Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ideology of sex verification in international elite athletics.

Paper long abstract:

The institution of elite athletics is not generally a site of socially progressive dynamics. Despite this fact, or in part precisely because of it, the crisis of sex verification disrupts longstanding presumptions about sex-dichotomy. This paper examines how elite athletics exposes the strange difficulties of scientific attempts to verify a female athlete's sex. Given the rather stubborn performance gap between male and female world records across a range of athletic events (consistently, male athletes are 10% faster), various techniques and technologies have been in place since the 1930s to verify sex in order to ensure fairness in competition.

Despite its initial promise, genetic testing failed to secure effective means for verifying sex difference; more recent methods therefore look to endogamous testosterone production in order to differentiate sex and physical capacity. However, in response to the banning of female athletes diagnosed with "hyperandrogenism," a 2015 law suit successfully challenged the very commitment of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to define "woman" for the purposes of sport. The very shift in focus from genes to hormones dramatizes the key point that the markers of male/female are not reducible to biology alone but rather emerge out of biosocial discourse. These markers, moreover, are demanding, since they require—in contingent, contradictory ways—that genes, androgens or other measurable elements provide the burden of proof for "sex."