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can sign up to make a monthly donation so we can continue our mission to use audio storytelling to inspire a more just world thank you for being part of our community and journey making making making contact making [Music] contact both fighter is being called in Center ring Len my comments head up welcome to making contact I'm SEL mamar and to start us off today we're going to go back to August 1st at the 2024 Paris Olympics to a boxing match between Amman khif and Angela kareim final worldwe fight of this session between Algeria and isaly and we're off at first khif and karini weave back and forth and karini lands a punch good right hook from karini khif looking to come with a straight punch is to the body of Kini and then all of a sudden Kini walks to the corner of the ring and she pauses K just asking to get her head guard tightened in she comes back out to fight and quickly khif lands a punch it's honestly so fast I don't even see it solid straight right hand from khif death and then all of a sudden karini quits 46 seconds into the match she retreats to the corner demonstrating from karini she talks to her Corner she's not happy about something she's been shouting it's not fair it's not fair meanwhile khif looks Sullen and worried we're waiting the results here winner by abandon Victorious [Music] in red from Algeria Iman khif khif wins this fight because karini quits after one punch less than one minute into the fight but khif doesn't look triumphant In This Moment her face looks confused this fight this 46c match began a fire storm in this year's Olympics almost immediately commentators flooded Twitter Facebook and Instagram khif the Algerian fighter they said is not a woman she's secretly a man they argued that karini quit because she was hit so hard by a man that she didn't feel as if it was fair to continue she was in danger during the fight Elon Musk and JK Rowling got involved rolling using incorrect pronouns tweeting that khif was enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head and whose life's Ambitions he's just shattered former president Trump jumped into the fry saying that if he was elected he'd forbid men from competing in women's sports but here's the thing imman khif isn't a man that's khif speaking out about the controversy later saying I'm a woman like any other woman I was born a woman I have lived as a woman I compete as a woman there is no doubt about that so why did everybody suddenly become convinced that she was not a woman that's the topic of today's show the extreme focus on proving women's identities and sports and to help us understand what's going on with gender in the Olympics I sat down with rose evth I am the host and reporter behind a new podcast called tested which is about sex testing past present and future unfortunately probably Rose has been investigating gender testing in sports especially in track and field for over a decade okay Rose so start us why did people start making this accusation that khif was a man was it based on her appearance what was it so it's a couple things I think some people will say things like well just look at her right clearly she doesn't look like a woman which of course is completely subjective the other thing that's happening here is that last year in the spring of 2023 the IBA the international boxing Association held a meeting and they disqualified these two boxers halif and Lynn and they did so because they claimed that these boxers had failed some unspecified Laboratory test about their gender and it is still very unclear what test was done they've gone back and forth they've said it was testosterone and then they said no no it's not testosterone it's chromosomes so it's all very confusing but in the spring of last year they disqualified these two boxers and it was very strange because it was sort of in the middle of an event the big sort of International Tournament for boxing and so because some people I guess knew about this past disqual ification they sort of resurfaced this idea that perhaps khif is not somehow a woman which of course is not the case and why do they single out khif and Lynn we don't really know it's it's I think just based on appearance right I think it's that they seemed somehow not womanly enough but there's not it's not clearly written out in the meeting minutes what it was that flagged these two women in particular but also the IBA has had its own controversies right which have predated this particular gender Scandal is there a reason we should be wary of what the IBA claims it discovered during those tests yes so the IBA is uh fraught um to put it maybe nicely the IBA is the international boxing Association they used to be known as the aiba they they sort of gone through different uh iterations and the IBA has been in hot water for many years since about 2019 because there have been allegations of Corruption of unethical practices of all sorts of things that actually have nothing to do with sex in at all they were already kind of in trouble and so in 2019 the ioc actually gave them kind of a laundry list of things saying look if you want to maintain your status as the recognized International Federation for boxing you need to clean up your act you got to do this this this and the IBA essentially didn't do those things and so a couple of months after this meeting at which these two boxers were disqualified the ioc stripped the idea of recognition the ioc the international Olympic Committee has since come out in support report of khif with a rare very rare Progressive statement on gender they have competed and they continue to compete in the women's competition they have lost and they have won against other women uh throughout over the years the testosterone is not a perfect test many women can have testosterone which is in what would be called male levels and still be women and still compete as women so this Panacea this idea that suddenly you test do one test for testosterone and that SS everything else not the case I'm afraid and keep those words in mind from the ioc because that is not how they've normally thought about gender Rose so the other thing about the kind of like truly horrifying media obsession with Kif's gender is that it's not new and in your podcast you talk about the earliest Olympics and how this immediately became a problem when the very first women began competing can you talk to me a little bit about the history of gender testing in sports yeah so so one of the things I think is the most surprising about the history of sex testing is just how old it is how long ago we started doing this so in 1928 it's the first year that women are allowed to compete in track and field now women had been allowed to compete in the Olympics before 1928 but they were only allowed in sports that were deemed at the time more feminine so things like swimming or tennis track and field was seen as the manliest of man Sports if you were a real man you competed in track and field and so in 1920 8 when women are allowed to compete essentially right off the bat as soon as women hit the track you hear people talking in newspapers you know quotes all these headlines saying there is something wrong with these women that woman looks too muscular that woman looks too strong the woman who won silver in the 800 meters in 1928 um homi kinway who's a Japanese Runner people said things like you know she had all the power of a halfback right talking about how they had these muscles there was something wrong with them and that sort of begins sex testing so you know you have a couple of anecdotal stories about women being pulled aside there was a story about Hitomi kinway being pulled aside and examined there's a story about Helen Stevens an American runner being pulled aside and examined and then in 1936 you get the first sort of on the books policy for track and field saying that if there are what they called questions of a physical nature you could take them aside and you could examine them wait when you when you say examined what do you mean yeah it was purely visual there's not a lot of good documentation about exactly what test would be done and I I sort of often don't even like to call it a test cuz really it is a visual exam it means that you take someone aside and in the best case scenario you ask them to go to their doctor and ask them to get like a essentially a doctor's note that says you know we've examined this woman and she's a woman but in the worst case scenario you wind up with a sports official taking a woman aside and asking her to again get naked so that they can examine her body and make sure that I guess her vulva looks correct in some way and again this is not written down they don't they don't write down exactly what they'd be looking for it's all very vague it should be pointed out here that the 1936 Olympics that Rose mentions were the Berlin Olympics which took place during the height of the Nazi regime in Germany at the time there were huge boycotts asking the US to pull out of the games because of the Nazis but while the persecution of Germany's Jewish population was taking place in the background what were Olympic officials worried about if the women were feminine enough this has all always been an underlying worry are the women competing feminine and attractive enough for men to want to look at yeah I mean Avery Brundage who is a really critical figure in the period of the 30s 40s even to the 50s he's he's really the instrumental American Sports official who pushes the United States to not boycott the 1936 Nazi Olympics right he is the reason largely that the US stays in those games because he had a lot of friends in the Nazi party and was quite sympathetic to the Nazi cause you know he talks fairly explicitly about one of the reasons why he doesn't like women participating in sports is because he finds it unattractive he does not find it attractive to watch women exert themselves because when you run really hard you know you make a weird face and you look like you're trying really hard and that was just sort of disgusting to him and he's he's not he doesn't really mince words about that he's very straightforward about it but even in Nazi Germany testing was on a case-by casee basis and that changes in the 1960s and then in 1966 rather than abandoning sex testing the governing body of track and field decides that actually they needed to test every single woman that doing it on a case-by Case basis wasn't enough and so they roll out something called the nude parades which are unfortunately quite what they sound like women were asked to go into a room and get naked and be examined by someone usually a doctor that they don't know to make sure that their basically genitals look correct and they looked like a woman that also was called the peak and poke tests by some of the athletes at the time Rose actually managed to interview athletes who underwent the peak and poke tests for their podcast tested here is Carol Martin who was a young 18-year-old athlete at the time that she competed in Jamaica in 1966 at an international competition I remember we were taken under the stands before the competition into a large room and had to pull my pants down in front of this woman so she could see I had a vagina I remember thinking what the is this this seems a little invasive this seems a little inappropriate this part was really astonishing to me in Rose's podcast because men have never undergone this kind of scrutiny just women the nude parades were incredibly unpopular for obvious reasons and they were successfully banned in 1968 but by then science had progressed and we were able to start checking for test testosterone and for chromosomes which gave the ioc new tools with which to examine gender so between 1968 is and 1999 every woman who competed at the Olympics had to go into a room get their cheeks swabbed and take this chromosome test and if you passed it you were given a little card a certificate of femininity they were called and it would say like certified female check um and you had to bring that with you to every event you wanted to compete at but so then in 1999 they drop that and and they drop it because there have has been truly 30 years I mean basically since the very beginning there have been doctors and experts begging the ioc to drop this test because it is not a reliable test of sex or gender having a y chromosome does not necessarily make you a man there are some estimates say one in 500 women have y chromosomal material in some or all of their cells you or I might have white chromosomes we might just not know because why would we know that and So eventually in '99 they drop that test and then in 2009 you sort of see this pick up again after Castor Seena who some people may know ran in Berlin and now we're sort of in this testosterone era where rather than thinking that the chromosome is the core thing now we're really focused on testosterone so it's been this kind of I almost like to describe it as like a game of whacka a little bit where there's everyone is just searching for This One Singular test to tell who's a woman and who's not and there isn't one and so you just keep kind of hitting the moles as they pop out of the ground and each one of them is their own kind of weird little test that we try to do but there's just no way easily to do this okay but why can't we find one single test to tell us whether or not someone is a man or a woman well because human sex is a beautifully varied complicated thing and there's no easy way to divide the Sexes into a binary no matter how much the ioc wants to stay tuned we're going to dig into what makes a man and what makes a woman or not right after the break I'm jumping in to remind you that you are listening to making contact if you like Today's Show and want more information or if youd like to leave us a comment visit us at our new website FOC media.org there you can access Today's Show and all of our prior episodes okay now back to the [Music] show welcome back to making contact today we're talking about sex testing at the Olympics in the first half of the show we talked about the history of gender testing in sports and the incredibly invasive way women not men have been singled out in order to prove their gender identities but while we might have social ideas about what makes a man and what makes a woman in the biological realm there's no clear binary and we're back in the second half with rose EV host and producer of the podcast tested which you can find links to on our website Rose there are a lot of components to biological sex that make us quote male or female and I'm just curious how common are variations how many of us for example who identify as women might have high testosterone for example without even knowing yeah it's a great question that's actually hard to answer because as you say most people don't know right their chromosomal makeup their testosterone level right like most people just don't know that so we don't really know exactly how common it is depending on the definition so there's all sorts of things that can vary in human sex biology you can have XX Y chromosomes you can have x y chromosomes men can have XX chromosomes you know you can have internal testes but also have breasts and a vagina you can have really high levels of testosterone some women have really really high levels of testosterone but they have what's called Androgen and sensitivity and so they can't actually process that testosterone so there's sort of a million different variations that can happen here interex Advocates sometimes call it sort of a symphony right that there's all different instruments that can get played to kind of combine to make whatever your sort of unique biological makeup is and depending on who you ask and how you define these terms there are some estimates that say that between 1 and 2% of the population has some kind of variation in their sex biology so this is not exceedingly rare it's not a super uncommon thing and I think you know many people would perhaps be surprised to learn their biology actually I was just talking to a neighbor of mine and she told me that recently she was diagnosed with high testosterone and she had no her whole life she had no idea and she was joking she was like I'm not good at sports you know didn't give me any kind of advantage and so I think this is just actually far more common than people [Music] realize and then of course gender and sex are different concepts you can be assigned one gender at Birth but know yourself to have a different identity than the one that you were assigned the difference between sex and gender didn't exist as a concept back in the 20s and 30s but there have always been trans people and there was consistent fear back in the early days of sports that if a woman was too athletic she would spontaneously turn into a man so at the time in the 20s and 30s and even into the 40s there was this idea called balance Theory and you have to remember this is before we really know very much about human chromosomes so they had this idea that every person was born with basically like a little bit of man stuff and a little bit of lady stuff and your balance was what sort of made your sex or gender and so they beli that you could be kind of a 65% woman or um a 90% woman and what they worried about is that if you were already kind of maybe a what they called a borderline case somebody who was maybe only 65% a woman if you did things that men do like for example play Elite Sports you could actually shift your balance and you could tip over into maleness quite literally turn into men at the time you see local newspaper is reporting this where people would allegedly get sick right get really sick and then they would get better and that sickness will have tipped them over and so you'll see these sort of amazing articles where they say you know like Johnny got really sick and now he's Jane and that's fine and we're all fine with that because we all know that's the thing that can happen is you get sick and it tips your balance and then you become something else and so you see these stories essentially of transition happening but blamed on sickness that kind of balances tips the balance and so there was this worry that if you took these again borderline cases and you allowed these women who were already kind of maybe close to the edge of being men and you allowed them to compete in sports they would accidentally turn themselves into men and they needed to be protected against that yeah and at the same time you know the newspaper articles of people transitioning when I read them they weren't as um horrifying as I thought and in fact it was almost more of an acceptance of trans identities than there is now yeah it is always a little bit both incredible and sometimes depressing when you see something like this where you realize that perhaps you know 1920s uh ideas around acceptance of trans people are maybe we're in a better place than we are now you know not always great and and also it's sort of interesting great because obviously balance theory is not like correct quote unquote scientifically but in some ways it's actually spiritually or like philosophically much closer to the realities of human sex biology right which is that it is a it is a spectrum there are all sorts of variations it is not this real really rigid binary where there is XX XY testosterone and you know estrogen like you know today I think people really have this sense of a very rigid dichotomous you know sex binary and that's not true and in fact balance Theory while certainly not accurate is is maybe a framing that is slightly more true in the spirit of the thing in the sense that we have this spectrum that we're talking about okay so we have this 1 to 2% gender variation that is possible among all humans across all Races right but you mentioned in your podcast that all of the women you talked to who were pulled aside for testing were black and brown women from the global cell so so what's going on here yeah I think it's a huge piece of this conversation I think there are a couple of reasons why um when it comes to specifically people who are being flagged for what are sort of broadly called DSD differences of sex development when we talk about women who are being flagged and suddenly being told like khif saying like you don't look like a woman we're going to force you to test as far as I know there are no white women who have been in the last since 2009 who have been flagged in this way and I think there are a couple of reasons for that one is that in most sports these tests are not blanket tests so we are no longer testing every single woman the way that we were in the 60s through the '90s and so what that means is that there are only certain women who are being flagged as quote unquote suspicious and that accusation often does come down to visuals what somebody looks like and there is a really long history of racist assumptions about who looks like a woman and what woman Hood looks like what femininity looks like there is a very long well documented history of white supremacy essentially telling people that black women Brown women don't look like women that they look actually like men for example non-white nonwestern women can sometimes have more body hair that is enough to get you flagged for gender testing there's also I think another element here which is sort of healthcare disparity so in General on average and these are sort of sweeping generalizations but babies that are born in the global North tend to be born in hospital settings and tend to be going to Pediatric checkups and kind of have these what they call touch points to care right they're going to the doctor more and in that case often that means that if you do have some of these variations in sex biology you might be diagnosed early and they're sometimes treated for it which is highly controversial in of itself many women in the global South don't know that they have a difference in sex development until they're suddenly tested by the ioc but that might be changing because we're seeing a shift in the ways in which the global Norah thinks about these kinds of treatments right because often those treatments involve things like genital surgeries to try and make them more like one or the other sex and those are unnecessary and you know in some ways damaging and so maybe I've heard people speculate that in 10 years you're going to see a bunch of white folks who get into the same position where they're 18 and suddenly being told actually you have this thing and actually you need to you know know about it or change your body in some ways and it will be very interesting to see if that changes the conversation that we're having right now but that's another thing that's going on so it's kind of both things in concert with one another yeah and again given the variability in humans why is this why is there this extreme focus on women have men ever been scrutinized I mean there are probably men with low testosterone or high testosterone or interex men competing in the Olympics too right no no men do not get questioned men can have as much testosterone as they like uh good for you and that's fine and the reason for that when you ask about this the reason that you get is that the male category is not a protected category the women's category is protected and we need to protect the women's category because if we didn't then men would enter women's sports and they would win everything because men are better at sports than women and so we need to protect the female category because otherwise it would be unfair to the real women who are competing in these groups because if you allow men or people with what they call maleik bodies or whatever other euphemism you want to use here to compete it won't be fair okay so I've heard this before about the protected category so the idea is that someone is secretly a man and that they're unfairly trying to win medals by competing in the women's category so we have to make sure that everybody in the women's category is actually a woman my question is has that actually ever happened at the elite level as far as we know no so you know obviously there are like road races wherever you know who knows but at the Olympic level as far as I know and I've been reporting this for many many years 10 years now and I've talked to as many historians as I can we have no evidence of any case of a man quote unquote masquerading as a woman now we do have cases of women pretending to be men to compete because they've been barred from things like the marathon so we do have cases of the reverse happening but we do not know of any cases of elite at the elite level of men pretending to be women to compete okay so given all of this information I have one final question for you the binary in sports seems like it's pretty limiting it also ignores a lot of human biology and sexual development so how do we deal with this in the future do we get rid of the binary or do we change the way that we organized athletes and I don't know weight classes or something yeah I think it's a good question and I think there are kind of different layers to it right and so I think the sort of Baseline level is that if there if you're a woman you should be allowed to compete in the women's category and that I to me goes for Trans athletes as well as for you know athletes with DSD variations and all of that then there's this question I think of non-binary athletes right and I think there are in some cases it makes sense to give a non-binary category right for example a couple of marathons and half marathons have opened up a non-binary category and that's great that is not something that you should force someone into I've seen people suggest that you know these interx athletes or athletes with sex variation should be just given their own category and that feels quite othering I think to those women who say you know all the women I talk to for tested they say but I'm a woman like they don't have any questions about their gender they don't have gender Doria but I also think that more big picture when we talk about like what is the future of sports it may be that in some sports we should not have a gender binary and then everyone should compete together it maybe that in some sports we should or that maybe we should think about dividing Sports by some other category like height or you know weight classes like they do in boxing or something like that and so I think that there are so many potential ways to think about this that can be really interesting but that are hard to get at because we spend so much of our time debating the human rights of you know people who are don't fall neatly into these categories and so I think there's all sorts of really interesting things that we could potentially talk about but we're just not there yet because we're so stuck in this other muddy part [Music] that was Rose eth producer and reporter for the podcast tested there is a lot we didn't get to cover but if you're listening and want to know more please visit our website FOC media.org to get links and behind the- scenes information and because we started the show with immani khif we just wanted to end with an update this is what the years of work is about this is what the early runs and the late sparring are about in the final of the women's welterweight division imman khif the Algerian fought Yang Yu of China go to the winner and in a unanimous decision from all five judges khif won gold gold medalist and Olympic champion victorion olyp in red from Algeria Iman [Applause] but it's not the end of the controversy over her gender the Algerian boxer filing a criminal complaint with Paris prosecutors to get to the bottom of the quote misogynistic racist and sexist campaign against khif according to her lawyer khif specifically names Elon Musk JK Rowling and JD Vance and she doesn't have to prove her gender in court this is not a defamation hearing she's taking them to court for online harassment it's a big deal in an era when athletes lives can be ruined over social media and we'll be following the court case and we'll bring you updates as soon as the case is [Music] resolved that's it for today's show I'm SEL hamani thanks for listening to making contact [Music] [Applause]