1960 - Chromosome Testing
By 1960 the international sports committee required all athletes to go through chromosome testing and physical genital inspection before competing in cisgender sports. Dr. Peter Donnelly, a professor at the University of Toronto, wrote a research paper titled, "Sex Testing, Naked Inspection, and The Olympic Games" in which he found evidence for naked inspections during the 1960s. Donnelly found that naked inspections were carried out in multiple sporting events in the 1960s, including the IAAF (international track and field federation), but not at the olympic games. In fact, naked genital inspection of female athletes was only used by the IAAF in international competition in 1966-1967 until chromosome testing was implemented in late 1967. Although there is no evidence of the IOC performing naked tests on athletes many scholars are skeptical that they did.
Swyer Syndrome
Swyer syndrome is a disorder in humans in which they have a XY chromosome, but still have female genitals. For countless athletes this ruined their lives. Stories such as Sprinter Klobukowska. She was a double medallist at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and broke the women's 100m world record in 1965. But she was banned from all professional sport in 1967 after becoming the first athlete to fail a chromosome test, following suspicions about her masculine appearance. This was a legitimate women who had her life ruined over a faulty system. She probably believed that she was actually a man through all of this and her athletic accomplishment were fraudulent. However, she was a hardworking female athlete who achieved great things. In addition, she had to go the rest of her life being publicly humiliated and labeled a male, despite being female. That is why we must continue to question our own policies for labeling people as male or female. At the time, people thought a chromosome test determined sex without failure, maybe modern science still has some flaws as well.
Sources:
- https://kpe.utoronto.ca/sites/default/files/donnelly-donnelly---sex-testing-naked-inspections-the-olympic-games.pdf
- https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/swyer-syndrome
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/6061375/Sports-gender-controversies.html