How the Olympics obsess over women’s bodies

Sex testing is a Summer Games controversy, writes Celeste Orr.

I am struck by the difference between Winter and Summer Olympics media coverage and commentary. During the former, there is an utter lack of concern that women athletes are “masquerading ” as men or have intersex variations, traits that, according to dominant interphobic logic, supposedly discount them as “real” women.

During the Summer Olympics, there are countless articles scrutinizing women athletes’ bodies, particularly women of colour from the Global South who run track. Even though there is no methodically sound evidence to suggest that sport sex testing ensures fairness, athletes such as Caster Semenya (South Africa), Dutee Chand (India), Francine Niyonsaba (Burundi), and Margaret Wambui (Kenya) all end up under fire.

This lack of concern during the Winter Olympics should raise eyebrows. Why are sports committees, cultural critics and the general public troubled by women athletes who run track? What does this tell us about our cultural beliefs and our relationship with women’s track and field?

The current concern with women of colour who run track is rooted in interphobic, racist and sexist notions of what women “should” look like and “should” be able to do. This is not a new phenomenon. Our sexist history illustrates why there is an overwhelming panic with women track runners and why, therefore, the (inter) sex-testing controversy is nonexistent during the Winter Olympics.

Historically, sport was deemed a male realm and women were excluded from participating. Women were eventually included, yet they remained segregated from men; there remain women’s events and men’s events. It was reasoned that women were innately physically inferior to men and sport ought to be male-female segregated. However, interestingly, sport studies scholars Shari L. Dworkin and Cheryl Cooky explain, sex segregation in sport was “put forward historically when women outperformed men at athletic performances.”

Sport sex segregation and sport sex testing went hand in hand. Boundaries cannot be crossed because the myth of male athletic superiority may be undermined (again). As a result, only women athletes have been subjected to numerous, humiliating procedures to “prove” their sex and femininity.

But why the focus on women athletes in track and field? Lindsay Parks Pieper outlines in her book, Sex Testing, that track and field in particular was associated with masculinity and masculine achievement. The public, male athletes and male sport organizers were distressed about women entering this historically masculine arena. They were also distressed by how women looked when they participated in track and field events. As opposed to Winter sports, in which people’s bodies are typically more covered up, in track and field people’s bodies are more readily visible. And women who participated in track and field looked strong, capable, dynamic and supposedly ugly and unfeminine.

Medical professionals worked to legitimize these sexist concerns about the way women looked and what women supposedly ought to be able to do, athletically speaking. As Jennifer Hargreaves explains in Sporting Females: “Because of the intrinsically vigorous nature of running, jumping and throwing events, female athletes (in track and field) were particularly vulnerable to reactionary medical arguments.”

Many medical professionals rationalized that women ought not participate and encouraged them not to compete in track and field. Pieper writes: “Doctors not only suggested that the sport harmed women’s health and damaged the female physique but also specifically described its detrimental effects on reproduction.” These are sexist medical standards of femininity and were not scientifically sound.

Women who defiantly entered track and field events faced social and medical scrutiny, opposition and suspicion.

This suspicion continues to this day for women in track and field who do not fulfil or embody sexist and racist standards of femininity. This history contextualizes 1) why sex testing concerns vanish from cultural consciousness during the Winter Olympics; and 2) why the moral panic around sex testing is utterly absurd and rooted in a sexist history. In other words, it illustrates that sex testing and the constant surveillance of women track athletes’ bodies needs to end.