Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport: A History of the Present

199 Pages·2019·0.989 MB·English

by  Sonja Erikainen

Gender Verification and the Making
of the Female Body in Sport
T his book critically explores the history of gender verification in international
sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce
“femaleness” and, consequently, the female body as we know it.
T racing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till
the present, the book shows how and why medical “sex tests” have been used to
“verify” women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have shaped
broader social and scientific ideas about femaleness in the process. Exploring
how geopolitics, gender, and class and race relations intertwined with scientific
ideas about femaleness and womanhood to shape gender verification, the book
shows how sports competitions became a battleground where new and old ideas
about sex difference collided. By mapping the social, historical, and material
instability of sex and gender, it shows why so much investment has been placed
in distinguishing femaleness from maleness in sport and beyond.
T he book will be of interest to researchers and later-year undergraduate and
graduate students in a broad range of areas including gender studies, sports studies,
social and historical studies of science, and medicine. It will also be relevant to
sports policy as it historically and conceptually contextualises gender verification
policies.
Sonja Erikainen is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her
research interests cluster around social, historical, and ethical issues concerning
biomedicine and gender. Her publications cover areas including digital health,
new and emerging biotechnologies, and gender identity as well as gender and
sports.
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Gender Verification and the Making of the Female Body in Sport
A History of the Present
Sonja Erikainen
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Gender Verification and
the Making of the Female
Body in Sport
A History of the Present
Sonja Erikainen
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Sonja Erikainen
The right of Sonja Erikainen to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Erikainen, Sonja, author.
Title: Gender verification and the making of the female body in
sport : a history of the present / Sonja Erikainen.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY :
Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge advances in critical
diversities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019043298 (print) | LCCN 2019043299
(ebook) | ISBN 9780367313012 (hardback) | ISBN
9780429316159 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women athletes—Physiology. | Sports—Sex
differences. | Gender identity in sports.
Classification: LCC GV709 .E85 2020 (print) | LCC GV709
(ebook) | DDC 796.082—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043298
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043299
ISBN: 978-0-367-31301-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31615-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To mum, the first feminist athlete I ever met, for
showing me how to tackle life like a judoka.

Contents
Acknowledgements x
List of abbreviations xii
1 Introduction: gender verification, sex difference, and the body 1
Writing histories of gender verification 5
A genealogy of the female category in sport 9
Socio-scientific configurations of sex, gender and the body 10
Feminist configurations of sex, gender and the body 16
Structure of the book 20
Notes 22
2 Sex instability from the 1920s to the 1950s 24
“The peculiar awkwardness of women’s efforts” 25
Sex changes, metamorphoses, and hormonal sex instability 29
Hermaphrodites, monstrosities, and sex borderlines 34
Physical examinations and femininity certificates 37
Conclusion 40
Notes 41
3 Pure and polluted bodies in Cold War sports 43
Cold War geopolitics in international sport 44
Gendered Cold War sporting dynamics 47
Artificial substances and sex abnormality 48
Naked parades 53
Borderline bodies, hybrid creatures, and the feminisation
of women’s sport 56
Conclusion 60
Notes 62
viii Contents
4 Sex screening and diagnosis in the Olympics 63
The medicalisation of the Olympics 64
The medical management of sex abnormalities 65
Naked parades, embarrassment, and further
examinations 68
A diagnostic paradigm for sex 70
The impact of on-site gender verification in the Olympics 73
Conclusion 79
Notes 80
5 Gender fraud and masquerade in the 1970s and 1980s 81
Chromosomal disorders and transsexual women 82
Gender masquerade 86
Ferguson-Smith and the male masquerade threat 87
De la Chapelle and the scientific opposition to
chromosome screening 90
(Re)defining the aims of gender verification 92
“Man has a penis and a scrotum; a woman does not” 96
Conclusion 99
Notes 100
6 Gendered suspicions at the turn of the millennia 102
Gendered suspicion, excessive bodies, and feminine
body aesthetics 103
Objections to the health and gender examinations, and
the PCR test 105
Genitals, gendered suspicion and hypermuscular women 107
The “essence of man” 110
The discontinuation of PCR testing 114
Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya 116
Conclusion 120
Note 122
7 The testosterone debate – from hyperandrogenic females
to biological males 123
Conceptualising androgens 124
Regulations on female hyperandrogenism 126
Diagnosing and treating hyperandrogenism 130
Debating a testosterone sex gap 134
Contents ix
The Rio Olympics 137
IAAF DSD regulations and the testosterone debate 138
Conclusion 144
Notes 146
8 The past, present, and future of gender verification and
sex categories in sport 147
Continuities and discontinuities in the making of
the female body 148
Drawing lines in the sand – current delineations
of femaleness 151
Beyond binary sex and gender categories? 155
Notes 160
Bibliography 161
Index 182