Women Are Not Men With Undescended Testicles

March 8th, 1896, Stamata Revithi becomes the first woman to complete a marathon distance at the Olympics.

She couldn't do it officially, of course. Thanks to a total ban on female athletes, Revithi wasn't allowed to run until the day after the male-only marathon had been completed.

But after four and a half hours of effort, she arrived at the stadium where the male runners had completed their runs to the cheers of the crowds...and officials denied her entry for being too female. She completed the distance by running alone around the outside of the arena.

April 19th, 1966. As women are still barred from the Olympics, Bobbi Gibb becomes the first woman to run at the Boston Marathon.

She couldn't do it officially, of course. The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which oversaw the Boston Marathon, had declared that women were "not physiologically able" to run more than a mile and a half.

So, even though she'd been running distances of up to forty miles a day for the previous two years, and even though she feared being arrested for the crime of running too far, Gibb disguised herself in her brother's shorts and a hooded sweatshirt, hid in some bushes near the starting line, and blended in with the male runners as they went past.

April 19th, 1967. A year after Bobbi's groundbreaking run, Kathrine Switzer became the first registered female entrant in the Boston Marathon.

She couldn't do it officially, of course, the AAU were just as hostile to female runners as they'd been the year before. Thankfully, Kathrine had the bright idea of registering under the androgynous “K. V. Switzer” and asking her male coach to collect her running bib.

Kathrine was allowed to start with the other runners, but as word spread that a woman was once again defying the natural order, the race director leapt from a nearby press truck, charged at Switzer mid-race, and ordered her to, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!” Luckily, Switzer's boyfriend held him off long enough for her to finish the race.

And as Switzer crossed the line, faced with this final, irrefutable proof that female athletes could handle the distance...the AAU banned women for five more years.

Until recently, sporting bodies were crystal clear about which athletes were male and which were female.

Female athletes were the ones who had to disguise their names to compete in boxing events, they had to wear skimpy outfits or face heavy fines, they had to hide in bushes and dodge rampaging race managers, and males...didn't.

But thankfully, those dark, misogynistic days are behind us. In 2024, sporting bodies are committed to pretending there's no difference at all!

Take, for example, Avi Silverberg, a self-identified man, who was nonetheless allowed to smash the women's bench press record thanks to the Canadian Powerlifting Union's policy on gender self-identification.

Or Con Laoghaire, also a self-identified man, who, as a joke, bypassed Trinity College's rigorous gender policies by claiming to be a woman in a “slightly triggered tone.”

And most recently, Algerian Imane Khelif and Taiwanese Lin Yu-Ting, both of whom are competing in the women's 66kg and 59kg Olympic boxing categories despite failing “gender eligibility” tests in 2022 and 2023.

The International Boxing Association (IBA), who administered the tests, confirmed that both boxers were discovered to have XY chromosomes, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, Thomas Bach, accidentally confirmed the findings when he claimed that “this is not a DSD case” and was promptly corrected by his media department, and István Kovács, European Vice President of the World Boxing Organization, left no room for doubt when he confirmed that “...the Algerian boxer is biologically male.”

All signs suggest that Khelif and Yu-Ting were raised as females, and likely believed themselves to be female, but thanks to a DSD (Difference of Sexual Development), they’re male, with all the physical advantages male puberty provides.

Acknowledging this isn't about picking on intersex people, it’s about the fact that, aside from the obvious safety and ethical concerns of men beating up women on television, asking female athletes to compete against males is no different to removing them from sports entirely.

In this year's Olympics, the winning women's 100m time of 10.72 seconds wouldn't have made it out of the men's preliminary heats. So no women in the 100m finals.

The world record in the heaviest women's clean and jerk weight category (set by a woman who weighed 150kg), falls short of the record in the men's 67kg category. So no women in the weightlifting finals either.

The world record of 2.10m in the women's high jump wouldn't have qualified to compete in this year’s men’s division. Same for the world record of 72.28m in the women's javelin. So no women in these events at all.

I could quite literally do this all day because this pattern holds for every single strength/power-dominant event in the Olympics.

Martina Navratilova, Sharron Davies, and Nicola Adams, all retired, have spoken out about the unfairness of males competing against females. But women who still rely on a career in athletics can't say so officially.

As Olympian Lynsey Sharp put it:

...I've tried to avoid the issue all year [...] we know each other feel, but it's out of our control and we're very much relying on other people at the top sorting it out.

It's hard to imagine how much it must suck to grow up believing you're female only to discover that your biology says otherwise.

And how much more it must suck if you're an athlete who is suddenly ineligible for the female category.

And how unbearably it must suck for this ordeal to be broadcast across social media for ill-informed strangers to share their simplistic, nuance-free understanding of human biology.

But we can't move beyond simplistic, nuance-free ideas if we're not allowed to speak honestly, if we can't accept that some people who look female are not female, if we insist on pretending that it’s fine to be meticulous about an athlete’s weight and movements and diet and recreational drug consumption, but hateful to ask athletes to compete in the appropriate category for their sex (especially as several female trans and non-binary athletes choose to compete in the female category).

Women are not an “F” on a passport or the performance of gendered stereotypes. Women are not men speaking with a slightly triggered tone of voice. Women are not an overflow category for males with undescended testicles or otherwise unconventional biology.

Male or female, trans or intersex, we are all relying on bodies like the IOC to set rules that respect everybody. The fact that there's only one group they can't respect proves that after all these years, they still know who the women are.