TESTED: How transphobia has changed sex testing conversations
A quick content note: I'm going to discuss transphobia in this newsletter, and in doing so I'm going to directly quote some examples of transphobic things people have said online and to me directly.
As you all know, I've been obsessed with sex testing for over ten years and pitching Tested for eight. So much of the show is about the ways in which things have not changed — the way that sports organizations keep making the same core mistakes over and over again.
But in the last few years one specific thing has shifted: transphobia.
We’re in a moment of extremely intense moral panic about the existence of trans people. According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, there were 638 anti-trans bills considered in the United States, across 43 states. Sixty-five of those bills focus specifically on sports. Anti-trans violence reached record highs in 2021 and in 2023 Human Rights Watch reported an "epidemic of violence" against trans and gender non-conforming folks in the United States.
Meanwhile, more and more trans folks — particularly trans women — have been fighting for the right to participate. Never before have we had so many out, visible, and vocal trans athletes — women like Lia Thomas, CeCé Telfer, June Eastwood, Navi Huskey, Veronica Ivy, Chelsea Wolfe and more. In response, transphobes have seized upon sports as one of the places to wage war against the inclusion of trans people.1
In general, sex testing policies do not directly affect trans athletes. The eighteen or so International Federations with sex based “eligibility policies” mostly have separate rules regarding trans athletes and so-called “DSD athletes.”
And yet, this rise in visible trans athletes and the corresponding rise in virulent transphobia over the last five years or so has changed the ways that conversations about sex testing tend to go.
I'm still trying to muddle my way through how to best talk about this shift, why it happened, and what it means. Which is, perhaps, what newsletters are for? So here we go.
First, I want to acknowledge that transphobia is not new. It's not even new in the context of sex testing. As you heard on the show, the earliest sex testing policy was fueled, in part, by a backlash to two athletes who transitioned — Zdenek Koubek and Mark Weston. Even though neither Koubek or Weston attempted to participate in sport after transitioning, they were still used as examples of how some women in sport were fundamentally broken. For more about them, I highly recommend Michael Waters's book The Other Olympians.
For many years of sex testing history, however, transphobia was not actively driving the decision making or conversation. This is not to say it didn't exist. Certainly it lived in the background — in the water in which these officials swam. But it wasn't something anybody talked about, because there weren’t any out trans athletes to bring this hatred to the forefront.
Instead, people talked in pitying and paternalistic terms about "hybrid beings" who needed to be protected from themselves. They talked about cheating (which again never happened, as far as we know), and doping, and this fear that some women were wrong in some way. But they did not talk about trans athletes, because there simply were not any out trans athletes to talk about.
In the 1970's, Renee Richards became the first out trans athlete that most sports fans or officials of the era had ever heard of. At the time, every woman who competed at the elite level was undergoing a Barr Body test to allegedly confirm that they were women.2 Richard famously sued to be allowed to compete, and eventually won the right to play in the US Open. But at the time — at least based on archival I've read and watched from the time — Richards was perceived as more of a curiosity than a threat.
I asked journalist Julie Kliegman about this, to make sure I wasn’t simply missing something. (Julie is writing a book about Richards, and you can keep up with their research on their newsletter here.) Julie tells me that there are probably a lot of reasons that Richards didn’t inspire the same kind of hate we see today: she was older, not that competitive, and extremely good at presenting herself as a demure, feminine woman. She emphasized her surgeries and the extensive efforts she took to become a woman. And, crucially, she was alone. “My sense is that the media thought she was a one-off and they'd never, ever have to deal with this issue again or feel "threatened" by a larger number,” Julie says.
After Richards, again you see conversations about trans athletes slide into the background. And when I started reporting out this story ten years ago, I almost never heard anybody talking about trans athletes in conversations about sex testing. The focus was on athletes with variations in sex biology.3
But in the last few years, that has changed.
It used to be that when I pitched Tested, I could say something like: "Not all women who are successful get accused of being men. Take Katie Ledecky for example. She's an absolutely unreal athlete, completely dominant in the 800 and 1500. And nobody is accusing her of being a man, the way they accuse Caster, or Christine, or Max."
That is no longer true.
Now, when you look at posts about Katie Ledecky's success in the pool, beneath them you will find people saying things like "well it's unfair when 'she' has a 3rd leg," "ya cause she a MAN," and, one person who simply wrote, "trans." Those are all from just one recent ESPN Instagram post.4
This shift has also changed how people refer to athletes with sex variations. When Caster first broke onto the scene, people were not accusing her of being a trans athlete. Today, however, they do. I have heard people on the side of regulation argue that Caster is trans, even though she was assigned female at birth, and still identifies as a woman.5 These folks will argue that since Caster “should have been assigned male at birth” her choice to live as a woman today makes her a trans woman. (Reader, I know you probably know this, but just to be clear: that is not how it works.6)
And, of course, we've seen this exact same thing happen with Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting — false assertions that they are trans women, when they are not.
I think it’s easy to write this off as transphobes being irrational or bigoted. And certainly that is part of what’s happening here. But I think there’s more to it than that.
There are two connected threads here I want to pull.
The first is how the rising profile of trans athletes has changed conversations on the ground.
We talk on the show about the ways in which trans folks and intersex folks get conflated both through honest ignorance and less honest efforts to conflate them.
But on the track, all around the world, I found that athletes and coaches and sports fans actually did know the difference between the two groups. In fact, they were quite clear about these being two distinct groups. While reporting Tested, I heard a lot of transphobia from folks who were staunch supporters of Christine, Max, Caster, and the rest.
Over and over in conversations with athletes and coaches during my reporting, I would hear the same basic argument, which went something like this:
"Christine Mboma did nothing wrong. She was born this way, this is how her body naturally works. Why should she have to change that? That is ridiculous. The real problem is trans athletes. They are changing their bodies, they are unnatural and should definitely not be allowed to compete."
It was almost as if the increased presence of trans athletes seemed to offer a kind of pressure release valve in conversations about athletes with sex variations. A foil, perhaps. One group (intersex athletes) is seen as innocent, while the other (trans athletes) is painted as nefarious. One group is simply talented, and "natural," while the other is somehow cheating, or strange, or wrong in some way. That those who choose to be trans are working against the natural order of things.
Which brings us to the second string — the way that people talk about this online. Because I think this core part of anti-trans sentiment is one of the big reasons we're seeing people online conflate and collapse down the nuance between athletes with sex variations, and trans athletes.
Because when it comes to athletes with sex variations it is much harder to argue that someone born a certain way is "unnatural." You can't really argue that Christine, or Caster, or Max "chose" this, or did anything to wind up the way they are.7 So in order to vilify and exclude them, you have to lump them in with trans athletes, who you've decided are choosing some kind of evil and corrupt path.
Personally, I find all of this a little bit mind melting.
Not just the rhetorical knots that some folks will twist themselves into to find a way to reject any woman who doesn't look like a woman to them. But also the ways in which these two groups can, and sometimes do, either intentionally or accidentally harm one another in an effort to protect their own inclusion. Trans athletes advocating for testosterone caps that harm intersex athletes. Intersex athletes arguing that they were "born this way," which can lead to cutting out trans athletes.
It was surreal to be having a conversation with someone who was intensely defending Christine’s right to compete, suddenly go on a tangent about how trans athletes must be banned. And similarly surreal to hear trans athletes argue that intersex folks should be willing to “take one for the team” and change their bodies, to help trans athletes compete.
It's all just... complicated!
This mess we're in today — where people are now accusing cis women like Katie Ledecky of being trans because she's too good — is the natural endpoint of panic around trans women existing.
If you truly believe that there is some invisible line — for strength, power, facial structure, whatever it is — which no "real woman" can cross, then you find yourself having to police that line based on your own internal ideas about what a real woman looks like. This leads to truly absurd situations, like transvestigators deciding that Prince William is potentially a trans person (I promise I didn't make that up, these people really exist). And like people demanding that Caster, and Khelif, are trans, when they are definitionally not.
I get asked in interviews a lot about whether I'm hopeful or not about the future of sports. And I never quite know how to answer.
On the one hand, watching all of this active disinformation go around (and be reprinted in allegedly reputable news outlets like the Boston Globe) is depressing as hell. When I was interviewing people who worked to end chromosome based sex testing in the 80's and 90's a few of them told me that they were no longer involved because it felt like the core problem — understanding sex biology — was never going to go away. It was too depressing to see this whole thing play out once again, after all their hard work.
On the other hand, I do think that for every person screaming about how these women are secretly trans, and being deeply, loudly, weird about the genitals of strangers there is another person I am seeing going, "wait... what?"
When a binary star collapses in on itself, it creates a black hole. And I’m hoping that maybe, the kind of intense collapsing of nuance that transphobes are doing is simply too much for the system to bear.
And if not that, at the very least, I'm hoping that Tested, and this newsletter, helps answer that question. At least a little bit.
Footnotes:
There's obviously a lot that has been written about why sports are such a perfect place for the far right to try and situate this debate. Sports is one of the few sex separated spaces that still exists, and conversations about access can be couched in "fairness" rather than bigotry. For more on this I highly recommend Katie Barnes’s book Fair Play.
At one point Richards claimed to have passed the Barr Body test. Which might be true, since there are all kinds of reasons that the test might show two X's. There is really no way for us to know! But I did find that linked clipping super fascinating — the fact that she gave the slides from her Barr Body test to a 21 year old journalism student at University of Arkansas to take to the lab because he “was the only reporter who had ever written an article about her without using the word ‘transsexual.’"
We talk here, and on the podcast, about how trans and intersex identity are separate. But I want to also clearly acknowledge that they are not mutually exclusive. You can be intersex AND trans. Trans folks can have variations in sex biology. These identities can, and do, overlap.
I have a lot of opinions about the ways in which journalists (myself included at times) over index on the value and representational power of Instagram comments. On the one hand, they provide a source of direct quotes, without having to interview anybody (which, in my opinion, is a double edged sword, because you can’t ask people to explain what they mean). But we also all know that Instagram comments — especially the most intense, emotional ones that are the most enticing to quote — are not a good sample. Relying exclusively on Instagram comments to capture how people feel about something would be like a restaurant critic solely quoting from the most extreme Yelp reviews. In my brief stint teaching journalism I was shocked and a bit terrified to learn that some students thought that quoting from a spread of opinions posted on social media was sufficient reporting. In my opinion it is not. Reporters should actually talk to people, ask them questions, clarify what they mean and why. And I think often people will be surprised by what they learn in those conversations.
One scientist I interviewed for Tested, on background, told me that he hates that phrase "assigned female at birth." To him, the idea that this is an "assignment" and not a pure, immutable fact, was absurd. He considers athletes with sex variations to be "misdiagnosed males."
I think there is a really interesting (and, to be fair, sometimes frustrating) conversation happening about the definition of transness within the community. I recently read this interesting paper, arguing that we should figure out ways to move beyond the binaries of cis and trans in both research, and daily life. Julia Serrano, has also said “trans and cis are useful shorthand, they are not immutable, essentialist categories.”
I'm not going to go into detail here but it's worth knowing that there is a whole long discussion within the trans community about the innateness of transness. Can you choose to be trans? Or is it something you're born into? Many trans people have rejected the "born in the wrong body" framing that was once popular, and seen the ways in which the "born this way" argument around queerness can backfire. If you want to hear actually interesting conversations about gender, listen to the Gender Reveal podcast. In particular I love this episode with Jules Gill-Peterson.