TESTED: Help the show win some awards, and other updates
Hello there!
A bunch of bits and bobs on this edition of the Tested newsletter, starting with a very self indulgent ask:
Tested is nominated for three different Sports Podcast awards! Very exciting. Less exciting: This is one of those awards that requires the public to vote for the nominees, which means that I am here asking you to consider voting for Tested in three categories (each link below will take you to the voting page for that category):
When you vote, they’re going to ask you a bunch of questions. I’m sorry, I know it’s annoying. The upside is that they’ll only ask you once, not all three times you vote (if you are kind enough to vote three times).
Deadline to vote is January 13th!
Also! I’m doing a virtual event about Tested on January 27th with New America and ASU’s Dr. Victoria Jackson.
You can RSVP for the event here.
Now on to the more newsy bits.
Who will be the next IOC President?
This isn't exactly news, but I did want to flag it for you folks: Sebastian Coe, current President of World Athletics, announced his long awaited bid for President of the IOC for 2025. This isn't a surprise, there have been signs and rumors about it for a while now. Nor is it a surprise that Coe has explicitly made "protecting women's sports" (aka largely excluding intersex and trans athletes from competition) a core part of his campaign.
You can find Coe's candidate statement here, which features the following pillar:
Protect and promote the integrity of women’s sport.
I will advocate for clear, science-based1 policies that safeguard the female category. We will work closely with world-leading medical and educational institutions to increase research into female health, performance and exercise physiology. Women’s sport is at a critical juncture. We must navigate this with sensitivity and resolve to ensure current and future generations of women choose sport.
This is all fairly familiar, and is in line with the way he's talked about the women's category as president of World Athletics — it's based on this idea that if they do not enact strict, exclusionary rules around intersex (and trans) athletes then "women" (by which he means cis women) will simply abandon sports entirely2.
As you also probably remember, the IOC has stood up in favor of allowing athletes with variations in their biology to compete — and current IOC President Thomas Bach specifically defended boxers Lin Yu-Ting and Imane Khelif this summer. Should Coe win this bid, the future of the Olympics for intersex and trans athletes across all sports would likely be in jeopardy.
Coe is running against six other candidates, but he’s probably the biggest name in the race. Here’s what each of them has to say about the women’s category (mostly taken from their candidate documents):
- Feisal Al Hussein: No specific statement.
- David Lappartient: No specific statement in his candidate manifesto, however as president of The Union Cycliste Internationale (the governing body of international cycling) he oversaw a ban on trans athletes.
- Johan Eliasch: “We must be guided by biological fact, not cultural trends. Regardless of current testosterone levels, exposure to puberty creates sex differences in height, weight and so on which can provide a sporting advantage. It is on the basis of this biological fact that I firmly believe we must ringfence women’s sport, ensuring that only those who were born female can compete in women’s sport. We owe it to female athletes to protect their competitive future through objective, science-informed frameworks, not policies shaped by subjective opinions or ideologies3.”
- Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr.4: “The IOC has a fundamental duty to safeguard women's sport by adopting a policy to maintain unambiguous distinctions between men's and women's categories. The IOC must lead on this issue by setting clear guidelines for competition.”
- Kirsty Coventry: No specific statement.
- Morinari Watanabe: No specific statement. In fact, the word “women” does not appear even once in his candidate manifesto.
In other words, most of these other candidates will either be just as harsh on trans and intersex athletes, or don’t have any stated position. None of them are explicitly in favor of letting these women compete.
The election will take place in March, 2025. I’ll keep you all up to date on what happens.
Boxing confusion & harassment
In November, boxer Lin Yu-Ting traveled to the UK for an event and then unexpectedly pulled out. The reason is still unclear. Taipei Times reported that it was over "medical confidentiality issues." World Boxing says that she was still eligible to compete. I have no idea what's going on here but it's not a great look for the event organizers.
It makes sense for Lin to worry about confidentiality. Earlier in November, someone allegedly leaked Imane Khelif’s medical records. I’m not going to link to them here, or quote from them, nor do I know if they’re legitimate. I had a handful of reporters reach out to me asking for comment about the contents of the report, and I’ll share with you what I told them: Leaking these kinds of medical records is not new, (Caster Semenya’s personal records were leaked as well) is deeply invasive, and is a form of harassment. Anybody who covers these private, personal medical files should really think about what they’re publishing and why5.
In more fun news, Khelif came in third in the AP's Female Athlete of the Year poll. And if you haven't already seen them, I highly recommend these incredible Vogue photos.
The myth of "protecting" women
Barbara Banda (rightfully) won BBC's “Women’s Footballer of the Year” award this year. Banda is an absolute sensation, so fun to watch, and was also 12th in the race for the Ballon d'Or. These awards also placed Banda in the spotlight again, which meant that once again folks have come out of the woodwork to claim that she doesn't deserve the awards because of her biology. JK Rowling weighed in (sigh) again (sigh) because she really is dedicated to spending her time and unfathomable wealth on... this.
Banda's case feels to me like such a clear example of the farce of people who claim that this is about "protecting women" in sports. Banda is from Zambia, and plays for the Zambian national team. In 2023, the coach of that team was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. He was not fired, or reprimanded in any way as far as I can tell. In fact he is still the coach of the team despite several players reporting that he demanded that they sleep with him in order to keep their spot on the roster. Absolutely vile stuff.
Where are these "protect women in sports" people on this? Surely this qualifies as something that women in sports might actually want to be protected from? And yet, all these people who are protesting outside the BBC office for giving a soccer player an award are completely absent from this conversation.
A bit more bragging, if you will allow it
Lastly, Tested was named a "Best Podcast" by a bunch of places recently and I'm so chuffed. I'm also excited to listen to the other shows on these lists, since I wasn't really able to listen to much while I was making Tested because I had no time to do so.
Wow you read to the end! If you liked Tested and want to keep up with my work moving forward, you can check out my website. My work is currently 100% reader funded, so if you want to chip in, you can do that here.
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He does not expound on which science any of this is based on, which, of course, is a core theme of Tested. And, as you heard on the show, there is no science that directly compares intresex athletes and non-intersex athletes in sports. The few studies that exist on trans athletes suggest that they might have some advantages, but also some key disadvantages. ↩
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A World Athletics representative made this claim to me in an email as well. I asked for evidence of this — this idea that women will abandon sport if they have to compete against other women with different sex biology — and they never replied. ↩
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It's unclear to me from this how he thinks about athletes with sex variations — whether he thinks they were "born female" or not. ↩
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I’m sure this name isn’t familiar to most of you, but it’s QUITE familiar to me and Ozzy — because his father was IOC president for 21 years. While we were at the IOC archive, Ozzy and I read through hundreds of pages of letters between Samaranch Sr. and his colleagues about the question of what to do about athletes with sex variations. ↩
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Would you believe that none of them quoted me on this in their stories? Weird. ↩