TESTED: All The Small Things (We Cut From The Show)
Before we get to the fun part of this newsletter, I just wanted to answer a question I’ve gotten from a bunch of you: what’s the best way to support your work, Rose? It’s very kind of you to ask! As you know from this newsletter, Tested burned all my savings. I’m a freelancer, currently between gigs, and in case you haven’t noticed… it’s bleak out there. If you want to support my work the best way to do that is to become a member of the Time Traveler Club, my membership program.
I originally set the club up as part of my old show, Flash Forward, but it’s grown to encompass the entire Rose Eveleth Cinematic Universe. Members get access to regular newsletters, bonus podcasts, exclusive looks at fiction drafts, updates on all my ideas, and more. And, supporting there will help fund continued Tested coverage too. I’ve got all kinds of things in the works at the moment — not just continuing to follow the story and these athletes, but further resources like a searchable database of all the various trans and intersex policies across all elite sports.
If you want to become a member, you can use the code TESTED at checkout for 15% off your membership!
Thanks to all who asked!
Now, on to the newsletter.
I’ve got a few newsy updates brewing for you, but they’re not quite ready. So in the meantime, please enjoy this little round up of fun facts!
In the newsletters that went along with each episode (which you can find in the archive, if you missed them), I talked about some of the mid-sized things we cut from the series. This edition of the newsletter is for all the little things. Tiny bits and pieces, fun facts, stuff that is interesting but didn’t quite make the cut. So buckle up, and get ready to learn a bunch of interesting stuff you can tell people about at parties.
In 1928, the Pope tried to ban women from competing in the Olympics. “The Roman bishops must deplore that after twenty centuries of Christianity, Rome is showing less respect for its young women than pagan Rome, which excluded them from athletic competitions,” wrote Pope Pius.
The founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, died in Geneva in 1937. He was buried in Lausanne (where the IOC museum and main offices still are to this day). But before he was buried, his heart was removed. He loved Greece so much, that he asked for it to be removed and “interred in a memorial stela adjacent to the ruins of ancient Olympia.”
We talked in episode two about the 800m race at the 1928 Olympics, and how the press ran with this tale of ravaged, dying women. One thing I didn’t manage to fit into the episode, is the fact that several newspapers ran an image with their story. A set of closeups of women running — their faces contorted with exertion. Not only is this not actually all that shocking (news flash! when you run hard your face looks kinda funny!) but the women in the photo weren’t even running the event the story was about. They cobbled together images from women running the 100, and claimed they were from the 800. Newspapers also got basic facts wrong about the race. Most of them claimed it was eleven runners (“eleven wretched women” as one put it) but it was actually only nine.
On episode two, we also told you about the newspaper article about Helen Stephens accusing her of being “too fast” to be a woman. What we didn’t tell you, is that she actually sued Look Magazine over a related story, which used her picture and the headline “Is This A Man Or A Woman?” And she won! $4500, according to the papers, which is the equivalent of $98,179 today.
From 1912 to 1954, the Olympics awarded medals for art. While athletes ran, jumped, and battled – artists could compete in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. Submissions had to be "inspired by the concept of sport." This wasn’t ended because of a commitment to sport. But rathe due to a commitment to “amateurism.” This has largely been abandoned in today’s Olympics, but the original idea of the Olympics was that these were not professional athletes. In fact, not only could you not be a professional athletes and compete in the Olympics, you couldn’t make any money at all from sport. This was a problem for artists, because they "blurred the line between amateurism and professionalism" since artists obviously made a living doing art.
There are some sports that were not separated by sex at the beginning. Skeet shooting, for example, was originally a mixed gender event. Then, in 1992 at Barcelona Olympics, a Chinese shooter named Zhang Shan won gold. The next Olympics, women were no longer allowed to compete in shooting at all — the even became a men’s event, and no women’s event was added. Women were not allowed to shoot at the Olympics again until 2000. (I have been meaning to try and track down the minutes from the shooting federation from the 1990’s, to see what they actually said in terms of their justification for changing the sport to exclude women. The meeting minutes don’t appear to be online so I’ve reached out to the ISSF and if they get back to me I’ll let you all know.)
In the show we say that every woman at the Olymipcs was forced to go through sex testing. That is not technically true. One woman in the history of gender verification was exempted from sex testing. In 1976, Princess Ann competed in equestrian at the Montreal Olympics. And she managed to get out of being tested.
We don’t talk much about Avery Brundage on the show — there simply wasn’t time to get into all the bad things he did. He hated women. He also loved Nazis. In fact, he was one of the driving forces behind quashing the movement for the US to pull out of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. (You can learn a lot more about him in Michael Waters’s book The Other Olympians.) While reporting this story, I read a few biographies and books about Brundage, largely written by people who seem to be hell bent on restoring his image and arguing that actually he wasn’t a woman-hating Nazi. Unfortunately for them, we have a vast written record refuting their revisionist history. One of my “favorite” weird bits of Brundage archival is a letter he sent in 1936 to Count Henri de Baillet-Latour (then president of the IOC) saying:
I don't know whether hermaphrodites are as common today as they evidently were two thousand years ago judging from the many statues which appear in museums of classical art, but I do know that the question of the eligibility of various female (?) athletes in several sports has been raised because of apparent characteristics of the opposite sex.
And here’s a nice little clipping from 1960, quoting Brundage’s thoughts on women in the games:
Over time, the terms used for gender/sex tests have changed. Below, is a handy timeline from Dr. Lindsay Pieper’s thesis. In 1968, a doctor named Dr. Jacques Thiebalt wrote a report for the IOC about sex testing, objecting to the term “sex control,” writing: “Above all this term gives rise to some confusion because it applies only to the female sex and because the idea of sex is in itself psychologically quite variable. This is why I prefer the term ‘research into femininity'. This has the advantage of replacing the word ‘control’ which to my mind has rather repressive connotations, and introducing the word 'femininity', which describes the characteristics peculiar to women without conjuring up precise anatomical traits.”
The sex tests that were used during the chromosome test era were not only ill suited to find theoretical “masquerading males” but they were also unreliable and easily contaminated. In fact they were so easily contaminated that those who conducted sex testing at the games had to make sure that no man ever touched the samples. Simply handling them could contaminate them with Y chromosomal material, and result in an athlete “failing” the test.
One of the things that I found most interesting, and also somehow encouraging, is that when you look through the archives you actually do see lots of people pushing back on these rules from the very beginning. It is easy to think “oh well, in the past they weren’t as enlightened as we are” but actually, plenty of people were outraged by these policies! Here is a letter that I really wanted to find a place for, but couldn’t quite fit in. It was sent to Avery Brundage by a man named Andrew M. Underhill Jr. in 1969.
In case that’s impossible to read, here are the key sections:
I have been reading a lot in the paper recently about these "sex" tests, chromosome analyses, etc. for female athletes, to determine whether they are "females" or not.
Just yesterday I read about some Polish woman athlete, in the TIMES, who, on the basis of such tests, was not only barred from competition, but all her past awards were to be stripped from her, and her name stricken from the records of her past achievements. I'm sure I don't know what the truth is in this case.
But what in the name of God are they doing? This seems absolutely outrageous, disgraceful, disgusting, revolting! To relegate an honest, sincere, conscientious woman athlete to some sort of nameless half-way in between limbo, neither man nor woman. To drag her name through the mud, the muck, and the mire.
Chromosomes! They come up to some arbitrarily predetermined COUNT, that reads FEMALE, according to THEIR lights, or she is thrown out! LOOK, there is a very simple test for determining sex, if they must have one, as basic as Adam and Eve. Simple visual examinations, done in a discrete way by female observers. That's all that's needed. Any boob who walks the streets, any child, can give them the answer. No fancy chromosomes: --- Need I spell it out here, the difference between a man and a woman?
…
But if this chromosomes nonsense is what the International Olympic Committee now stands for, official policy, I say it is high time the United States, and every goddamn nation got out, withdrew from such an organization, with its foul shinnanigans. No daughter of mine, if I had one, in her youthful eagerness, will be put through that kind degredation, to be told she isn't a girl---Because her chromosomes don't matchup to THEIR standards. If they must LOOK, then LOOK, and don't ask any more questions:
I'm American. This Polish gal I read about was Polish. But we're all people. It mustn't have been very much fun for her. If THIS is what the OLYMPICS comes down to, then let's just forget the whole thing. Give it up.
You know those wacky waving inflatable arm dudes who are at used car dealerships and county fairs? Those were invented for the 1996 Olympics.
Another 1996 fact: the transportation at the Atlanta games were an absolute nightmare. Thousands of bus drivers were hired from all over the country, for abysmally low pay. These drivers knew nothing about Atlanta, and got no training or support. Which meant that they regularly got extremely lost. Newspaper accounts from the time features tales of bus drivers walking away mid-shift, crying, and even a situation in which athletes commandeered a bus and forcing it to change course to get them to their event on time.
There are so many incredibly galling things revealed in Caster Semenya’s memoir The Race to Be Myself. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend doing so. One story that stuck out to me, which really illustrates some of the racism at play here, is this: “The owner of Teazers had come up with some clever advertising for his club. A giant billboard on a main highway in Johannesburg that featured a naked, blonde, White woman with the words “No Gender Testing Necessary” written across the bottom half of her body.” Caster’s team sued, and won R20,000 (about $1,000). Way less than what Helen Stephens got!
On episode five you heard us talking about the 2017 study done by two World Athletics folks. This is the study that served as the foundation for their 2018 policy, which targeted the middle distances for regulation. But it’s worth noting that biggest effect of testosterone they found — out of all the events — was in the hammer throw. They also found an advantage in the pole vault. But those athletes were not asked to moderate their testosterone. Also, in the original paper, they didn’t find much advantage at all in the mile — but the mile was regulated. Odd!
A year before Caster’s World Championships win in Berlin, Pamela Jelimo won an 800m race by a bigger margin than Caster did. This was the third fastest 800m time in women’s history — faster than Caster ever ran it. But as far as I know, Jelimo has never been accused of having an unfair advantage.
There were a few athletes with sex variations who competed at the Olympics in Paris. One of them is Barbara Banda, a Zambian soccer player. Banda was excluded from the African championship in 2022, but since FIFA doesn’t currently have any rules regulating testosterone levels, she’s back. There are almost certainly other athletes with sex variations competing at the games, who we don’t know about because their sports don’t regulate them. I’m working on a database of regulations around trans and intersex athletes among IOC recognized federations right now.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for you for today. Hopefully this was fun and interesting?
Until next time,
Rose