The Sports Binary: The Restrictive Practice of Sex Verification Testing

Even before Olympic athletes became subject to mandatory “gender verification testing” in 1968, Olympic officials had already begun the process of gender testing decades before, singling out women considered too “strong” or “masculine.” The practice of sex testing, still in use though no longer mandatory, has led to the disqualification of a number of athletes from the Olympic games, even going so far as to strip competitors of their medals. In this Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program newsletter — 2022 New America National Fellow Rose Eveleth discusses the evolving field of audio production and podcasting, and her forthcoming project, a podcast titled TESTED, detailing the past, present, and future of sex testing in sports. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the world's best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Your Fellows project, a podcast titled TESTED, will focus on the practice of gender verification testing in athletics. Was there one particular story that drew you to explore this issue?

I’ve been following this problem since 2006, when I read about how Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of her medals after a sex verification test. The news story I read was incredibly short, and I remember thinking, “wait, what is a ‘sex verification test’?” From there, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this issue and the many athletes who’ve been impacted by it.

During the Olympics this summer, criticism emerged around the physical, mental, and emotional strain athletes undergo in training and competition. How do you hope TESTED will inform the discourse around what we expect from our athletes going forward?

Professional athletes are already pushing themselves to the brink of human capabilities. That’s why we tune in, to see them do things that nobody has ever done before. Put on top of that the scrutiny that the media and fans place on athletes for everything from their relationships, to their facial expressions, to, in the case of my project, their gender, and it’s enough to break even the strongest people in the world. More than one athlete has committed/attempted suicide due to gender verification policies. A lot of what TESTED is about is the idea of fairness and ethics, and who gets to decide, and it’s important for us to remember that these are human beings whose health and well-being have to come before tradition, entertainment, and the egos of those running international sporting bodies.

You’ve dedicated your career to audio production and podcasting, which is a field that's changed dramatically over the last decade. How do you think the landscape is different for audio journalists today from what it was when you first started?

I can rant about this for hours — and have, sorry to my friends — but I’ll try to keep it short. The landscape is wildly different than when I started. It’s much more difficult to break in and succeed as an independent podcaster now than it was before. Hollywood believes that podcasting is a “cheap” and “easy” way to test out IP and is thus flooding the audio world with half-baked ideas that they simply want to option back to film or television. For those with huge platforms already, podcasting seems like a great additional way to make money. For those trying to push the medium forward, it is far more challenging than it once was.

The eclectic mix of topics you’ve reported on range from finding the perfectly grown pepper to chronicling an all-female polar expedition. What about a subject makes it good fodder for audio stories?

I’m drawn to stories where people are trying to figure something out. Whether that’s who they are, and what they want (as in the case of the all-female polar expedition), or how to engineer something really specific (as in the peppers). I love documenting people in the middle of a puzzle. Hearing people think and try and understand something in real time can be so satisfying in audio because you’re hearing them grapple with hard questions and try to work their way to an answer.

If you could recommend one podcast that everyone should absolutely listen to, what would you recommend, and why?

This is the hardest question! There are so many different kinds of podcasts out there it’s hard to recommend one single one. So I’m going to cheat and recommend two, one fiction show and one nonfiction. On the fiction front, Forest 404 remains one of my favorites in a long time. For nonfiction, Floodlines deserves all the praise it gets. And if you want a bit of an older cut: I recently re-listened to No Feeling is Final and I highly recommend it as well. Okay that’s three, but it’s hard to pick just one!

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