Wade's world: where female sports for females only is "a giant step backwards"

Fun facts about sex verification, and some of the "progress" that's been made in women's sports since it was abolished

In 2023, John Spencer, on the left, tied for fifth place in boys’ pole vault at the Maine state indoor track championship. This year, as Katie Spencer (right), he won the girls’ pole vault title, and contributed to his school’s win of the Maine state indoor track championships by one point. Another giant leap forward for girls’ sports, made possible by utter lack of eligibility criteria.

Alison Wade, editor of the weekly Fast Women newsletter covering women’s running, is one of the most strident voices for men in women’s sports. As such, she’s apoplectic about sex verification for the female category. Below is her take on the proposal by IOC presidential candidate Seb Coe to reinstate sex screening for the female category at the elite level. For background, Coe, as head of World Athletics, made the outrageous decision in 2023 to restrict the female category to females, and has made that the centerpiece of his IOC campaign. The other six IOC presidential candidates have all, to various degrees, adopted a female-only female category stance (writing that is my daily crazy pill) as a matter of existential necessity for the IOC brand, which was badly battered in 2024 by two IOC-enabled and -defended male boxers winning gold in women’s boxing.

Here’s Wade’s fact-free treatise on the evils of defending the female category. Farther on, I spotted her some examples, just from the world of track and field, that Wade could have used to strengthen her sex-category-without-sex-testing position, but didn’t for some reason.

Last week, World Athletics announced that they’re considering bringing back sex testing for all athletes who want to compete in the women’s category. Rose Eveleth, host of the Tested podcast, wrote a good piece in response.

Gosh I am an inveterate link clicker. Rose Eveleth produced a podcast called Tested, A Surprising History of Women’s Sports, for CBC and NPR. Indeed, most people who know the history of women’s sports would be surprised by what Eveleth wrote. Eveleth seems to have an extremely casual relationship with facts, more of an internal sense of her own truth, up to and including her name. At the link above to the Tested website, Eveleth uses the unusual last will and testament construction “I (Rose Eveleth) have been following this story for ten years.” Naturally, I clicked on that Rose Eveleth link and was directed to a bio page for someone named Reo Eveleth. Rose, Reo, I toggled back and forth thinking it was pretty egregious for a writer to misspell her own name. But now I realize a name is one of those progressive fluid truths, like the definition of woman. Still, if a writer can’t be clear and consistent with her name, it makes you wonder about the other surprising “facts” she’s uncovering.

After the announcement, I went back and listened to episode three of Tested, titled “Card-Carrying Females,” for a refresher on the history of sex testing in sports. Eveleth explains in the episode that from 1968 to 1999, every woman who competed in the Olympic Games had to undergo a chromosome test verifying that they were female. Athletes, doctors, and ethicists worked hard to end the testing, and 26 years ago they were successful. Eveleth mentioned that there’s speculation that World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who is hoping to become president of the IOC, wants to be able to say he has “sorted out” how to handle DSD athletes as part of his campaign. Others think he’s feeling emboldened by the transphobic bills and executive orders in the U.S. Regardless of the logic, it would be a giant step backwards, and I wish more athletes were educating themselves and speaking up on the matter.

What Eveleth and Wade have failed to mention is that the only reason sex verification was ever instated at the Olympic level was because, from the first women’s participation in the 1920s, men tried to gatecrash women’s sports. Being familiar with the purpose of sports categories, the IOC was forced to institute sex verification to defend the category. Just as they do with other categories like weight classes, age categories, and para ability categories. Up until 1999, the IOC tried to keep men out of women’s sports. Sex verification did that.

Unlike Rose/Reo Eveleth, Linda Blade, a former Canadian National Champion in track and field, and author with a phD in Kinesiology, has done more than follow “this story” for ten years, she’s lived it since 1984. Her history of sex testing in women’s sports also has some surprising elements to it. Except these are true. For example, at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the IOC introduced gene testing for the SRY (male) chromosome because it was more accurate than the previously used cheek swab. While it was more complex and costly than cheek swabs, it did work. Eight SRY-having male athletes were identified. The surprising part is that the IOC nonetheless gave these anonymous eight males permission to compete in the female category! Makes you wonder whether the IOC was starting to think men in women’s sports was not such a bad thing. I mean, if they were going to pay all that money and go through the hassle of accurate sex verification and then just let males compete anyway, why do the testing? Save yourself the money, right? Of course, they couldn’t say that. That would look like they didn’t care about women’s sports. So, in 1999, the IOC announced they were doing away with cheek swabs and genetic testing because it was too costly and it made female athletes uncomfortable. But oops, their own survey of female athletes from the Atlanta Games showed that fully 82 percent of female Olympians favored the continuation of sex testing, and 94 percent reported feeling no anxiety from the procedure. This surprising fact has eluded Eveleth and Wade.

So, sex verification was only ever instituted to keep males out of female sports, and conversely, it was abolished because the IOC had decided to actively make a pathway for males to compete in female sports. Sex testing would be at odds with this goal. In 2003, the IOC announced a policy whereby “male transsexuals” could compete in the female category, based on “the best evidence available at the time.” In fact, the only evidence available at the time showed that males who’d had their testes removed and chemically altered their hormones to mimic women’s still retained physiological and anatomical advantages. It showed that this would be unfair to women, and in some cases, dangerous. Linda Blade recounts that the author of one of the only studies on trans-identified males, Dr. Louis Gooren, told the IOC, “depending on the levels of arbitrariness one wants to accept, it is justifiable that re-assigned males can compete with other women.” In other words, if you’d like to be arbitrary, playing fast and loose with fairness, sure, you can let males compete with women. And the IOC said Let’s do it! Since 2003, the IOC has only made it easier for males, both those with DSDs and trans-identified males, to compete in the female category. More surprising facts that didn’t make it into Eveleth’s history that focused on how discriminatory sex testing was. Eveleth apparently does not recognize that ALL CATEGORIES discriminate against those who do not meet the criteria.

Wade accused Seb Coe of wanting to “sort out” the DSD issue, and of being emboldened by “transphobic” executive orders, the ones that keep males out of female sports. Like that’s a bad thing. There’s so much wrong with her statement, I don’t know where to start. First and elephant-sized, one has to wonder why Wade would be in favor of males in female sport. Second, the word transphobic was never and still isn’t accurate—very few things or people are afraid of transness. The list of things that have nonetheless been labeled transphobic—reality, biology, science, sex, mothers, women, men, pregnancy, breasts, vaginas, cervixes, menstruation, executive orders, transwomen vs trans women, sexual assault statistics, violent crime statistics, women’s rights—render it meaningless. In fact, transphobic can now be used as a synonym for reality. Third, 46 XY 5-ARD was first described in a scientific paper in 1974. So, the fact that this DSD only affects males was “sorted out” 51 years ago. The IOC and every other sports organization have known since then that athletes with this disorder are male; they allowed them to compete in the female category anyway, because no sex screening! Fourth, since Coe’s official protection of the female category at World Athletics occurred nearly two years before the executive orders, Wade is way off base in saying they influenced Coe’s years-long commitment to the integrity of women’s sports. It may come as a surprise to those who seem to think binary sex was invented a couple weeks ago, but biological reality has existed for at least the last six thousand years or so, well before the executive orders.

I could not help but notice Wade missed lots of obvious opportunities to strengthen her argument that sex verification would be a “giant step backwards.” Why not highlight some of the advancements that have been possible since cheek swabs were dropped? The most photogenic, in a crowded field, is that of Rochester Institute of Technology sprinter Sadie (Camden) Schreiner. By all means, click on the image below and listen to Schreiner’s story of oppression. Also, note the comments.

sadie_schreiner

A post shared by @sadie_schreiner

In case you don’t know, Schreiner ran with limited success as a man, and after chemically mimicking a female hormonal profile and switching to the women’s team, set school records and qualified for NCAA Nationals, something he’d never done on the men’s team. Schreiner tried to enter a track meet at Boston University as an “unattached” female, something that’s condoned by the NCAA even after the executive order, because the NCAA counts anyone as female who has a female marker on their birth certificate. Schreiner has changed the sex marker on his birth certificate. A changeable birth certificate does not verify sex, but a cheek swab would. As Kim Jones, co-founder of ICONS, pointed out, the only thing that kept Schreiner from competing AGAIN in a women’s race is that the meet officials at Boston University could not help but notice Schreiner’s many Instagram posts in which he complains about the travails of being a trans-identified male athlete. Had he not advertised his maleness by every means possible, this fine and deserving athlete would have been able to race in the women’s category, where he’s had such success. Why did Alison Wade not highlight Schreiner’s success story as a clear cut example of the good stuff that happens when there is no sex testing for the women’s category? Schreiner is a prime example of the progress that’s been made by abolishing cheek swabs.

Want proof of more progress made by the abolition of sex verification? Look no farther than Para Olympian Valentina Petrillo.

The IOC was not guilty of policing this “woman’s” body with an invasive and discriminatory cheek swab, and as a result, he was able to compete at the highest level of women’s track. As is clear from this photo, sex verification would be a huge step backward for Petrillo’s career in the women’s category. Why did Wade not highlight Petrillo’s story?

An oldie but goodie, why did Alison Wade not reference the obvious pioneering in women’s sports of three male runners on the female 800-meter podium at the 2016 Olympics? Yup, all thanks to the fact that the IOC had abolished cheek swabs. As I mentioned above, the IOC knew that all athletes with 46 XY 5-ARD were male, and because Caster Semenya, the gold medalist, had started his elite running career under a cloud of suspicion, World Athletics conducted their own sex verification tests. They knew back in 2009 that Semenya was male with a DSD, but allowed him to continue to race in the female category. Since there was no routine cheek swab screening that would have made it impossible to disguise the fact that they were male, all three Olympic medalists—Semenya, Francine Nyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui—competed and won medals for years at the highest level of women’s sports. What a leap forward for women’s sports! If Wade is going to argue that sex testing is bad and a giant step backward, I can’t imagine why she didn’t highlight this example.

I wonder, though, when Wade urges athletes to educate themselves and speak up, if that’s really a wise move. I’m pretty sure that’s what people have been doing for the past 26 years.

There are at least 40 peer reviewed papers that show that male advantage is retained despite hormonal treatment. There are at least two studies that show boys are stronger, faster, and throw farther than girls before puberty, and that that performance gap widens overwhelmingly with puberty.

Education of the public and other athletes was the last thing on the IOC’s mind. The IOC had to lie about the reason they stopped doing sex verification because they knew it would undermine women’s sports. And they knew allowing “male transsexuals,” their words, in the female category would be extremely unpopular with athletes and with the public. Both the IOC’s 2003 pathway for males to compete in women’s sports, and the NCAA’s male inclusion policy in 2010 were accomplished with minimal public engagement or announcement. In fact, one of the only news articles about the NCAA’s “proposed interpretation” of transgender eligibility appeared in Inside Higher Ed in 2010. It recounted the NCAA’s oddly furtive, low-key- to-the-point-of-secretive release of the information: “NCAA officials did not return requests for comment about the proposed interpretation. The announcement was posted on the NCAA's website Tuesday, but was removed, and an NCAA official said it had been placed there before it was scheduled to be released.” Most people were not aware that the NCAA allowed males to compete in female sport until swimmer Lia Thomas won a women’s national championship twelve years later in 2022.

For proponents, the less people knew about males in female sports, the better. These policies were never discussed or voted on by the public. Education or involvement of the public was to be avoided because they knew it was unfair to women and an obvious violation of Title IX. It would come as a shock to most Washington residents that the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association adopted a policy of sports participation by gender identity in 2005. By 2015, 33 state high school sports associations had adopted a self-ID policy for sports, including Minnesota. I was both writing about women’s sports and coaching at the high school level in 2015, and I did not hear one word of discussion about “transgender inclusion.” This secretiveness was on purpose. Educate the public? Quite the opposite—all possible care was taken to hide the fact that, without anyone knowing, girls’ and women’s right to their own sports was given away. It was an outrageous, anti-science, anti-reality, misogynistic, indefensible violation of human rights. There was no reasonable defense—the best bet was to keep it quiet.

But people see things. They do educate themselves. And the more people learn, about male advantage, about women’s rights, that “trans inclusion” actually means male incursion in the female category, the less they approve of it. Just in the years 2021 to 2023, public support for sports participation by biological sex rose from 62% to 69%. A study of elite and world class athletes published in 2024 also showed overwhelming support for biological sex sport categories. And people are speaking up. Blind devotion to men in women’s sports was one of the issues that sunk the Democratic party in the 2024 presidential election.

People have indeed educated themselves about males in women’s sports, and they’re speaking up. As Alison Wade knows, you have to define and defend any category, or it ceases to exist. Sex verification defines and defends the female category. Seb Coe: “If you do not protect that category (women's sport), or are in any way ambivalent about it, then it will not end well for women's sport.”