Opinion | The Original Sin of Olympics Sex Testing

Sometime in May 1936, a reporter for The Western Morning News, a newspaper based in Plymouth, England, arrived at the doorstep of Mark Weston, a retired shot putter who had embarked on a career as a massage therapist. Mr. Weston brought the reporter into the sitting room, where he handed over a certificate recently signed by his doctor. The certificate stated, “This is to certify that Mr. Mark Weston, who has always been brought up as a female, is a male, and should continue life as such.”

Mr. Weston, born in 1905 in Plymouth, had been labeled a girl for most of his life. Throughout his sports career, he played in women’s leagues. But in early 1936, he began seeing a doctor about living as a man. He checked into Charing Cross Hospital for what turned out to be two sex-reassignment operations — one in April, another in May. Mr. Weston explained to the reporter, “I realize I am now in my true element.”

The Morning News published its article on May 28, 1936, under the headline “Devon Woman Athlete Who Has Become a Man.” Compared with the contentious discussion of trans and intersex athletes today, the article and the coverage that followed were striking for their empathy. The paper focused on explaining how a gender transition like Mr. Weston’s was possible. But eventually, the focus shifted. Mr. Weston’s story made its way to two prominent sports officials — a sports doctor who often advised federations on medical matters and a member of what was then the International Amateur Athletic Federation and is today World Athletics, the track-and-field federation — who responded by drafting early iterations of its modern sex testing policies, the first of their kind in contemporary sports. Mr. Weston did not want to return to sports, much less women’s sports, but the officials worried that gender transitions like his would poke holes in existing male and female categories. Since then, international sports bodies have continued to deny or restrict opportunities for trans and intersex athletes to compete at the highest level, in some cases barring them from competition completely — all for failing to meet a subjective definition of “female.”

When I first encountered this historical coverage of Mr. Weston, I saw that we had missed a chance to chart an alternate path — to organize sports without the regimes of gender surveillance that dominate it today. We still have an opportunity, though, to design policies that acknowledge male and female sports categories as imperfect and permeable and that place the humanity and dignity of athletes first and foremost.

Advocates of sex-testing policies cloak themselves in the guise of fairness; they exist, proponents claim, to exclude anyone with a perceived biological advantage in women’s sports. That group ranges from trans women, who are banned from most major sports even after undergoing a medical transition, to many cisgender and intersex women who have not undergone any medical transition but who have testosterone levels considered higher than normal for women. Yet little evidence supports the idea that these women have physical advantages, in strength or otherwise, over other women.

These sex testing policies also fail to acknowledge natural variations in human bodies. There’s no single way to cleave people into binary categories, but that hasn’t stopped sports officials from trying.