the body, is something men said that women shouldn't have. Sports officials (not even biologists) demanded nonsense regulations about "sex testing," and this was part of our early 20th-century awareness of who trans people are and what scientists were about to learn about hormones.

As Waters writes, sports official Avery Brundage "didn't consult doctors or other sports officials on the merits of sex testing. He seemed to conceive of the idea himself, perhaps influenced by the agitations of Wilhelm Knoll, and pushed it through without real consideration of the impacts."

Gender regulation spreads to enforce femininity

Here's part of the story Waters tells:

With the end of the Women's World Games, "the IOC was about to become the primary arbiter of women's sports, which meant the all-male committee could do as it pleased." They didn't like butch women, and "now, if they wanted, they had the power to simply ban masculine women from competing."

On August 10–11, 1936, while the Berlin Olympics were still ongoing, the IAAF met in Berlin. Observing that women's sports had inferior "standing" to men's sports within the IOC, they decided that it cost too much to have a separate organization for women's sports. They approved the former women's records under the FSFI, including Czech athlete Zdeněk Koubek's 800-meter sprint, and then ended the FSFI, declaring that there would be no future Women's World Games. Simultaneously, they approved an amendment allowing for a host organization to "arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert" should any questions be raised about an athlete's physique, and adding that "the athlete must submit to the inspections as well as the decision taken on account thereof." U.S. sprinter Ted Meredith said this IAAF/IOC rule was "not only ridiculous but nauseous." In his view, sex didn't need to be regulated "at all," as Waters put it.

Brundage continued to say things like "I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors," a sport in which their "charms sink to something less than zero." For him, the validity of women's sports continued to be based on whether he found the athletes sexually attractive. At age 84, after 36 years of advocating for sex testing, it started to occur to him that "apparently technical tests are not the answer" to screen out masculine women, and he shrugged off this insight with a joke: "Maybe the eye of a 25 year old would be better." In any case, he claimed that sex testing had resulted in women athletes being "more feminine now."

Brundage was truly something that way — anyway, you need to read this history.

I received a free advance copy from NetGalley.

About me

Tucker Lieberman is the author of Ten Past Noon, a biography of a New Yorker who lived 1901–1940 and tried to write a world history of eunuchs. I often write about transphobia. Subscribe to get an email when I publish stories on Medium.