You Ain’t Woman Enough: Tracing the Policing of Intersexuality in Sports and the Clinic
| Author | Mireia Garcés de Marcilla Musté |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221086595 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
You Ain’t Woman Enough:
Tracing the Policing of
Intersexuality in Sports and
the Clinic
Mireia Garcés de Marcilla Musté
Law School, London School of Economics and
Political Science, London, UK
Abstract
This article traces the continuities and discontinuities in the history of sporting and clin-
ical rules concerning intersexuality. Through the parallel investigation of how intersexual
bodies have been monitored, examined, and modified in the sporting and medical
worlds, I argue that neither of them have ‘progressed’to become more ‘respectful’
or ‘inclusive’. Rather, changes in the management of intersexuality in both areas consist
in different iterations of a pervasive conceptualisation of bodies as dichotomously gen-
dered. I contend that medical and sporting bodies’supposedly ‘scientific’search to
‘determine’gender not only is a failed endeavour, given the contradictory gender ‘mar-
kers’that have been ‘discovered’and enforced on bodies, but also constitutes an
attempt, disguised through discourses of health and fairness, to render intersexuality
a problematic form of embodiment.
Keywords
clinic, gender, history, intersexuality, science, sports
Introduction
What does it mean to ‘run like a girl’? This question has recently resulted in many
problems for Christine Mboma, an eighteen year old Namibian sprinter who broke the
Corresponding author:
Mireia Garcés de Marcilla Musté, Law School, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton
Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom.
Email: m.garces-de-marcilla-muste@lse.ac.uk
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(6) 847–870
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221086595
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30 year-old women’s world 400 meter record last July. After such an outstanding per-
formance, however, she was barred from running the Olympic 400 meter race in
Tokyo 2020 because she was found, together with fellow runner Beatrice Masilingi, to
have an intersexual condition which increases her levels of testosterone above the
‘normal’female range (BBC Sport, 2021). According to the sports governing body
World Athletics (henceforth, ‘IAAF’),
1
these women’s participation in the female div-
ision would have threatened fair competition, only allowing them to run if they agreed
to hormonally or surgically lower their testosterone levels. All three 800 meter medallists
from Rio 2016, Francine Niyonsaba, Margaret Wambui and Caster Semenya encountered
the same problem, and were unable to compete at Tokyo 2020 after refusing to undergo
medical treatment to artificially suppress their testosterone levels (Higgins, 2011).
These controversies surrounding intersexuality are, however, not new. The gradual
acceptance of women in sports competitions in the early twentieth century was followed
by increasing fears about female athletes not being ‘true’women. Helen Stephens, who
won the gold medal for the 100 meter race in Berlin 1936, was accused of being a man by
her competitors and the ‘height, musculature and masculine features’of the silver med-
allist in the same event, Stella Walasiewczowna, also prompted questions about her
womanhood (Harper, 2020: p. 30). Perhaps the most (in)famous case of ‘gender fraud’
is Heinrich Ratjen’s, whose participation in the 1936 Games as a woman is said to
have been part of a Nazi scheme to ensure the success of Germany in the Berlin
Games (Berg, 2009). During the Cold War, Soviet sister athletes Irina and Tamara
Press, who systematically outperformed their American competitors, were nicknamed
the ‘Press Brothers’by the US media, fuelling numerous rumours about their ‘true’
gender (Wiederkehr, 2009). As we shall see, anxiety about the ‘unfemininity’of some
female athletes led to the establishment of ‘gender verification’,‘sex testing’or ‘femin-
inity testing’
2
procedures by the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee (IOC),
which seek to screen out ‘fake’intersexual women from the female division.
The policing of intersexuality is not confined to the sports world. The medical profes-
sion also has a long history of monitoring and ‘normalising’intersexual bodies, mobilis-
ing health, instead of levelling the playing field, as the main justification to control and
treat intersexuality (Dreger, 1998). While the evolution, rationales and problems attached
to clinical and sporting protocols managing intersexuality have separately been matters of
lengthy academic discussion (see Daly, 2015; Elsas et al. 2000; Feder, 2014; Kessler
1990; Ljungqvist et al., 2006; Malatino, 2019), this paper seeks to explore how the
history of both sorts of regulation proceeds from shared assumptions about gender and
embodiment. Reading together the history of how clinical and sporting bodies have
been dealing with intersexuality opens up a new path of inquiry to study how embodi-
ment, ambiguity and gender have been conceptualised and regulated.
How do sporting and clinical policies justify their commitment to surveil intersexual-
ity? Have both ‘systems’been fuelled by similar fears or concerns? What do the constant
changes in each of these policies mean for how intersex is seen? By seeking to answer
these questions, this paper puts forward two main arguments. First, changes in both
sorts of policies, albeit framed as ‘progress’in terms of scientific accuracy, inclusivity,
health and respect for autonomy, consist in different iterations of a constant conceptual-
isation of bodies as dichotomously gendered. Second, binary gender difference, despite
848 Social & Legal Studies 31(6)
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