Abstract
Over the past 25-30 years, a number of journal articles and books have been published on the history of sex testing, offer a critique of the various methods employed to determine sex/gender, or provide a feminist criticism of sex testing/gender verification policies. Moreover, white papers published in medical journals have outlined the limits of scientific technologies to determine sex/gender. Scholars aware of this extant literature will find much of the historical trajectory, critique, and argument outlined in Sex Testing quite familiar. Sex Testing: Gender Policing in Women’s Sports by Lindsay Parks Pieper collates this research, providing an exhaustive history of sex testing policies in international sports competition from the 1930s to the 2000s. Driven by fears of men posing as women in athletic competition, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other international and national sports governing bodies developed, implemented, and defended testing athletes in women’s competitions, ostensibly to ensure fairness and a level playing field. Similar to arguments put forth previously by feminist scholars, Sex Testing illustrates how nationalism, particularly during the Cold War, gender ideologies, including the notion of female physical inferiority, and notions of the sex/gender binary shaped sex testing policies and justified their continued use, despite objections by the medical community.
Echoing prior feminist research, Sex Testing’s central thesis is that sex testing policies upheld white, heteronormative, Western notions of femininity and were shaped by the gendered beliefs of those in decision-making positions of power in the IOC and International Association of Athletics Federations; beliefs that persisted across decades. While the historical and political context shifts across the time frame under examination, as well as the science of sex and the technologies available, what remains relatively stable are the Western cultural assumptions regarding womanhood, the sex/gender binary, notions of female physical inferiority, and male dominance in sport. Sex Testing “demonstrates society’s deeply rooted concerns about female athletes’ appropriate place in physical contests” (p. 10).
Sex Testing offers a chronologically driven history of sex testing policies, outlining the context for sports governing bodies’ justification and legitimation of the policies. The book weaves cultural assumptions regarding sex/gender (upheld by the IOC and other sports governing bodies), the political climate, particularly Cold War anxieties, and the role sports played in providing a site for displays of nationalism in the battle between communism and capitalism, advances in science and technology that both shape and contain the possibilities for determining sex, alongside the impact and effect on the development of women’s sports and the opportunities of female athletes.
While various aspects of this history have been provided elsewhere, Sex Testing provides an in-depth examination pulling this literature together. It also uncovers less familiar accounts of sex testing controversies. Moreover, Sex Testing rights the historical record in several cases, for example, regarding German high jumper, Heinrich/Dora Ratjen, who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. It has been commonly believed Ratjen was a male masquerading as a woman at the behest of Adolf Hitler in order to demonstrate the ascendancy and superiority of Nazism and the white race, or to prevent Jewish track and field athlete Gretel Bergmann from the 1936 Games. Yet, confusion regarding Ratjen’s sex at birth, as well as police documents that outline the Nazi party’s ignorance, challenge this account. Moreover, a legal proceeding following the Olympics determined there was no fraud and indeed Ratjen had never been told she was male. We also learn of transgender athlete participation in the 1930s, specifically two European athletes who had competed as women in track and field and subsequently underwent sex reassignment surgeries. For the IOC, transgender/sexual athletes “provided evidence of the masculinizing effects of track and field, and increased the demands for sex control in international sport” (p. 31).
Sociology of gender scholars will find the book of interest given its historical evidence of the ways in which sex testing reflected “larger cultural perceptions of womanhood” in the twentieth century. Moreover, it provides thorough illustration of the ways in which, as Anne Fausto Sterling asserted, “only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex” (p. 63). While the relationship between science and feminism has been fraught (e.g., androcentric bias in research, the marginalization of women in medicine, the silencing of women’s scientific achievements), readers new to the history of sex testing may be surprised to learn that the most vocal and persistent advocates against the use of sex testing were geneticists, endocrinologists, and other scientific and medical professionals. Conversely, Sex Testing cites research that found female athletes overwhelmingly appreciate sex testing policies in part because of their lack of knowledge of the limits of science to determine sex, and also as a result of their desire to both prove their heteronormative femininity and to ensure a “level playing field.”