JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
This week women's boxing suddenly began generating headlines. An Algerian boxer defeated her Italian opponent, and some on social media cried foul. That's because the International Boxing Association had last year disqualified the Algerian boxer from the world championships. They claim she'd failed some unspecified test and wasn't eligible to compete in the women's category. If you are wondering what this is all about, you're not alone. There is a long but little-known history of gender tests targeting women in elite sports. And a new podcast series called Tested from NPR's Embedded and CBC in Canad, examines that history. Host Rose Eveleth takes us back to a time when all elite female athletes faced mandatory examinations.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Today Summer Sound of Sports visits the 8th British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
ROSE EVELETH, BYLINE: Carol Martin was 18 when she landed in Jamaica to compete in the 1966 Commonwealth Games. This was her first-ever international competition.
CAROL MARTIN: And, I mean, hello. That was a little bit of a high. But then again, I didn't know anything from anything, and I was just there having a good time, right?
EVELETH: And she was there to throw the discus.
MARTIN: Let me tell you you don't want to choke when you're throwing the discus because it won't go anywhere if you're tight at all. You have to be loose as a goose, fast as blazes and stronger than, you know, a pitbull.
EVELETH: But before Carol was allowed to throw a single disc, she had to be examined to make sure she was actually a woman.
MARTIN: I remember we were taken under the stands before the competition into a large room and had to pull my pants down in front of this woman so she could see I had a vagina.
EVELETH: These inspections have come to be known as the nude parades or, as some of the athletes called them at the time, peek-and-poke tests.
MARTIN: I remember thinking, what the [expletive] is this? And I was a nice person. I never said that at the time, but I remember thinking, whoa, this seems a little invasive. This seems a little inappropriate. I mean, can't you see I'm a girl?
EVELETH: Every single woman who competed in elite athletics in 1966 and 1967 had to undergo this exam. Those who refused were not allowed to compete. These so-called nude parades were just one in a long stream of methods that sports authorities have used over time to try and verify that female athletes are really female. And the reasoning behind those tests changed over time, too. The core connecting idea behind them was this. Some women simply didn't seem like women to the people in charge of sports. So they needed a way to check.
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EVELETH: Nude parades only lasted two years. They were, unsurprisingly, deeply unpopular. Many athletes from the era have since spoken about how humiliating and terrible they were. The governing bodies that ran sports knew that if they insisted on testing everybody to verify their sex, they would have to come up with another way, something less invasive and more reliable, something objective, ideally, that was beyond reproach or accusations of bias. And they were in luck because science was about to deliver something that seemed like salvation - genetics.
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WALTER CRONKITE: It has been said that when the history of science in this century is written, the first half will have been the study of things - the automobile, airplane, rocket. The second half will be the study of living things - the cell, the chromosome, the gene.
EVELETH: Let's take a trip to a lab in Ontario, Canada, to visit a mild-mannered medical researcher named Dr. Murray Barr. Dr. Barr studied the science of sex.
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MURRAY BARR: We found that a certain condition that occurs only in males was very interesting from the cellular point of view.
EVELETH: In 1948, Barr made a discovery. He was looking at cat cells under the microscope, and he happened to notice that in the nucleus of some cells, there was a small, dark dot. Upon further examination, he realized that the dots coincided with the cat's sex. Female cats had the dots. Male cats did not. These little dots became known as Barr bodies.
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EVELETH: In the 1960s, genetics captured the public imagination. People became enamored with this idea that our genes determined everything about us, which is exactly what sports needed - a scientific test to tell who was really a woman and who was not.
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EVELETH: So they turned to Murray Barr's little dots because those little dots tell you if a cell has two X chromosomes. You only really need one. So if you have two Xs, one of them becomes inactive and makes a little dark spot inside every one of your cells. And to the leaders of sports, it was perfect. All they had to do was collect some cells from an athlete, look at them under a microscope and that's it - females and males, neatly sorted into tidy little piles of slides. And so in 1967, the governing body of track and field replaced nude parades with the Barr body test.
DEBBIE BRILL: It was just a little classroom, basically, where you walked in and they had somebody just doing cheek scrapings and lining up the test tubes of cheek scrapings.
EVELETH: That's Debbie Brill, the reigning Canadian high jump record holder. In 1970, Debbie went to Edinburgh and competed in the Commonwealth Games.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Canada's Debbie Brill, the gold medal winner in the high jump.
EVELETH: But before Debbie could win her gold, she had to go through sex testing.
BRILL: I think every young girl felt a little anxious about what was going to come up there, you know, 'cause a lot of us were tomboys, and we were athletic, you know? And we were more athletic than all the other girls that we knew, so there was some anxiety around what the test was going to show.
EVELETH: For Debbie, it wound up being worry over nothing. She passed. And like every other woman who passed, she was handed a very important document.
BRILL: We got to carry a card that said, I am female (laughter).
EVELETH: These cards were called certificates of femininity.
Yeah. And the card - can you describe it for us? What is the card like?
BRILL: Yeah. It was a little tiny card, like a business card. Here's my business card. I'm female. I can do this job.
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EVELETH: From 1968 to 1999, for more than 30 years, every woman who competed in the Olympics in every single sport had to take a chromosome test and get one of these little cards verifying that they were female. And they had to bring this card with them if they wanted to compete. And ending that practice would be quite a battle.
SUMMERS: That was Rose Eveleth, the host of Tested, a six-part podcast from NPR's Embedded and CBC in Canada. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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