At the Paris Olympics, Sex Testing Will Be in Full Force. How Did We Get Here?

Sometime in May 1936, a reporter for The Western Morning News, a newspaper based in Plymouth, England, arrived at the doorstep of Mark Weston, a retired shot putter who had embarked on a career as a massage therapist. Mr. Weston brought the reporter into the sitting room, where he handed over a certificate recently signed by his doctor. The certificate stated, “This is to certify that Mr. Mark Weston, who has always been brought up as a female, is a male, and should continue life as such.”

Mr. Weston, born in 1905 in Plymouth, had been labeled a girl for most of his life. Throughout his sports career, he played in women’s leagues. But in early 1936, he began seeing a doctor about living as a man. He checked into Charing Cross Hospital for what turned out to be two sex-reassignment operations — one in April, another in May. Mr. Weston explained to the reporter, “I realize I am now in my true element.”

The Morning News published its article on May 28, 1936, under the headline “Devon Woman Athlete Who Has Become a Man.” Compared with the contentious discussion of trans and intersex athletes today, the article and the coverage that followed were striking for their empathy. The paper focused on explaining how a gender transition like Mr. Weston’s was possible. But eventually, the focus shifted. Mr. Weston’s story made its way to two prominent sports officials — a sports doctor who often advised federations on medical matters and a member of what was then the International Amateur Athletic Federation and is today World Athletics, the track-and-field federation — who responded by drafting early iterations of its modern sex testing policies, the first of their kind in contemporary sports. Mr. Weston did not want to return to sports, much less women’s sports, but the officials worried that gender transitions like his would poke holes in existing male and female categories. Since then, international sports bodies have continued to deny or restrict opportunities for trans and intersex athletes to compete at the highest level, in some cases barring them from competition completely — all for failing to meet a subjective definition of “female.”

When I first encountered this historical coverage of Mr. Weston, I saw that we had missed a chance to chart an alternate path — to organize sports without the regimes of gender surveillance that dominate it today. We still have an opportunity, though, to design policies that acknowledge male and female sports categories as imperfect and permeable and that place the humanity and dignity of athletes first and foremost.

Advocates of sex-testing policies cloak themselves in the guise of fairness; they exist, proponents claim, to exclude anyone with a perceived biological advantage in women’s sports. That group ranges from trans women, who are banned from most major sports even after undergoing a medical transition, to many cisgender and intersex women who have not undergone any medical transition but who have testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women. Yet little evidence supports the idea that these women have physical advantages, in strength or otherwise, over other women.

These sex testing policies also fail to acknowledge natural variations in human bodies. There’s no single way to cleave people into binary categories, but that hasn’t stopped sports officials from trying.

The requirements for female athletes have shifted over the eras, from crude strip searching to chromosome testing to hormone testing. At each juncture, sports federations have constructed their subjective definitions of femaleness and pushed out anyone who doesn’t fit. The latest example is Lia Thomas, who was blocked from trying out for the Olympics because World Aquatics, the federation that oversees swimming, essentially bars all trans women from competing in the women’s category. Farther back, World Athletics excluded the Kenyan sprinting star Maximila Imali because of her naturally elevated testosterone levels; track athletes like Caster Semenya of South Africa and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi have also been told they may not compete in women’s sports.

This summer at the Paris Olympics, sex testing policies will be in some ways even more extreme than in years past. Because the International Olympic Committee has elected not to enforce an overarching rule, the individual federations that govern Olympic sports are now left to their own devices. Though the I.O.C. has projected a goal of greater inclusion (notably in this statement, released in 2021, asserting its commitment to “fairness, inclusion and nondiscrimination” in Olympic sport), few of the federations have listened. Some, like World Athletics, whose president, Sebastian Coe, recently reinforced his group’s commitment to the restrictive policies, have all but banned trans and intersex women from the women’s competitions. Often these women are allowed to compete only with men — not a realistic or desirable possibility.

Mr. Weston, who was shy and soft-spoken, made for an unconventional celebrity. During his athletic career, he was known across England for his shot putting success but never broke out on the international stage. After claiming gold in an English field competition, he qualified twice for the Women’s World Games, a global competition that rivaled the Olympics in scale. But he didn’t medal in the 1926 or 1930 events. Outside of sports, he kept to himself.

That all changed after the Western Morning News article, when suddenly Mr. Weston was gracing the pages of international newspapers.

Part of what brought him so much media coverage is that he was not the only athlete to transition that year. A few months earlier, in December, Zdenek Koubek — a Czech athlete who had also gone to the Women’s World Games — publicly announced his desire to live as a man, too. Readers couldn’t get enough of the two athletes. Above all, people seemed curious about how it was possible for someone to move between sex categories.

That empathy didn’t extend to everyone. When Avery Brundage, an American sports official who was about to serve on the I.O.C., read the news about Mr. Weston, he worried that “hermaphrodites” were participating in women’s sports. He wrote to the head of the committee to make a case for physical screenings of female athletes. “It might be well to insist on a medical examination before participation in the Olympic Games,” he wrote. That Mr. Weston had retired from sports and expressed no desire to play in women’s sports seemed beside the point.

The I.O.C. elected to kick the proposal to the International Amateur Athletic Federation — the sports organization that was then overseeing track-and-field sports, of which Mr. Brundage was also a prominent member. In August 1936 the federation allowed female athletes who suspected that their competitors did not adhere to traditional notions of their gender to lodge a protest against them. Afterward, that athlete would endure “physical inspection made by a medical expert.” The federation did not detail what that inspection would entail.

Sports officials thought they’d accomplished something important, but few others agreed. A columnist for The New York Daily News wrote that the sex testing policies risked kicking off “a deadly virus” of suspicion that “will affect us all.” The paper joked that if Cleopatra and Helen of Troy had been alive in the 1930s, the Olympics would have singled them out for sex tests. Ted Meredith, an American track star, also aired his displeasure. “When the situation reaches a point where it is necessary to subject athletes to an examination to prove whether they sing bass or soprano,” Mr. Meredith said, “the subject becomes not only ridiculous but nauseous.”

Years later, the I.O.C. adopted a version of the International Amateur Athletic Federation policy and found itself repeatedly answering for the holes in its rules. In 1967, when the Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska was disqualified for having, as the press put it, “one chromosome too many,” the head of the Polish Olympic Committee tore into the I.O.C., including Mr. Brundage. It didn’t make sense, he said, especially because “there are no generally accepted criteria of sex for woman athletes.” The I.O.C. shouldn’t decide who would be eligible for competition with such “arbitrariness,” he added.

Doctors at the time knew full well that biological sex existed on a spectrum, with no single trait — from chromosomes to internal organs to genitalia — demarcating a universal difference between the sexes. Yet sports officials never detailed what their criteria for “man” and “woman” would be. They seemed to believe that they would know an outlier when they saw one.

Regulating elite sports, which typically relies on binary categories in competition, in a way that acknowledges our current understanding of gender as fluid is certainly complicated. But the current system — in which trans and intersex women are simply turned away, with no path for inclusion — isn’t working. Certain sports, like figure skating and some skiing competitions, probably don’t need to be divided by sex. These divides may make more sense in other sports. But if we do lean on sex categories, we have to accept that they are messy and imperfect. Ultimately, all athletes should have a realistic path to participation in their lived gender category. The days of cruelly stripping athletes of their right to play need to end.

If sports officials in 1936 and after had been guided by the spirit of genuine curiosity that permeated newspaper coverage of athletes like Mr. Weston, we wouldn’t have wasted nearly a century banning athletes simply for being who they are.

Michael Waters is the author of “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.”

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