Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport: A History of the Present (Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities)

This book critically explores the history of gender verification in international sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce “femaleness” and, consequently, the female body as we know it. Tracing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till the present, the book shows how and why medical “sex tests” have been used to “verify” women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have shaped broader social and scientific ideas about femaleness in the process. Exploring how geopolitics, gender, and class and race relations intertwined with scientific ideas about femaleness and womanhood to shape gender verification, the book shows how sports competitions became a battleground where new and old ideas about sex difference collided. By mapping the social, historical, and material instability of sex and gender, it shows why so much investment has been placed in distinguishing femaleness from maleness in sport and beyond. The book will be of interest to researchers and later-year undergraduate and graduate students in a broad range of areas including gender studies, sports studies, social and historical studies of science, and medicine. It will also be relevant to sports policy as it historically and conceptually contextualises gender verification policies. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 11 List of abbreviations 13 1 Introduction: gender verification, sex difference, and the body 14 Writing histories of gender verification 18 A genealogy of the female category in sport 22 Socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender and the body 23 Feminist configurations of sex, gender and the body 29 Structure of the book 33 Notes 35 2 Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s 37 “The peculiar awkwardness of women’s efforts” 38 Sex changes, metamorphoses, and hormonal sex instability 42 Hermaphrodites, monstrosities, and sex borderlines 47 Physical examinations and femininity certificates 50 Conclusion 53 Notes 54 3 Pure and polluted bodies in Cold War sports 56 Cold War geopolitics in international sport 57 Gendered Cold War sporting dynamics 60 Artificial substances and sex abnormality 61 Naked parades 66 Borderline bodies, hybrid creatures, and the feminisation of women’s sport 69 Conclusion 73 Notes 75 4 Sex screening and diagnosis in the Olympics 76 The medicalisation of the Olympics 77 The medical management of sex abnormalities 78 Naked parades, embarrassment, and further examinations 81 A diagnostic paradigm for sex 83 The impact of on-site gender verification in the Olympics 86 Conclusion 92 Notes 93 5 Gender fraud and masquerade in the 1970s and 1980s 94 Chromosomal disorders and transsexual women 95 Gender masquerade 99 Ferguson-Smith and the male masquerade threat 100 De la Chapelle and the scientific opposition to chromosome screening 103 (Re)defining the aims of gender verification 105 “Man has a penis and a scrotum; a woman does not” 109 Conclusion 112 Notes 113 6 Gendered suspicions at the turn of the millennia 115 Gendered suspicion, excessive bodies, and feminine body aesthetics 116 Objections to the health and gender examinations, and the PCR test 118 Genitals, gendered suspicion and hypermuscular women 120 The “essence of man” 123 The discontinuation of PCR testing 127 Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya 129 Conclusion 133 Notes 135 7 The testosterone debate – from hyperandrogenic females to biological males 136 Conceptualising androgens 137 Regulations on female hyperandrogenism 139 Diagnosing and treating hyperandrogenism 143 Debating a testosterone sex gap 147 The Rio Olympics 150 IAAF DSD regulations and the testosterone debate 151 Conclusion 157 Notes 159 8 The past, present, and future of gender verification and sex categories in sport 160 Continuities and discontinuities in the making of the female body 161 Drawing lines in the sand – current delineations of femaleness 164 Beyond binary sex and gender categories? 168 Notes 173 Bibliography 174 Index 195