Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This message comes from Carvana. Sell your car the convenient way. Enter your license plate or VIN, answer a few questions, and get a real offer in seconds. Go to Carvana.com today. Hi, Invisibilia listeners. I'm Rose Eveleth, the host of a new series from the Embedded Podcast, NPR's home for serialized documentary storytelling, and our partner, CBC in Canada.
The series is called Tested, and I want you to hear it because it shares some DNA with Invisibilia. The show explores an idea that might be familiar to long-time listeners: the impulse to categorize. To stick people in boxes in order to make sense of the world. In this case, those boxes are the gender binary: male and female.
Tested is about sex testing in elite sports, a practice that has a long, sordid history. And that is still happening today. If you paid attention to the Summer Olympics in Paris, you probably heard about the so-called scandal involving two female boxers. These two women, who both went on to win gold in their weight classes, were inundated with hateful commentary. All of these untrue claims that they are somehow men, unfairly beating up on women.
But where do these accusations come from? Why do they keep happening? Tested has a lot of answers for that. And none of them are easy. My reporting focused on track and field, but these big questions affect pretty much all elite sports. So we're going to be dropping the first two episodes of Tested here. And you can hear the whole six-part series in NPR's embedded podcast feed now. Here is episode one.
Sometimes the best way to begin a complicated story is to start with something very simple. So, a fable. It begins at the end of the 19th century with a little French man with a very large mustache named Pierre de Coubertin. De Coubertin was full of ideas and schemes, many of which didn't pan out, like his passion for a strange new sport, fencing, but on horseback.
But eventually, after much persistence, one of his odd ideas caught hold. A reimagining of a glorious gathering of ancient Greece. Every four years, the most athletic men would travel from far and wide to celebrate what made them men. Strength. Endurance. Power. It was the modern Olympics. But then, de Coubertin encountered a challenge. Women.
They wanted to compete in the Games. But again and again, de Coubertin turned them away. What is the appeal of that, he said? Women competing in the Games would be impractical, uninteresting, ungainly, and I do not hesitate to add, improper. The Olympics were for men, and men alone.
But eventually, the women were impossible to ignore. And nearly a hundred years ago, the Coubertin and the members of his International Olympic Committee let women into the Games. But they did so with a very specific condition. A new category, just for women. Men over here, women over there. Problem solved.
When the men of the Olympics created a women's category, they did not, in fact, solve their problems. They only created new ones. Here's the thing. If you're going to insist on having men's sports and women's sports, you have to know who's who. You have to have a way of separating the sexes.
The men thought this would be easy. But almost immediately, some of the athletes who showed up to compete did not fit their notions of what a woman should be. They were too strong, too fast, too competitive. Some men questioned whether they were really women at all. Sports authorities have now spent the past century devising and revising rules.
creating tests to tell the difference between men and women, tests that defy biology and don't really work. Over the years, thousands of women athletes have been asked to prove that they were women. And today, a new generation of elite female competitors is facing a similar challenge with a new twist.
They're being asked by sports authorities to do something many doctors don't even consider ethical. Manipulate their biology in order to compete as women. From CBC and NPR's Embedded, this is Tested. I'm Rose Evelyn. There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately.
16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been a Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been a Minute podcast on NPR.
Hey, it's A. Martinez. I work on a news show. And yeah, the news can feel like a lot on any given day. But you just can't ignore las noticias when important world-changing events are happening. So that is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories so you can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen to the Up First podcast from NPR.
There is a lot happening right now in the world of economics. You may have heard about the president's desire for a sovereign wealth fund. If your country is small, well-governed and has a surplus, it is probably a good idea. We are not any of those. We're here to cover federal buyouts, the cost of deportation and so much more. Tune in to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. This past January, I traveled to Namibia to meet an athlete named Christine Boma.
In a lot of ways, she's a normal 21-year-old. Shy, funny, obsessed with her dogs. She's also one of the fastest women in the entire world. Even announcers seem extra excited watching her run. Charging, coming very, very quickly. And she just gets it on the line. 21.
In Namibia, Christine is a superstar. Her face is absolutely everywhere on murals and posters and signs, the cover of magazines, T-shirts for sale on the street. She's even name-dropped in a song called Silent Hero by Yeezer, one of the hottest rappers in Namibia right now.
Christine got this famous by becoming the first woman in Namibia to ever win an Olympic medal. In 2021, she took the silver medal in the 200-meter dash. And she did it when she was just 18 years old. But I flew all the way from California to Namibia not only because of that.
I also went because Christine has become, in some ways, the latest and most prominent athlete to be told by sports authorities that she actually falls on the wrong side of the line separating the men's and women's categories. We'll get to that soon. But meeting Christine, you'd never really know that she has a hundred years of sports policy hanging over her head. Okay, where are we?
We're driving through Christine's hometown, a small village called Shingyongwe in the northernmost part of Namibia. It took us about eight hours to get here from the capital where she now lives.
At one point, Christine takes me to a small beach along the Kavango River. There are kids playing in the water in their underwear while their parents lean against their cars and watch. What can you tell me about Boma? She's a superhuman. Yeah. Uh-huh. She's a superhuman. Uh...
Hello. Can I ask you a question? Do you know Christine Boma? Yeah. Is she famous around here? Yeah. Yeah? She's so famous. Why is she famous? Because she's Boma. Did you watch when she won in the Olympics? Mm-hmm. What was that like? It was so fast. So fast? Yeah? Do you want to meet Christine and Boma? Yeah. She's right over there. But how can I go like this?
Yeah. Do you want to come meet her? Most of the people I met along the Cavango River remember Christine as a little girl, playing with her friends. It's surreal, they told me, to be watching her on the big stage, competing all over the world.
It's something that really makes you feel, man, you belong to something. And everybody is proud. At a point, she's an inspiration to the young ones. Growing up here in rural Namibia, Christine did not have big dreams of athletic superstardom. Her father abandoned the family when she was very young. And when she was just 13, her mother died during childbirth.
She's forced to really grow up because then she has to care for her two younger siblings. In fact, she even says, when you talk to her, she says, they are my kids. She calls them my kids. This is Celestine Karony, a BBC Africa reporter who has been covering track and field for years.
She had this period of her life, you know, where she socially, she felt alone, you know. But then she found sport. She found athletics. And she was excelling. She was doing well. When I'm running, I feel good. I feel good. Like when I was at the village, when my mom passed on, things changed. People that love you when your mom was dead.
They now don't love you and you've lost friends. That's why I was into sport. Every time when I go and play netball and every time when I go and run, I just feel like I forgot about things people say to me or things that are happening to me. Running helped me a lot with stress and all that stuff, like depression, because I lost my mom when I was 13.
Christine didn't really get serious about running until she met a coach named Henk Bota. Christine came to me by accident and somebody asked me whether I would look and see whether she can perform. And my first thought was, I don't think she's going to make it. People were saying that I'm still small and skinny, that I'm not able to run with the people in the winter. They said that? Yeah.
But once they got onto the track, Hank realized that he and everybody else were wrong. After the first session of training, I said to my brother, actually, I said to him, this is something special. Pretty soon, Hank and Christine would make Namibian history. Tokyo, August 2021. Christine has managed to make it all the way to the 200-meter final at the Olympics.
Here we go. The setting is ready for the final of the women's 200 meters. And what an unbelievably deep field we have for this group of fleet-footed women.
Making it to an Olympic final is always a huge deal. But making it to the 200-meter final in 2021 was extra impressive. Because in 2021, the 200 meters for women was absolutely stacked with talent. People like Marie-Josée Talu, Gabby Thomas. Of course, you had the Jamaicans come out and, of course, Shelly Ann Fraser-Price, you know, with her flaming hair. And everybody is just looking at, oh, can Mommy Rocket get another, you know, gold medal?
Celestine Koroni, the BBC Africa reporter, was at that final in Tokyo. And everybody's wondering, well, will it be Jamaicans and Americans? Will it be Jamaicans and another Caribbean? I will honestly say, coming into this final, I did not give Christine a chance.
Amidst all these legends, nobody really thought much about Christine Boma, which, if we want to be generous, might be part of the reason so many announcers pronounce her name wrong. I've heard Bomba, Mamba, Mbamba, but just so we're clear, her last name is Boma.
Here's the other 18-year-old from Namibia, Christine Mbama. Christine wasn't the only Namibian in that race. Her teammate, Beatrice Masalingi, was there too. Hank was coaching both of them. The starting blocks in Tokyo were different than the ones they were used to. Bigger and fancier, with built-in electronics to sense a false start.
And so before the race, Henk gave both Namibians, Beatrice and Christine, one big piece of advice. I said to them, please don't false start. And maybe from my side, it was also a rookie mistake. I think they were so scared to do a false start that they were so slow out of the Bronx. That's my biggest fear. I was like...
Fair.
And they're away in the opening bend, and Talou with her trademark start. Unlike Talou, Christine, terrified to false start, gets out to a really slow beginning. Around the first turn, she's near the back of the pack, and it is not looking good. In fact, she isn't even mentioned in most of the race commentaries I've watched because she's not really a factor in the race for the first 80 meters. I wanted to give up.
In the last 60 meters, Christine passes Marishose Taloo of Ivory Coast, Mujinga Kumbunji from Switzerland, Shellyann Fraser-Price of Jamaica, and then finally, Gabby Thomas of the U.S. Here's Celestine again. At this point, I'm now, I'm standing up. I'm like, Christine is coming into contention. She's making ground, she's making ground. And I remember thinking,
I was shaking. Someone was sitting next to me. I don't remember who it was. I'm like, look, look, look. Christine is going to do it. Christine is going to make it. In the final seconds, Christine rockets past everyone except for one of the Jamaicans. The 18-year-old from Namibia will get the silver. I think she was just as shocked as we were. I was like, where did that come from? And the youngster from...
Namibia with a world junior record, 21-81. At every stage here in Tokyo, she has upped the ante, but there was no one to challenge. And I was so excited when I reached the finish line. I thought I would not be second last or something like that. You really thought you'd be second last? Yeah. At that moment, almost everybody who's of African descent or who's African in that stadium was Namibian.
After the finish, Christine runs to the stands and grabs her coach, Hank, for a huge hug. She whispered in my ears and she said to me, Coach, I'm the boss. And yes, it was just a wonderful moment. I'm the boss. I love that. That is a motivation. She will go down if she's scared or she's got nerves. She'll just tell herself, I'm the boss. I can do it. I'm the boss. I can do it.
When she returned home to Namibia, a marching band met her on the tarmac, along with water cannons. That was 2021. It should have been the beginning of an incredible career for a young, talented athlete. But lurking in the background, something else was happening. Something that had the potential to derail Christine's career entirely.
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In the spring of 2021, before winning the silver in Tokyo, Christine was already having an incredible season. She was racing all over the world, running really impressive times in both the 400 and the 200. But look at Mamba there from Namibia. Quite a strange technique. In June, just a few weeks before the Olympics, Christine ran a race in Poland. And Mamba is absolutely flying. Keep an eye on that clock.
And you don't do this. You're not supposed to do this to world-class athletes. Everybody was like, hold up.
There's a teenager from Namibia running crazy times in the 400 metres. Oh my goodness, 48.56 seconds. The fastest time in the world by over half a second. That is crazy. That is absolutely crazy. And so that is when everybody was like, hmm, you know, like, OK, OK.
Who's this athlete? Where is she from? How does an athlete come from nowhere to run this fast? But she hadn't come out of nowhere. Just because she hadn't run on the international stage, that doesn't mean she came out of nowhere. She came from somewhere. She came from Namibia. Around that same time, Henk says he got a call from someone at World Athletics, the governing body of track and field. He says that the person on the other end of the line told him they needed to test Christine.
Not for doping, but for something else. We had to go to a doctor in Italy. We did some blood tests there and we also did some, I think it was sonar sound imaging with the doctor. What the doctors were looking for wasn't entirely clear to Hank at the time. But somehow, Christine's performances on the track had raised suspicions.
We reached out to World Athletics for this series, but they declined our interview requests.
In an email, they wrote, World Athletics has a longstanding practice not to provide specific comment on any individual or ongoing cases. But I know from Hank and Christine that the results of the tests showed that Christine has naturally higher testosterone levels than most women do. And she was told she has something called a difference of sex development, or DSD. Some people with these kinds of bodies use the term intersex.
This was news to Christine, who, like most people, had never once questioned her biology. But now, with this diagnosis, World Athletics placed Christine into a new category because the organization has spent years developing specific policies governing how track and field should deal with DSD athletes.
The organization believes that some women with DSDs should not be allowed to compete against other women, at least not without additional restrictions. At the time, in 2021, the DSD rules said that Christine could no longer run the so-called middle distances, 400, 800, and the mile.
But she could still run shorter races. So she did. Jenny, I shall be watching the Namibian, Christina Mboma, very carefully. She is, of course, one of those athletes with a DSD question mark hanging over her head. If these rules seem confusing, trust me, it's not just you. They are confusing for athletes and coaches, too. And they keep changing.
In the spring of 2023, World Athletics announced new regulations regarding athletes like Christine. Here's Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics at a press conference. Let me, if I may, now turn to our DSD eligibility. The World's Athletics Council today decided to reduce the testosterone threshold for DSD athletes to 2.5 nanomoles per liter across all our events. ♪
So while before Christine could still run some distances, now she wasn't eligible for any distances. This is where we come to the huge and incredibly hard choice that DSD athletes like Christine are facing. Give up on elite level racing in the female category or alter their biology to lower their testosterone.
Our scientific advice is that six months is the minimum period necessary to ensure their naturally high testosterone levels are no longer giving them an advantage over biological women. Biological women. What does that mean? I'm so glad you asked, because the answer is actually really important. And it requires us to tackle a little bit of science. Maybe you remember high school biology.
Maybe you don't. Maybe you loved dissecting that frog. Or maybe you skipped class completely. But probably, at some point, your teacher did some kind of lesson about human sex biology. And maybe it went a little something like this. We are about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science. The science that deals with the nature of living things through the magic of electronics. We're inviting some of the audience to come along with us and join in.
Question? Is it genes that tell whether a baby will be a boy or a girl? Yes, they do. In every male human being, the 23rd pair of chromosomes is a mismatch. One large partner and one short one. We call them an X chromosome and a Y. In the cells of every female human being, there are two X chromosomes and no Y.
A fertilized egg that has two X's will grow into a girl. One that has an X and a Y can only grow into a boy. Sound familiar? XY equals boy, XX equals girl. And that's that. The two kinds of human beings there are. Like probably a lot of things you and I learned in high school, that's not quite the full picture. So let's try again.
"Question?" "Is it genes that tell whether a baby will be a boy or a girl?" Possibly. You see, there are all kinds of ways that bodies can be configured. Biology is a rich tapestry. Genes are just one of the many threads. Anatomy is another. Hormones are a third. And there is an amazing number of combinations of those things.
You can have a person with XX chromosomes who has a penis and testicles. You can have a person with XY chromosomes who has a vagina. Some women make a ton of testosterone, and some men don't make any at all. The list of combinations and recombinations of these traits goes on and on.
For the physical nature of life around us and all its wonderful variety is a constant marvel to mankind.
Today, doctors and scientists have a much better picture of all the ways that human biological sex can vary. And that's one reason that medical experts often recommend avoiding phrases like biological women, the one you heard Sebastian Coe use earlier. There is no one biological thing that makes someone a woman. And lots of people have a blend of biological traits. It's
It's hard to pin down exactly how prevalent these variations are, but some estimates put the frequency at between 1 and 2 percent of the population. So with all this biology in mind, let's get back to World Athletics. Let me, if I may, now turn to our DSD eligibility.
Their policies regulate DSD athletes. But to make this all a little more confusing, there are lots of conditions that are considered DSDs. And the rules don't apply to all of them. Only a handful, and specifically ones that involve having high levels of naturally occurring testosterone.
To be clear, these are not trans athletes. The athletes in question here were all assigned female at birth. And just like Christine, most say they never suspected that there was anything different about their bodies. But because they have high testosterone, World Athletics believes that they have an unfair advantage over other women.
Here's Sebastian Coe again, the president of World Athletics, in an interview with the British news agency PA Media. My instinct is always to try and keep athletes in competition. And...
Asking those athletes with DSD to reduce their testosterone level so that we can at least try where possible to create a more level playing field was, I felt, the right decision, the right course of action to take for the sport. There's a lot to say about that, and we're going to unpack all of this over the rest of the show.
World Athletics says it has proof of that alleged unfair advantage. But other experts argue that there's no solid evidence. And by the way, as far as we know, it's only women athletes who ever get tested, not men. Hank, Christine's coach, remembers vividly the day the new rules came out. It was March 2023. Somebody sent me a message asking me, did you see this? It was early in the morning with us.
And my first reaction was, I'm not sure if this is true. And obviously when I Googled and then I realized this is the truth. Do you remember that? What was your gut feeling? I was just feeling like, I don't know, I was just disappointed. When Celestine Karony, the BBC reporter, saw the news, the first person she thought about was Christine. And I was like, uh-oh, Christine Karony.
is out of the world championships. Now she was being told the rules have changed, blankets, regulations across all events in athletics. And honestly, I thought to myself, she can't catch a break. So we had to do a lot of tests and we had to do a lot of research and we had different discussions with Christina on different options and stuff that we need to try and explain to her.
Christine was just 19 when this all went down. So Hank worked with her to make this big, hard choice. He and his wife, Elise, who is a doctor, explained to her what her medical options were to lower her testosterone levels.
One of those options was surgery. Some people with DSDs have internal testes, which is the reason they have high testosterone levels. Surgery would remove those organs from her body, but that's a permanent change, and she'd have to be on hormone replacement therapy for the rest of her life.
The other option was medication, like oral contraceptives. These drugs have known side effects. Increased risk of blood clots, fatigue, mood changes. Other athletes who've taken them have reported feeling both physically and mentally sluggish and fuzzy. Most doctors we spoke with said they would not prescribe this medication to someone who didn't want or need it.
The World Medical Association, an organization that advises doctors on ethical standards for care, has explicitly come out against World Athletics here, saying that asking women to take medications they do not need purely to qualify for competition in the sex category they already occupy is medically unethical. All this to say, this is a big choice to put on a young runner.
I mean, did you ever consider giving up and stopping running? Was that ever an option? Running isn't just Christine's job. It's everything to her.
Did you ever consider trying to fight World Athletics on the rules? Yeah.
If you are not on the track, you're not earning money. And the career that was supposed to be a 12-year career just become a one-year career. And so, ultimately, Christine opted for the medication. In April of last year, she started taking the drugs. When I was with her in January, she wasn't cleared to compete yet. She still had to prove to World Athletics that she had kept her testosterone levels down consistently for six months.
Once she did that, she'd get a letter from them saying she was once again eligible to compete. And after that, she would only have a short window of time to run in races that would give her a chance to qualify for this summer's Olympics in Paris. Christine is not the only athlete in this position. From my reporting, I'm aware of at least a dozen women right now who are facing the same choice as Christine –
I've traveled around the world to spend time with some of them. And what I learned is that the impact of these policies goes far beyond this one painful choice about surgery or medications. Many of these women have now been outed as different, somehow not real women. Another athlete in this same group, Aminatou Saini, told me that when she returns home to Niger, people come up to her and ask her, are you a woman or a man?
Almost every woman I spoke with for this series who has been impacted by these regulations has a story like this, about people questioning them, telling them they don't deserve their medals or honors. When I was in Namibia, I stopped by the offices of The Namibian, a local news outlet, to talk to radio host Kelvin Chiringa. What is the most common question you get from readers or listeners about Christine?
But no matter what people say, Christine's coach, Hank, believes in her. He's confident that they're going to be able to overcome these obstacles and even with the medication, make it to the Olympics in Paris. And if they do, he's going to want some answers.
You said you're a sore winner. Yeah, I'm a sore winner. What are you going to say to them if you should as well? No, no, to be honest with you, I will wrap it in their faces and they'll have to give me answers. Why, why would you do this? Why would you put this girl through all these things? And it's just, it's a public humiliation because we need to understand that this is the life of somebody. It's not just...
I've been following this topic for over 10 years, ever since I heard about a South African runner named Kaster Semenya who made headlines back in 2009 when athletes, officials, and journalists were
All very publicly questioned whether she was really a woman. The controversy continues this morning about that champion runner from South Africa who's now undergoing a battery of tests to determine if she is really a she. Castor ran the 800 meters, the half mile, which many consider one of the hardest races on the track.
I tend to agree because it was one of my events when I was an extremely not elite runner. And when I saw people saying that this South African woman had an unfair advantage because she was actually sort of, but not really, a man, I thought, what? ♪
I'm a sports nerd and a science journalist, and also someone who loves to crawl into a historical rabbit hole. And what I pretty quickly realized is that this story intersects with all of those things. Because it turns out that sports organizations have been on a century-long pursuit to find a singular, foolproof exam or test that can determine, without a doubt, whether an athlete is female.
And over and over they have failed, with disastrous, career-destroying results. Because of one very important fact. Sports are binary, but human bodies are not. For this series, I've traveled to Germany, Kenya, France, Namibia, Switzerland, and more to try and understand how we got here. So we are in Lausanne. We are...
I've watched women impacted by these policies train and seen how their lives have been upended by a single lab test. I've read tons of research papers and archival documents squirreled away in libraries and in people's closets. I've called scientists and policymakers on all sides, trying to better understand where these rules come from and why some people think they are so essential.
Over the next five episodes, we're going to go on a little ride together. It's a beautiful place, Maasai land. Around the world and back in time. I'm going to follow Christine as she tries to make it back to another Olympics, this time while changing her body's biology. You'll meet athletes who are taking on these policies. I need to keep on fighting for this. And those who have been forced out of sports entirely.
You'll hear historians who have studied this hundred-year history, doctors who are trying to weigh the ethics of it all, and scientists who are trying to figure out what a biological advantage even means and how to study it. And together, we're going to grapple with some big questions. What is fair? Who gets to decide? And what happens to the people left behind? ♪
You don't quit with me. Come on. Christine, come on. We do not quit. You've been listening to Tested from CBC, NPR's Embedded and Bucket of Eels. The show is written, reported and hosted by me, Rose Eveleth.
Editing by Allison McAdam and Veronica Simmons. Production by Ozzy Linas Goodman, Andrew Mambo, and Raina Cohen. Additional reporting, producing, and editing by Lisa Pollock. Sound design by Mitra Kaboli. Our production manager is Michael Kamel. Anna Ashite is our digital producer. This series was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman. Our intersex script consultant is Hans Lindahl.
Legal support from Beverly Davis and archival research by Hilary Dan. Special thanks this episode to Yeezer for letting us use his song, Silent Hero, and Keith Houston, Amir Nakjavani, and Damon Papadopoulos. French translation by Vanessa Nikolai. Special thanks to CBC Licensing. Additional audio from World Athletics and Warner Brothers.
At CBC, Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez are executive producers. Tanya Springer is the senior manager. And Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. At NPR, Katie Simon is supervising editor for Embedded. Irene Noguchi is executive producer. NPR's senior vice president for podcasting is Colin Campbell. We got legal support from Micah Ratner. And thanks to NPR's managing editor for standards and practices, Tony Cabin.
This series was created with support from a New America Fellowship. If you want to learn more about anything you've heard on the show, see behind the scenes stuff, and keep up with what's happening to these athletes now, go to tested-podcast.com. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. Start selling with Shopify today. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Go to shopify.com slash NPR.