An ‘Obscene Process’ to Police Women Athletes Rears Its Head Again
The practice of “sex verification testing,” discredited decades ago, has become the new favorite of anti-trans zealots – cost and privacy be damned.
by Denny
“Sex verification testing,” a discriminatory practice that shatters the privacy of all women athletes, is gaining traction among anti-trans zealots despite a cost of thousands of dollars per competitor and a record of unreliability and abuse that led it to be abandoned decades ago.
“Anyone who doesn't conform to a sort of stereotypical presentation of femininity is now open to invasive, expensive testing,” Shane Diamond, director of communications and advocacy at GLAAD, said in an interview with Assigned Media. He describes the testing as a “ridiculous, very intrusive, obscene process.”
World Athletics, the governing body of international track and field, announced last month that all female athletes must undergo chromosome testing in an explicit effort to bar trans competitors. Its president, Sebastian Coe, cited “integrity of competition” in reinstating a form of testing that was discredited in the 1990s.
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who has waged numerous tax-wasting, anti-trans harassment campaigns in his state, is now suing the NCAA to demand sex-verification screening of all collegiate female athletes.
Sexism and misogyny are at the core of these efforts to subject women to invasive testing, Diamond said. The absence of similar policies or scrutiny for men’s athletics, he said, illustrates the double standard at work.
“If people, governing bodies, and administrations were interested in protecting women’s sports, we would see equal funding for men's and women's sports, we would see a closing of the pay gap between men's and women's professional sports, and we would see more investment in women's coaches,” said Diamond, who played women’s ice hockey in college, prior to transitioning.
Depriving women athletes of privacy also ignores a history of predation they have faced. “It wasn't that long ago,” Diamond noted, “that Larry Nassar was charged with assaulting over 100 gymnasts.”
Shortly after Coe’s announcement, The Inclusion Playbook—a consulting group that promotes equitable and inclusive athletics—published an analysis detailing the steep costs and intrusiveness of sex verification testing.
“Historically, sex testing has been used to police women’s participation in sports, particularly harming women of color, intersex women, and transgender athletes. Many of these policies have led to human rights violations,” its analysis said. Sex testing policies, it added, “often rely on outdated and pseudoscientific ideas about sex and disproportionately target women whose bodies do not conform to narrow gender stereotypes.”
Inclusion Playbook found that basic chromosomal testing, or karyotyping, alone costs between $1,000 and $2,500 per athlete. Hormone level analysis, pelvic ultrasounds, genetic sequencing, administration and appeals push the cost per athlete above $10,000. For disputed cases requiring multiple rounds of tests and legal steps, costs could exceed $15,000 per athlete.
Double standards are at work on a financial level, said Diamond, contrasting the far-right’s eagerness to embrace costly testing against its opposition to gender-affirming care for veterans. This inequity can be traced back nearly a decade, to other expenditures: A study released under the first Trump administration found the U.S. military spent eight times more on Viagra than on gender-affirming care.
Invasive chromosome testing is itself built on the false foundation that trans women will always have an inherent advantage in competition, a premise not based in fact. “It is our responsibility to counsel those around us about the healthcare priority to encourage participation in sport and the importance of avoiding fear-driven policies,” the author, Joshua D. Safer, wrote in the Journal of the Endocrine Society.
Notably, DNA testing to confirm the eligibility of women competitors is not new. From 1958 until 1992, all female athletes were subjected to testing before they could take part in any events held by World Athletics—known originally as the International Amateur Athletic Federation—and the International Olympic Committee. Princess Anne, the British royal, was the only exception to the rule, having been exempted for unknown reasons when she competed in the 1976 Olympics.
By June 1999, though, the IOC voted to discontinue gender testing at the urging of several constituent bodies that found it to be irrelevant, discriminatory and actually harmful to women athletes.
“In reality, gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate,” Myron Genel, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine and co-author of a commentary on gender testing published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September 2000.
“Furthermore” Genel wrote, “these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors, are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who ‘fail’ a test.”
The implications of this testing fall heavily on intersex people, who have been swept up in the record-breaking wave of anti-trans legislation – 835 bills in all – that have been introduced in state assemblies nationwide this year. For intersex people, the need for bodily autonomy has been a longstanding fight.
“I would be devastated if I was told I could not compete anymore because I was not enough of a woman,” said Amelia, an intersex athlete competing in NCAA Division I track and field. People with Amelia’s intersex variation, androgen insensitivity syndrome, have one X and one Y chromosome. She was raised as a girl and has always competed in the women’s category.
Chromosome testing shatters privacy barriers in a way that’s uniquely harmful for intersex athletes. “For many athletes, it could be the first time they know anything about their body is different and the first time their gender is called into question, which can be shocking and a lot to process on its own,” Amelia said.
An obsession with sex characteristics is reductive and dehumanizing, said Amelia, whose full name is not being used here to protect her privacy.
“We work as hard as other athletes, we vary in skill as much as other athletes, and we should have as much opportunity to compete as other athletes. Being intersex doesn’t make me a threat to other women. I just want to play my sport.”