Organizers of this year’s Olympic games in Beijing have set up labs in oder to verify whether female athletes participating in the games are, in fact, female as well as whether they might have taken certain performance-enhancing drugs like “a penis.” The tests have, expectedly, drawn a lot of criticism since the first were used in the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. Luckily, we can blame communists for this:

Gender verification tests emerged in the 1960s when Communist countries in Eastern Europe were thought to be using male athletes in women’s competitions. The tests were used at the Olympics for the first time at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

The concept has drawn criticism over the years, largely because certain chromosomal abnormalities may cause a woman to fail a test, even though it gives her no competitive advantage. Also, if a female athlete fails a test she must have a physiological examination, which many consider invasive and a privacy violation.

Unpleasant, to be sure. Of course, you probably want to know more about what sort of sneaky men decided to compete dressed as women, don’t you? Well, we aim to please:

Sex testing was introduced in competitive sports in the mid-1960s, amid rumour that some competitors in women’s events were not truly female - especially two Soviet sisters who won gold medals at the 1960 and 1964 Olympics, and who abruptly retired when gender verification testing began.

Suspicious!

The first tests, at the European Championships in 1966 and the Pan-American Games in 1967, required female competitors to undress before a panel of doctors. Other methods used during this period included manual examination or close-up scrutiny of the athlete’s genital region.

Invasive!

When athletes complained that these tests were degrading, the IOC at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 introduced genetic testing in the form of a sex chromatin (Barr body) analysis of cells from a buccal smear. The procedure was further modified at the Barcelona games, using the polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA extracted from a specimen to allow detection of a Y chromosome gene, SRY, that codes for male determination.

Scientific! And while we can blame communists for inspiring the inclusion of such tests in the Olympics, fascists are not exempt from partaking in a little gender bending of their own from time to time:

The Nazi youth movement wanted winners at the 1936 Olympics. So Hermann Ratjen bound up his genitals, called himself Dora, and entered the high jump. He made it to the finals, where he was beaten by three women. His deception went undiscovered until 1955, when Ratjen, working as a waiter in Bremen, Germany, told his story.

Beat by three women! We’d always wondered why certain contests and awards, such as the Oscars, had categories divided by gender. Is a “Best Actor’s” best work somehow different from a “Best Actresses’?” With the Olympics, however, we’d always chalked it up to physical differences between male and females. But, maybe, that was an assumption on our part:

Ratjen’s is the only well-documented case of a male athlete masquerading as a female one in the modern Olympics. It’s not an avenue to victory that appeals to many men. Ratjen’s deception also happened long before drug testing began. ‘Who on earth would try that now?’ muses Arne Ljungqvist of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and chairman of the International Amateur Athletic Federation’s medical committee. Dope tests require that athletes urinate into a container in the full sight of an official. ‘Today, it would be impossible for anyone to hide their maleness,’ says Ljungqvist.

Well, actually, that’s not true at all. Especially when “maleness” can be the product of social conditioning rather than a biological fact. We’re not sure what extent maleness plays in providing competitors with an edge when it comes to sports, but we do know that testing for sex and gender as defining, simple categories is increasingly a thing of the past - not because gender and sex have changed, but because so many of our views regarding how these work to define people were never true to begin with.

Lab Ready for Sex Tests for Female Athletes [NY Times]
Olympics Sex Test: Why the Olympic sex test is outmoded, unnecessary and even harmful. [Peak Performance]
Last Olympics for the sex test? [New Scientist]