Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Am a character in this is the sunday story. Today is the new york city marathon. Around fifty thousand runners will be racing in the minds and women's divisions. And this year, for only the third time in the race's history, a number of runners will be competing in the non binary category. The non binary division emerged due to advocacy from trans and non binary athletes, runners like cow colombia.
I'm not a gender woman. I'm not a this gender man. I have so much experience in multiple genders.
Cow is a rising star in this emerging category. He's trains and on binary, and he started his transition back in the last two years. Cow has been advocating for non binary runners and sharing his journey with thousands of social media followers.
But this summer, cow caught the attention of the U. S. Anti doping agency or usada for using a prohibited substance and that to stay strong.
Which cow has been taking for years as part of his gender affirming horn? Theri producer r on a glee has been following cows journey. And today's episode of the sunday story we hear about the process cow went through in order to continue running and competing.
And the larger questions his experience has brought up about gender, fairness and equity and sports. A quick note, and this story will be using key hm pronouns for cow. Cow also uses they them pronouns.
Hi ariana. Welcome officially on air to the pod.
Hi isa. Thank you for having me. So when did you meet cow? I met cow in twenty twenty two.
And at the time he'd just burst onto the running scene, he'd won the same Francesco marathon in the non binary category. And after that, he played second in the chicago and boston marathon's, also in the non binary categories. He was all over social media. Drop your .
transition related questions in the comments, and I respond to his money as I can.
And he was turning into this kind of media darling.
now live everybody coloma good morning on and really .
just stepped into this role of being a new leader in this vacation, non binary running community.
I was just on club nine, the possibility to participate in new binary divisions and then to like rally community to support, to make them Better, and then to to race in them and be in bodied and to win. I just was like, this is, this is .
living cow. You know, during this period was really pretty Frank and open about taking testosterone. But that openness is part of why last summer he found himself on a call with someone from the U. S. Anti duping agency, or usada.
basically the police .
of running you. Sada is the U. S. Branch of the world anti doping agency, and you might know them from the land. Armstrong doing andal and other other as well. What you saw a tells on this call is we've .
been made aware that you are using a prohibited substance, testosterone, a one is prohibited. I sort of just felt panic like i'm in trouble. I'm doing something bad, like why am I dealing with an anti doping agency when i'm not doing?
So so how did they learn about cow where they monitoring like his social media, or something you thought .
is not like some big surveilLance organization keeping tabs on tons of athletes, how things that the way that he got on their radar was actually that he was reported. And as I was digging into that, I found the substantive, a freeLance writer, name's sya. Archer is called the female category, and SHE writes about cow's use of castle stone in this one article.
And I should say that Sarah, in writing about cow, repeatedly mischances him and refers to him as a woman. So I reached out her, and SHE confirmed that, yes, emailed, you saw a about cow, although you thought I would not confirm what prompted them to reach out a cow in the first place. But seras mean argument is that the nonbinding category is essentially unregulated by you saw a, SHE thinks he saw a is overly preoccupied with gender identity and ignoring the real dividing line of sports, which is biological sex. SHE thinks by even letting gender identity into the mix, usada is essentially giving non binary athletes an unfair advantage and allowing them to, in her words, dope with importunity.
basically gaming the system and having people get into a category where IT would be adventures to them.
Yes, cow was extremely bothered by this idea because essentially, you know, she's saying that he's calling himself trans to take us off stone so that he can run faster.
Being trends is a disadvantage, and pretty much every space in society. So what someone really pretend to do IT for some benefit, that is, no, that is digital.
And also, if someone could put him on, you saw as radar like this, could that in danger, other increasingly visible non binary runners?
What would prevent someone like this person from reporting? You know, all of my friends i'm saying, you know, this is a person using a prohibited substance, like they investigate them.
So, so what does happen if you saw A A context cow, what cow finds .
out is that while testosterone is a banned substance, you saw to understand that, you know, there's reasons that people need to take test astern as a medication, not just transport by oasis, man and women. So they have this process for exemptions and that exemption processes called the therapeutic .
use exemption or T U, V. So they're p that that means, I guess, that you needed not for athletic performance, but I guess for a preexisting reason unrelated to to run in or to the sport.
exactly. And so what happens next to? You submitted an application, you saw a reviews that application, and they can approve IT, deny IT or ask you for more information.
In this case, if cow is in approved, IT mean that he could be barred from official races in the united states, like, for example, the chicago marathon or the boston marathon. And I will say that cow is not the first trans or non binary athlete to go through this process. Transit non binary athletes have been getting TV in competing for years. And some people who are familiar with this process said that in an ideal world, cow would have actually initiated the TV application himself instead of having to go through, you know, series of events.
So what is the process? What does the application look like?
The application involves lots and lots and lots of materials. IT calls for a complete medical history, including a psychological .
record and consultation, establishing the diagnoses.
a lab reports reporting the concentration of testosterone one and his body at various intervals in china.
logic report of initiation of hormonal therapy and subsequent hormonal treatments.
a doctors letter detAiling his whole treatment plan, a list of prescriptions that could be relevant to the diagnosis of gender.
Tasha A. A letter written by the athlete describing their personal experience and decision to undergo their medical .
transition and a report of gender firming surgery, which you know doesn't particularly have much to do with testosterone at all.
I mean, that's a lot of paperwork and is deeply personal. So I mean, IT IT is once you saw a, what has this information? Is IT is IT private? You thought .
IT isn't on profit and says all of its information about athletes is confidential. But you know, there there was still something about this process that just felt really invasive to cow.
especially just give him given the current temperature of conversations around trans people's, specifically around trans athletes, just having all that information sitting somewhere makes me feel unsafe. Cow really wants this exemption.
though. So he starts collecting all these materials. He calls doctors, he makes appointments, he writes a personal statement.
He gets friends and his girlfriend to all write supporting letters, saying that he is in fact, trans and does need testosterone. And then he gets to this form. It's the basically the official you saw A T, V application form. There's just a male and a female checkbox.
and there's not even a no binary check box for me to check.
So what did you check?
I just left a blanke.
And the more that cow starts to work on this application, the more that starts to bother him.
The whole thing hinges upon this diagnosis. The idea that being trends is a disorder.
And so cows like, you know what? I'm not sending all the stuff in.
I don't think anyone should have to. I just don't think we should have to.
Cow ultimately decides that he's going to withhold his full psychiatric and medical records and instead substitute and doctors notes and some supplemental material and a the risky decision. But cow decides this is interest about him.
I don't want to a president that this is a Normal amount of information to submit to this agency. To even show up to a race isn't no .
way you're listening .
to the sunday story. After the break, we take a deep dive into the science of tista h drone. And what IT really does.
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We're back with the sunday story. So ariana, so much of what's going on here is sent to around this idea that testacea is a performance enhancing drug. But we all have taste room, right?
Yes, we all have testosterone, and we actually need testa throne to be healthy. So that includes bone development, heart function and liver metabolic. And you know, naturally, there's a lot of variation. There's men with low levels and there's women with high levels in the so called mill range um for our purposes, what's important is that what you saw a bans is synthetic testosterone. So that's the kinds that you would take, not the kind that your body is naturally producing.
okay. So so why is IT being by usaa? You saw a sites.
peer reviewed studies that say tester one can be used as a performance enhancing drug. When I heard about that, I started kind of digging into tests aston's role in athletic performance. Because I was like, weight is that that any amount of testu take is actually performance enhancing. So the conventional narrative that i'm sure we're all familiar with is that when IT comes to stores one, the more you have, the Better of an athlete you are. The stronger you might be, the faster you might be etta, their researchers who support this claim, like karl, who, when she's an evolutionary biologist who spoke last year at a conference hosted by an advocacy group called the independent council on women sports, which argues for the protection of biological sex as the basis for sports competition.
The separation in sports performance with males dominating over women perfectly coincides with the increase in testosterone one.
And there's also a ross tucker, who's a sport scientists cited by sea barker and other advocates.
Biological six is the single most important determinant of athletic performance that we know of. IT is so overwhelmed that if we did not have a category for athletes through our female, we would have .
no females in elite sport. But there are also experts in this field that question these arguments around biological sex and testis drone. I spoke to a train car cases whose an anthropologist and coauthor of the book testosterone, unauthorized biography, SHE, looked at a lot of studies on the effects of testosterone. And what he and other researchers in the field told me was that these studies on test stone show a wide range of results.
Sometimes people with higher levels do Better. Sometimes people with higher levels do the same, and sometimes people with higher levels do worse.
okay. So I mean, we got a kind of dig into that a bit because, I mean, so you're saying that taking to such wrong doesn't like make you into the incredible hok like he does not like all of the site you are running faster. You jump in higher and stuff because you ve got more test.
Yeah no, it's like completely nice, guaranteed, I guess I would say and and it's a really hard assumption to chAllenge actually. And someone I spoke to was saying that getting people to rethink their assumptions about testosterone was like getting people to question whether the sky was blue or not.
So while some scientists point to studies that indicate that teste drone levels are positively linked to avoid performance, there are also studies that showing negative correlation to athletic performance. For example, there was a recent analysis about teenage girls who were olympic weight lifters. And the less test astern the girls had, the more they were able to left. And what I learned was that one big reason, the studies support different arguments is because testosterone, one is actually really, really difficult to study. For one thing, testosterone levels vary a lot even within an individual person.
Testosterone varies by time of day, time months, time of year, time of life.
It's associating so much that it's actually difficult for scientists to say, hey, this is the level of testosterone in your body. And in the second thing is that test aston's binding process is really complicated. Each of our muscles have different testosterone receptors. And when testosterone goes into those receptors, every muscle is responding kind of differently to that.
okay. So this doesn't sound straight forward at all.
It's an eyes. And athletics themselves have so many different factors that go into performance.
So for example, Katrina brought up there are physical factors, like is IT an advantage to be tall and muscular in the sport? Or is IT Better to be sure in light? And then they're like social factors, like where you encourage to do the sport, did you have access to the resources you needed? And of course, you know there is a really hard to measure aspect, which is the psychological part. You know how determined our you can you really stick to IT and that kind of a thing.
So what I hope i'm giving you is IT is a tremendously complicated task to disentangle all of this. And I would argue then IT can be done right now.
What scientists know is that testosterone can have some kind of impact on our bodies, but the question is how much and in what context and under what circumstances? And those are really, really hard answers to get.
So, so IT is not simple. But what about cow? Like, like, did he get faster after taking you know I had .
the same question um and Michelle said was that yes, during this period where he began to transition, he did get faster but also he started training a lie at the time he was trying to realize his child to dream of getting under a five minute .
mile and I remember I ran like five or five and then a few weeks later I tried again and I was like a five one and I was just so frustrated. I was like, i'm so close and I didn't try again for a while. I just kept my head down and I kept training and I kept working really hard. And then maybe about a year ago now, I ran through gold gate park, and I ran at four forty six. And IT was like.
I blew .
IT out of the water. Wow, that I mean, what this this transition like with him taking the test ash room IT sounds like he was also working at the time. He's his he's training. He's not just he wasn't just taken that and doing nothing else.
And also the other thing that he really emphasize to me was after he began transitioning, IT was like this huge psychological weight just got lifted off his shoulders.
It's very hard to untangle. Am I A Better runner now because I take testosterone? Or am I about a runner now because I have a healthy relationship with myself and with running, and therefore I can put in a lot more time and a lot more energy, which yields a greater output.
But I mean, where's the line here? Because i'm sure someone listening may think, oh, but maybe it's because you feel Better about yourself, but maybe that test. So so what is the difference between doping and taking to start room to affirm your enda?
There is actually a really big difference. Um when people are taking testosterone as a performance enhancing drug, they tend to take a large amounts of hormones. They often mix those hormones with other drugs, and those dosages are irregular.
They're typically medal unsupervised. Whereas when people are taking testosterone as a gender firming hormonal erp y, they tend to be taking lower doses, like, for example, calls, text, ste. Roan levels are actually at the low end of a typical melange.
All of those treatments are happening under medical attention. They're happening dreamy regularly, and there they are highly monitored. But I will say that it's hard to answer the question you asked because the truth is that at this time, there is very, very, very little research on how gender firming hormone therapy is impacting trans, masculine and athletes performances.
And so what you have is the situation where testosterone is hard to study and there's huge research gaps. And what ends up happening is that the science of testosterone becomes incredibly politicized and science that really has just been looking at six people or inactive people, is often getting cited in sports policies that govern trans athletes. Something I noticed a lot while reporting the story, is that all these conversations about test aston one gets so wrapped up in the idea of fairness.
And there's really two competing ideas of fairness here. On one side, you have a group of people who say, hey, we want a level playing field and the best way to realize that is through a science driven framework that's about testosterone. And then on the other side, you have another group that saying they also want fairness um but they're like, hey, testosterone science is all over the place. Let's make Better policies so that we can keep sports fair while also keeping its doors open to everyone and allowing them to show up the way they identify. And then you have sports governing bodies like you saw ta that find themselves right in the middle and responsible for making big decisions about this.
When we come back, what does you started decide about cow?
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We're back with the sunday story with producer ariana gables. When we left off with cow, he had decided not to submit everything you thought to ask for. So what happened?
So after kw submitted his application late in the summer, you saw a said, okay, we're gonna get back to you in twenty one days and it's marathon season. So how is kind of waiting with bated breath? And he's already signed up for a bunch of events, including the chicago marathon. And so the way just starts to eat at him.
just like checking my email intently. And these last few months have felt horrible. I've just felt, so far from myself.
the week supposed to hear back. I am checking in with cow every day by text and phone. And at this point, the chicago marathon is just days .
away sitting in yet. And I I I don't know, like i'm very, very confused.
Then the deadline passes and cow hears nothing.
And now it's like i'm starting to feel like are they just not going to say anything?
So until this point, he's been staying quiet on social media about all this. But after the deadline passes, he posted a real on instagram.
Please share this, express your support for myself in other transaction and athletes. I will keep you posted here.
So I decided to call you sada and find out what was going on.
So so what did they tell you? Well.
what they said was that they could not talk about call's case, but they did agree to talk about what cow was most upset about, which was the T. V. With all the medical information requirements. I spoke to Matthew phedre, c, their chief science officer, and honestly, our conversation was a little confusing because on the one hand, they felt like the checklist was set in stone.
The checklist and and the requirements around the T, V, again, are something that is set by the world anti doping agency. So this is, this is based on you objective evidence that with the aim of china, make IT consistent for all athletes are around the world. But on the other.
he acknowledged that you thought I was making an effort to be flexible.
This not a one side fits all approach. It's it's not it's not super, you know, rigid in that know if you're missing one thing of sun, you you're gonna be denied. We're working together with the athlete to make sure that appropriate evidence can be gathered.
okay. So you have this confusing call. But but IT seems like you saw a is also kind of in a tough position, right? Like they have these vocal critics like sea barker who think trans and non binary athletes are getting a free pass, but then they're also getting push back from cow, who's questioning how the whole system works.
Yeah, I mean, i've been thinking about that, and I was running the story by Katrina, a car cases the anthropologist st. You heard from earlier. And SHE made this point that's really stayed with me. He said, you saw as approaching this exemption process by trying to lean on the science.
what's the testoon level? What level do we believe gives somebody advantage? What's thresh hold? Do we let them compete or not?
But maybe that's not what they should be doing.
But if you take a human rights perspective, you don't start with the science, you don't even start with the body persue, you start with the human. What should humans be allowed to do? Should they have the right to bottle the autonomy? Should they have the right to privacy? The answer is yes, we do have these rights. And if you start with that frame, mark, that makes you think really differently, for example, about what car is being asked to pay about their body.
Okay, so what did you thought of finally decide about cow, so called .
flying to chicago to run the marathon and was essentially just hoping for the best? And then a day after I talked to mat from usada, I got a text from kaw and IT said, in all caps, I got approve.
哦 OK OK。 So approve for the the therapy use exemption, which means you can rent.
Yes, exactly.
That's a lot.
I got a really emotional voice note from him that day.
I just to cry with out relieved. I feel that I can run my race and not feel like i'm doing something wrong for just being there.
The TV that helga is for ten years, and IT authorizes him to compete in both the man's and on categories. Some advocates told me that they hope this means that ties are kind of going in a new direction and that in the future, they'll be a little bit more turnkey, a little bit less invasive for transient non binary athletes. And the world anti doping agency, which you saw as the U.
S. Branches, seems like they could be open to that. They're in the middle of reevaluating their process for trans and non binary athletes and actively gathering feedback on T, V.
If you're optimistic, again, that change possible and that change is .
going to happen for now, cow is feeling great, but I should say that at this point, isa, it's unclear of his result is an exception or the new Normal. So we'll have to see.
Thank you so much for your reporting. Ana.
my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Cow finished the chicago marathon aking a personal record. Today he is running the new york city marathon in the non binary division. This episode was reported by ariana gables and produced by Justine.
A IT was edited by leona symphony. Our engineer was cold taka sugi chair nova music from one blue come music audio tworog blue sessions, special thanks to dan diamond and Michael retina. Our supervising producer is leona sum shrum and iran.
A gucci is our executive producer on my saco. A first is back tomorrow with all the new you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
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