Oh wait, the caption on the photo revealed that Imane Khalif was in fact XY? I didn’t even realize that they had finally released the results!!
Also yeah, it’s literally a cheek swab. It’s not invasive, and it’s certainly not any more invasive than the tests athletes are required to do to prove they aren’t doping. It’s not a “genital inspection” it’s “do you have a Y chromosome” but I’m sure people will spin it as such.
Thank god, it’s the sane move. I also didn’t realize they used to do chromosome tests? Interesting
I also didn’t realize they used to do chromosome tests? Interesting
The IAAF and IOC made DNA sex testing mandatory for all elite athletes seeking eligibility to compete in the female category in 1967.
The first superstar athlete known by name to have been declared ineligible for women's competition because of the DNA sex testing when it was initially introduced in 1967 was Austrian alpine skier Erik(a) Schinnegger, then the reigning women's World Cup champion. Schinnegger underwent the DNA testing in preparation for the 1968 winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, where the Austrian ace was expected to win the gold in all three women's alpine events hands down. Instead, Schinnegger found out he was XY with a DSD, so his career in competitive women's skiing immediately came crashing to an end and his whole life took a different turn. Schinnegger went on to have some kind of corrective surgery on his genitals/gonads, which eventually enabled him to father a child "the natural way." He seems like an honorable, decent man. https://youtu.be/8mgQ97TKxc8?si=wtVddZYEyv237VXe
It’s not a “genital inspection” it’s “do you have a Y chromosome”
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the testing done for sports eligibility purposes was as you describe it - "do you have a Y chromosome." But after the SRY gene was discovered in 1990, new testing protocols were introduced to see if they had the SRY gene along with checking their sex chromosomes.
If/when the testing is re-introduced, I suspect it will look to see if athletes have a Y and the SRY gene too.
The last time that athletes in elite women's events had to undergo mandatory cheek swab DNA sex testing was at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta. Eight athletes in the women's category at the Atlanta Games were found to be XY and SRY positive with disorders of male sex development. Most had some form of AIS; one had XY 5-ARD (Semenya's DMSD). Six of the athletes had already had their testes removed, so presumably they weren't surprised when their test results came back showing that they were XY and SRY+. AFAIK, all eight athletes were allowed to compete.
The IOC polled the athletes in women's competiion who underwent the testing at the Atlanta Games to see how they felt about the DNA testing. The vast majority - 84% - said they thought the testing was a good idea and they wanted it to continue. But the IOC decided to discontinue it anyways - all on account of the hue and cry raised by, and on behalf of, the XY DSD athletes who had been caught out by the testing and felt it was unfair to them.
ETA: Correction: I was mistaken when I wrote in my earlier post above that Schinnegger was
The first superstar athlete known by name to have been declared ineligible for women's competition because of the DNA sex testing when it was initially introduced in 1967
The first superstar athlete known by name who was declared ineligible for women's competition because of the DNA sex testing was Polish sprinter Ewa Klubukowska, who won a women's bronze in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In 1967, the IAAF (now World Athletics) banned Klubukowska from women's competition after a DNA sex test administered for the European Cup women's track & field championships in Kyiv in 1967 revealed the Polish runner to have a Y chromosome.
It's never been clear exactly what the deal with Kłobukowska was. It's been reported that in 1968 Kłobukowska became pregnant and gave birth to a son, lending credence to the theory that Kłobukowska had some kind of chromosomal mosaicism. But on the other hand, the IAAF/World Athletics has a history of being extremely lenient towards XY DSD athletes and pulling out all the stops to be be as accommodating and possible towards them. Also, if Kłobukowska really were female, then it seems odd that in all the years since 1967, no formal complaints or lawsuits have been filed against the IAAF challenging the banning, and there's been no PR or media campaign to try to restore the athlete's tarnished public image.
Out of all the athletes I've looked through, Schinnegger is the only example I've found who has acted with anything resembling integrity and honesty. I actually feel bad about putting him on the HeCheated website, but I've left him there simply for data regarding male advantage.
He honestly didn't know he was male, but after finding out withdrew himself completely from women's competitions, didn't put up a stink or play the victim about any of it, and returned the world championship medal he had won.
He didn't continue living in denial, and recognized that he was, in fact, a man, despite what he had previously been told/believed.
There were a couple of other European athletes who competed in women's elite track & field in the 1920s and 30s who apparently were XY with DMSDs who seem to have been a decent, fair-mineded persons who wanted to face the truth - and who did.
British track athlete Mark Weston, nee Mary Weston, was one:
Weston was born on 30 March 1905 at Oreston to Stephen Weston, leading stoker on HMS Vivid, and his wife Susan, nee Stow. Mary was the second of eight children born to the Westons who lived at Bayly’s Cottages, Oreston, until the 1930s.
Weston studied at Plymstock Senior School and as a teenager joined Plymouth Women’s Athletics Club. Within months Weston was competing at a national level. Nicknamed the ‘Devonshire Wonder’, Weston won international titles in the women’s shotput in 1925, 1928 and 1929 and became national champion in women’s discus and javelin in 1929.
Weston became increasingly conscious of feeling uncomfortable as a woman and in 1936 underwent a series of surgeries at Charing Cross Hospital in London to become male. When interviewed by the Western Morning News in May of that year Weston said he was delighted to be now “in my true element.” He changed his name to Mark Edward Louis Weston and on 8 July 1936 married a close friend, Alberta Bray, formerly of Prince Rock. He spoke warmly of the support he had received from friends and the local community, telling an American newspaper:
"I was born and reared in Oreston, I think without undue vanity, I showed pluck by continuing to live here, where everybody knows my story. But my old neighbours are very kind and want the rest of the world to let me alone."
Mark retired from competitive athletics and was willing to hand back the records he had won as a female.
Mark and [his wife] Alberta started life as a married couple at Sweet’s Cottages and then are recorded at Wembury Park Road, Oreston, in the 1939 register of the civilian population (available on the Findmypast website). In this register Mark is recorded as a ‘Permanent Way Labourer’ but we know from other sources that he mainly worked as a masseur.
Weston’s life was touched by tragedy when his younger brother Harry Weston took his own life in 1942, aged just 26. Harry was also intersex and assigned female at birth. Born Hilda Margaret Weston he changed his name to Harry Maurice Weston after an operation to become male at the same hospital as his brother.
According to the family, Harry regretted the operation and became depressed, tragically hanging himself in a Plymstock field in July 1942. This is recorded in national newspapers of the time.
Perhaps as a reaction to this tragedy, Mark and Alberta are next recorded in June 1951 emigrating from Lipson, Plymouth to the USA on RMS Queen Elizabeth. According to the record of immigration at New York, they originally stayed in New Jersey but then moved at some point to Wallingford, Connecticut.
It’s unclear when the couple moved back to the UK, but we do know that Mark died in 1978 at Freedom Fields Hospital. His widow passed away in Plymouth almost two decades later, in 1995.
Then there was track star Zdena Koubková, later Zdeněk Koubková, of Czechoslovakia:
Zdena Koubková [born 1913] won two medals for Czechoslovakia at the Women’s World Games in 1934. Two years later, at the age of 22, she underwent gender reassignment surgery and became Zdeněk Koubek – who saw his former self’s sporting achievements erased from the books: national titles in the long and high jump and world records in running.
Zdena Koubková was intersex – what was then called a hermaphrodite – with a decidedly male frame.
Hands down, she was Czechoslovakia’s best runner in the 1930s, and among the top women athletes in the world, a celebrity as well known as the national football squad.
As such, [Koubková's] gender reassignment surgery caused a sensation – it was the biggest sports scandal of the First Republic, says journalist Pavel Kovář, author of "Story of a Czech Recordwoman."
In 1934, Zdena Koubková won five national [women's] titles, in the 100-, 200- and 800-metre races, as well as in high jump and long jump. That June, she set her first world record, in the 800-metre dash with a time of 2:16.4. (The current women’s world record, as it happens, was also set half a century later by a Czech woman – Jarmila Kratochvílová – clocking in at 1:53.28).
Zdena’s next world record came in the medley relay (2×100 metres, 200 metres and 800 metres), at 3:14.4. That August, she won the 800-metre event at the 1934 Women's World Games, in a new world record time of 2:12.4 and finished third in the long jump with a national record of 5.70 metres.
After the Women’s World Games of 1934, suspicions about Zdena Koubková’s gender were circulating widely. She retired from competition, considering it unfair to compete against women and struggling with her own identity.
In late 1935, some months after the publication of Lída Merlínová’s romanticized biographical novel [based on Koubková’s story], Zdena revealed in an interview that she planned to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Pavel Kovář again:
“It seemed strange and just unfair to her. Plus, she didn’t really know how to act like a girl and was ashamed to go to the ladies’ showers. Plus, the women, her opponents, also knew that she had a different body structure and that it was probably not normal. And as a human being, she longed for a relationship, but she knew she didn’t want a relationship with a guy.”
“It was an extremely prudish time, and such matters were taboo. It was not talked about in decent company. And she, in despair, consulted with doctors and told them about her problems. They found that she really was a hermaphrodite, with both male and female genitalia… So, she started some hormonal treatment and then had surgery.
“And this, in fact, was written about in the newspapers, some explicitly speculative, in the tabloid tone. But she approached it very bravely and honestly. She sought out a journalist, a serious one from České Slovo, and gave him an interview. It was published in the paper. And she was extremely relieved.”
Many national sports officials were outraged – as were athletic associations abroad, which objected that Czechoslovakia was sending “men disguised as women” to compete abroad. Professionally, Zdena Koubková had gone from celebrity to outcast.
After transitioning to Zdeněk Koubek, he found himself without a profession, no income, and not even a high school diploma.
And so he jumped at an offer to go on a paid “lecture” tour of the United States to tell his story – in fact, it was akin to a circus sideshow, says Pavel Kovář.
"He didn’t speak English, nor did he actually teach anything there. They exhibited him like a trained bear. That was embarrassing."
That unfortunate episode aside, Zdeněk Koubek did find acceptance on a personal level – he soon got married, passed his high school leaving exam, found work in the Jawa motorcycle factory, remained close to his large conservative Catholic family, and joined his brother’s rugby team in Říčany.
In December 1935, the Czech track star Zdeněk Koubek [born 1913] announced that he was going to be living as a man. To sports fans, the news seemed hard to believe: Koubek had been assigned female at birth, and he had competed, and set a world record, in the women’s 800-meter dash [just a little more than a year earlier].
But after years of expressing an affinity for masculinity, Koubek decided the category no longer fit him. He was going to undergo a series of operations in his home country of Czechoslovakia, he told the press. Afterward, he hoped to compete in men’s sports.
At the time [Koubek began competing], few women’s sports were available at the Olympics, and so the highest level of competition for most track athletes was the Women’s World Games, an upstart rival to the Olympics that took place every four years.
After rising through the ranks of a track club in Brno, Koubek moved to Prague. There, he set his sights on the 1934 Women’s World Games, which were hosted in London. That August, at the games, Koubek lined up for his signature event: the women’s 800-meter dash.
After his victory at the Women’s World Games, Koubek decided to focus on himself. He couldn’t escape his own nagging discomfort with the gender he’d been assigned. His “soul” was “always more for being a man,” he told the press later. The following fall, he began seeing a doctor, who agreed to perform a series of operations and to certify Koubek as a man. Though Koubek felt at times like a “guinea pig” in the doctor’s office, that was the price of getting healthcare in 1935.
When Koubek went public with his decision to live as a man, the public largely embraced him. At that point, Koubek had retired from women’s sports, and he expressed his desire to instead compete against men.
the head of the Women’s World Games, Alice Milliat, rejected a reporter’s question about whether to revoke Koubek’s gold medal. “If it is proved that [Koubek] has become a man, it is logical to consider that previously she was a woman,” Milliat said, noting that Koubek didn’t want to play in women’s sports anyway.
As World War II approached, Koubek received a driver’s certificate that identified him as a man, and he married a woman named Uršulou Škrobačovou. He landed a job at the car company Škoda. In 1944, after 10 years away, Koubek quietly returned to sports. He enrolled in a newly formed men’s rugby league, RC Říčany, which practiced in the suburbs of Prague.
He never made it to the Olympics—he was now over 30—but he had found a way to play sports on his terms.
Unfortunately, all the material about Koubek now on the web presents him as "trans." His story has become a fave of TRAs, who keep altering the details to suit their agenda.
Another great write up, as usual. Just got done with the video about Erik, fascinating! I had never heard his story before. Before this Paris outrage, the only Olympic “sex change” story I’d heard anything about was Heidi Krieger.
ProxyMusicOctober 10, 2024(Edited October 10, 2024)
I don't know what happened in any of the cases of the 8 athletes in the women's category who were found to be male with DSDs at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. But it could be that the XY 5-ARD athlete was one of the XY athletes seeking eligibility for women's competition at the Atlanta Games who'd already had their testes removed.
Back in the 1990s, the (mostly) men in charge of the Olympics believed that if a male had his testes removed, it meant he didn't have any physical advantage over women. Just as they believed that if males had faulty androgen receptors which left them unable to utilize/respond to the massive amounts of testosterone their testes pumped out in the ways that males normally do, then for all practical purposes those blokes should be considered female.
Back in the 1990s - just in the Caster Semenya era and even today - many men (and some women) in sports governance and the general public took it for granted that any bloke who didn't develp a normal penis was female, or "close enough." Phallocentric notions of sex are so widespread and deep-seated that even today, lots of people assume that lack of penis = female.
General women's fitness discussion belongs at /o/Fitness.
If you are posting a link, it should be directly relevant to the topic of sex-segregation in sports.
If your link is not directly on topic but you would like to use it to start a discussion that is on topic, make a text post including your link and commentary that puts it into context. Posts that link to something off-topic will be removed, even if comments provide context.
Oh wait, the caption on the photo revealed that Imane Khalif was in fact XY? I didn’t even realize that they had finally released the results!!
Also yeah, it’s literally a cheek swab. It’s not invasive, and it’s certainly not any more invasive than the tests athletes are required to do to prove they aren’t doping. It’s not a “genital inspection” it’s “do you have a Y chromosome” but I’m sure people will spin it as such.
Thank god, it’s the sane move. I also didn’t realize they used to do chromosome tests? Interesting
The IAAF and IOC made DNA sex testing mandatory for all elite athletes seeking eligibility to compete in the female category in 1967.
The first superstar athlete known by name to have been declared ineligible for women's competition because of the DNA sex testing when it was initially introduced in 1967 was Austrian alpine skier Erik(a) Schinnegger, then the reigning women's World Cup champion. Schinnegger underwent the DNA testing in preparation for the 1968 winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, where the Austrian ace was expected to win the gold in all three women's alpine events hands down. Instead, Schinnegger found out he was XY with a DSD, so his career in competitive women's skiing immediately came crashing to an end and his whole life took a different turn. Schinnegger went on to have some kind of corrective surgery on his genitals/gonads, which eventually enabled him to father a child "the natural way." He seems like an honorable, decent man. https://youtu.be/8mgQ97TKxc8?si=wtVddZYEyv237VXe
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the testing done for sports eligibility purposes was as you describe it - "do you have a Y chromosome." But after the SRY gene was discovered in 1990, new testing protocols were introduced to see if they had the SRY gene along with checking their sex chromosomes.
If/when the testing is re-introduced, I suspect it will look to see if athletes have a Y and the SRY gene too.
The last time that athletes in elite women's events had to undergo mandatory cheek swab DNA sex testing was at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta. Eight athletes in the women's category at the Atlanta Games were found to be XY and SRY positive with disorders of male sex development. Most had some form of AIS; one had XY 5-ARD (Semenya's DMSD). Six of the athletes had already had their testes removed, so presumably they weren't surprised when their test results came back showing that they were XY and SRY+. AFAIK, all eight athletes were allowed to compete.
The IOC polled the athletes in women's competiion who underwent the testing at the Atlanta Games to see how they felt about the DNA testing. The vast majority - 84% - said they thought the testing was a good idea and they wanted it to continue. But the IOC decided to discontinue it anyways - all on account of the hue and cry raised by, and on behalf of, the XY DSD athletes who had been caught out by the testing and felt it was unfair to them.
ETA: Correction: I was mistaken when I wrote in my earlier post above that Schinnegger was
The first superstar athlete known by name who was declared ineligible for women's competition because of the DNA sex testing was Polish sprinter Ewa Klubukowska, who won a women's bronze in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In 1967, the IAAF (now World Athletics) banned Klubukowska from women's competition after a DNA sex test administered for the European Cup women's track & field championships in Kyiv in 1967 revealed the Polish runner to have a Y chromosome.
It's never been clear exactly what the deal with Kłobukowska was. It's been reported that in 1968 Kłobukowska became pregnant and gave birth to a son, lending credence to the theory that Kłobukowska had some kind of chromosomal mosaicism. But on the other hand, the IAAF/World Athletics has a history of being extremely lenient towards XY DSD athletes and pulling out all the stops to be be as accommodating and possible towards them. Also, if Kłobukowska really were female, then it seems odd that in all the years since 1967, no formal complaints or lawsuits have been filed against the IAAF challenging the banning, and there's been no PR or media campaign to try to restore the athlete's tarnished public image.
Out of all the athletes I've looked through, Schinnegger is the only example I've found who has acted with anything resembling integrity and honesty. I actually feel bad about putting him on the HeCheated website, but I've left him there simply for data regarding male advantage.
He honestly didn't know he was male, but after finding out withdrew himself completely from women's competitions, didn't put up a stink or play the victim about any of it, and returned the world championship medal he had won.
He didn't continue living in denial, and recognized that he was, in fact, a man, despite what he had previously been told/believed.
There were a couple of other European athletes who competed in women's elite track & field in the 1920s and 30s who apparently were XY with DMSDs who seem to have been a decent, fair-mineded persons who wanted to face the truth - and who did.
British track athlete Mark Weston, nee Mary Weston, was one:
https://www.theboxplymouth.com/blog/history/mark-weston-biography
Then there was track star Zdena Koubková, later Zdeněk Koubková, of Czechoslovakia:
https://english.radio.cz/zdena-zdenek-interwar-czech-champion-who-changed-genders-8720071
https://www.history.com/news/athlete-gender-barrier-zdenek-koubek
Unfortunately, all the material about Koubek now on the web presents him as "trans." His story has become a fave of TRAs, who keep altering the details to suit their agenda.
https://youtu.be/lqoEVqr3lSs?si=995Lyxsk6d7mB3ar
Great information! Thanks
Wow, everything really does revolve around males.
Another great write up, as usual. Just got done with the video about Erik, fascinating! I had never heard his story before. Before this Paris outrage, the only Olympic “sex change” story I’d heard anything about was Heidi Krieger.
What was the point of sex testing if the IOC allowed 5-ARD males to compete?
I don't know what happened in any of the cases of the 8 athletes in the women's category who were found to be male with DSDs at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. But it could be that the XY 5-ARD athlete was one of the XY athletes seeking eligibility for women's competition at the Atlanta Games who'd already had their testes removed.
Back in the 1990s, the (mostly) men in charge of the Olympics believed that if a male had his testes removed, it meant he didn't have any physical advantage over women. Just as they believed that if males had faulty androgen receptors which left them unable to utilize/respond to the massive amounts of testosterone their testes pumped out in the ways that males normally do, then for all practical purposes those blokes should be considered female.
Back in the 1990s - just in the Caster Semenya era and even today - many men (and some women) in sports governance and the general public took it for granted that any bloke who didn't develp a normal penis was female, or "close enough." Phallocentric notions of sex are so widespread and deep-seated that even today, lots of people assume that lack of penis = female.