Tested Review: Podcast explores how sports draws boundaries between men and women

Tested
Rose Everes
NPR and CBC

The Olympics are over. But I’m still thinking about the displays of strength, skill, teamwork and joy. Decathlete Markus Roos was skipping away after winning the 100-meter heats. The women on Italy’s gold-medal-winning fencing team came together to congratulate each other. Gymnast Jordan Chiles was close to tears after a spectacular floor exercise routine, pounding her chest in pride in the stands.

I also think of athletes who weren’t there in Paris, like Namibian sprinter Christine Mboma, who won silver in the 200 metres at the Tokyo Olympics at age 18. She loves running and says it’s where she can forget the hardest things in life. “I don’t like being famous, it’s in my blood.” And then there’s Kenya’s Maximila Imari, a standout athlete for the past decade in the 400 and 800 metres, and more recently in the 100 and 200 metres. She holds national records in the 100, 200, 400 and 4×200 metres relay.

These two TestedThe six-part podcast, hosted by science journalist Rose Eveleth, explores how the world of sports has drawn gender lines, usually at the expense of women. Eveleth spent nearly a decade researching the stories that inform the show. Tested And each episode is thoroughly researched and well-referenced.

For both Imari and Mboma, like many others, their early success led some to doubt their worth as women, and after undergoing blood tests and invasive physicals required by the International Association of Athletics Federations (“I went home crying,” Imari says), they were faced with a career-defining decision.

Both athletes consider themselves female and have always done so, but World Athletics classifies them as differences of sex development, or intersex, which is any of several conditions characterized by differences in sex chromosomes, hormone balance, internal anatomy or external genitalia from what is expected.

Mboma and Imari have higher testosterone levels than average for women going through gender development. They were given an ultimatum: To run at the top level, they had to get the hormone down to what World Athletics deems acceptable, a target higher than average for most women but below the minimum typically found in men.

Tested Follow their reactions. Mboma chose to suppress her testosterone, a difficult trial-and-error process in which she and her doctors got little help and which the World Medical Association considers unethical. She tried, but failed, to qualify for the Paris Games.

For 28-year-old Imari, missing out on the Olympics may be her last chance, but rather than lower her testosterone she has decided to fight for the right to compete through the International Sport Tribunal, the ruling of which remains unresolved at the end of the podcast.

These are just two stories in a century-plus history of women in elite athletics. That history has moved from a brief and humiliating era of “nude parades” and genital examinations to decades of blood tests and “certificates of womanhood.” Today, running tests are based on testosterone levels. But Tested As shown, there is still a great deal we do not know about this hormone.

Among the other questions the podcast poses are: why has everyone who’s been told they’re “too masculine” since 2009 been a woman of color in a low-income country; how important is testosterone actually to performance? Why is sex hormones the basis for disparity in the first place, when so many other factors play into sporting success, including genetics and a country’s prosperity? And what does it mean to create these categories we’ve created in the name of fairness?

Science alone can’t answer that question. This series can’t answer that question either. But Tested What makes this book great is the context in which it invites us to think more deeply about history, science, controversial data, politics, and the things we take for granted, and to ask, along with Eveleth, how much suffering is worth allowing, and whose suffering, in the name of classification?