Women’s sport has a dialogue problem. There appears to be no shortage of opinions on which athletes belong (or not) in the women’s competition category. A common refrain among those women who have publicly expressed a view against a more gender-inclusive women’s category is that they are resisting efforts to “silence” their voices by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or sometimes questioning), intersex, asexual, and others activists, reducing dialogue to a one-way flow of exercising their speech rights (Ahmed, 2015). Far fewer spaces appear to foster exchanges rooted in listening across differences, including in the context of sport, where women athletes who perceive themselves to not be the direct targets of eligibility regulation have few opportunities to hear from and find common ground with those who are. This absence of dialogue is not confined to sport alone: In various countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the politicization of trans rights, as well as other social justice causes, has created seemingly insurmountable social divisions (Alter & Zürn, 2020; Butler, 2021). Conservative lobby groups and lawmakers have capitalized on women’s sport as a key institutional terrain as part of broader efforts to codify a cisgender and binary ideology of gender (Pearce et al., 2020).
A significant body of feminist sociology of sport scholarship has shown how eligibility rules for women’s sport are shaped by the ideological commitments of policymakers and the experts who guide them (Henne, 2014; Jordan-Young & Karkazis, 2019; Pieper, 2016; Posbergh, 2022). This scholarship has also shown that the architects of such eligibility rules—whether applying to transgender women or women with intersex variations—have not succeeded in finding the definitive traits to settle the boundary of the female athlete category once and for all: from genitalia to chromosomes to testosterone levels, women’s bodies have proven unruly (Karkazis et al., 2012). As such and as in the case of scientific claims about sex difference more broadly, feminist scholars argue that sports policymakers and their selected experts lean heavily on ideological “common-sense” assumptions to shore up their selected eligibility approach (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
Such work has had less to say, however, about the policy role of women athletes themselves. Recent national and international policy decisions concerning eligibility for women’s sport suggest that, while the opinions voiced by women athletes can be diverse they can also be used to justify exclusions. When World Aquatics asked its members to vote on an eligibility rule banning transgender women from women’s competition in 2022, Australian Olympian Cate Campbell was a key supporting speaker (Australian Broadcasting Corporation [ABC], 2022). In January 2023, when World Athletics sought feedback on a restrictive policy allowing transgender women to compete only if their testosterone levels were under 2.5 nmol/L, some women athletes expressed dismay (see e.g., Ingle, 2023). World Athletics ultimately imposed a ban on transgender women, citing “little support” from stakeholders as a primary reason for doing so (Falkingham, 2023).
In this paper, I consider the role of women athletes in the policy process, specifically those women athletes who occupy a hegemonic position within the existing cisnormative, binary, and Global North-dominated system of sporting competition. I develop the concept of the “unregulated majority” to capture the notion that there exists a body of women athletes who are exempt (and benefit) from gender eligibility regulatory regimes.1 In practice, all women in sport—including those in the Global North—are impacted by the existence of gender eligibility regimes because they render all women subject to scrutiny of their sporting and gender performances and potentially even to invasive testing (Travers, 2008).2 As such, the unregulated majority is not an actual subject position; rather, it is a powerful imaginary, one that pervades debates about eligibility regulation and which may be used to legitimize regulatory actions as seemingly in the interests of women athletes (Posbergh, 2022). Intersectionally privileged women may themselves wield this imaginary as part of consolidating their hegemonic position in sport.
To situate the concept of the unregulated majority in historical perspective and explore the role of intersectionally privileged Global North women athletes in policy decisions, I consider a case study from the 1990s, when a group of experts supported a policy change at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), now known as World Athletics. Referring to themselves as the Gender Verification Fax Club (the “fax club”), members communicated with each other over multiple years as part of their efforts to shift eligibility regulation in international sport toward an approach they believed would protect women with intersex variations from unwarranted and harmful exclusions.3 On various occasions, members of the fax club were confronted with resistance from women who I suggest can be seen as approximating the unregulated majority and who expressed a desire for stricter regulation. While the fax club ultimately achieved its goal of convincing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to abandon chromosome screening, it did not appear to achieve meaningful dialogue with the women who opposed this agenda. I thus suggest that the current dialogue deficit in women’s sport is not new: rather, contemporary appeals by athletes to exclude certain women from competition are part of a longer history of regulatory efforts to define the boundaries of the women’s category (Henne, 2014; Pieper, 2016). However, this historical case also suggests that practices of policymaking in sport have not created the conditions for listening across differences.
In what follows, I take steps toward a nonnaïve theory of feminist dialogue: one that recognizes the power of intersectionally privileged women and their potential to harm minoritized women, while also considering the institutional conditions that prevent this situation from being otherwise. To do so, I turn first to the concept of hegemonic femininity: the notion that femininities play a central role in intersectional domination (Hamilton et al., 2019). I suggest that the concept of the unregulated majority can be seen as a tool of hegemonic femininity because it is used to consolidate the advantages accrued to certain women under the status quo. Using the case at hand, I consider how practices of policymaking in sport—including the exercise of epistemic authority by empowered experts—may limit opportunities for the kinds of dialogue that could allow women who occupy hegemonic positions to recognize the harms of eligibility regulation. Drawing on the notion of “difficult conversations” as intrinsic to both social change and feminist thought and activism (Ryan-Flood et al., 2023), I reflect on the role feminist dialogue could play in this context, and consider whether experts could help to turn privileged stakeholders toward—rather than away from—those women who most stand to be harmed by eligibility rules.
Hegemonic Femininity in Sport
[J]ust as masculinities are simultaneously constructed in relation to one another and hierarchically related, femininities demonstrate a similar pattern . . . . [W]ithin hierarchies of femininity, social categories of race, age, and sexual orientation also intersect to produce comparable categories of hegemonic, marginalized, and subordinated femininities. (Collins, 2004, p. 18)
As gender relations are always situated within an intersectional “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990), certain forms of femininity can indeed be hegemonic—an insight that Hamilton et al. (2019) argue was missing from Connell’s (1987) original formulation of hegemonic masculinity. According to Hamilton et al. (2019), hegemonic femininities are “complex and powerful ‘intermediate positions’ in the matrix of domination” (p. 316), affording a “femininity premium” to those individual women who, through their performance of womanhood and deference to hegemonic forms of masculinity, uphold the intersectional gender hierarchy—typically white, heterosexual, middle-class women. Such women are complicit and not merely compliant, with any negative consequences of the status quo outweighed by the individual benefits it affords them.
Key to Hamilton et al.’s (2019) configuration of hegemonic femininity is the role of gender complementarity: masculinities and femininities are “anchored by the presumption of cross-gender sexual desire between presumably biologically distinct men and women” (p. 323). Unlike other axes such as class and race, which are often characterized by social, physical, and even legal segregation, women and men are expected to form intimate partnerships and family units and cohabit. That this often occurs within rather than across racial and other categories (e.g., white people forming white heterosexual couples) is a key mechanism via which the gender order reinforces broader configurations of difference-making and power. That is, intersectionally privileged women and men work together as complementary opposites to shore up their position in the matrix.4
Sport is a key institutional domain where a binary ideology of gender/sex complementarity is reinforced. However, unlike the configuration proposed in Hamilton et al. (2019)—which assumes women and men forming couples—in sport settings, women athletes are very often socially, physically, and even legally segregated from men. This arrangement arguably points to opportunities to reconfigure gender norms through sport, and indeed various studies have documented how women athletes have resisted hegemonic (heteronormative and white) ideals (Broad, 2001; Chase, 2006; Hardy, 2015). However, women athletes may also resist the emancipatory potential of women’s sport, sometimes reclaiming hegemonic forms of femininity and the privileges associated with it, such as via “hyperfeminine” performances to reassert their heterosexual complementarity vis-à-vis men (Lenskyj, 1994). Since women negotiated their existence in sport on condition of gender segregation, there is an incentive to reinforce the binary (Kane, 1995; Pape, 2020; Travers, 2008). This ambivalence of women’s sport—as a space that simultaneously challenges and reinforces norms of femininity—makes it a “contested ideological terrain” (Messner, 1988).
Against this background, it is unsurprising that women athletes have at times participated in intersectional domination by upholding whiteness and heterosexuality. For example, Adjepong (2017) found that women members of a U.S. rugby club shored up their belonging in this masculine space by participating in practices of white heterosexuality. A further intersection has been demonstrated with class, with one study finding that professional women soccer players leaned on their class and racial privilege to construct the morally righteous player as one who will sacrifice material rewards and resources (Allison, 2021). A study of professional mixed martial arts fighters found that those women who are white, heterosexual, and normatively attractive exploited their intersectionally privileged locations to create profitable social media identities (Hamilton, 2022). Travers (2011) has shown how the women athletes who fought for the inclusion of ski jumping at the Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2010 reinforced a structure with a legacy of patriarchal, racial, and class domination. Taken together, these studies suggest that intersectionally privileged women athletes may be complicit in intersectional hierarchies in individually beneficial ways.
In this context, the concept of the unregulated majority can be seen as a tool of hegemonic femininity. Feminist scholars have documented how, in the case of athletes with intersex variations, such practices disproportionately affect women of color from outside of Global North, Western countries (Bohuon, 2015; Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018; Pieper, 2016; see also Human Rights Watch, 2020) . In a regulatory context where athletes are often only tested if they are “suspected” of having intersex variations (or of having had a transition experience), scholars argue that the women who attract the most scrutiny are those who do not embody the norms of white, cisgender, Global North femininity (Karkazis et al., 2012). This suggests that practices of eligibility regulation play an important role in positioning intersectionally privileged women—and the system they uphold—at the center of the women’s competition category. While scientific experts and sports policymakers are known as enforcers of such regulatory regimes, an underexplored question is the role of women who occupy hegemonic positions in legitimizing (or resisting) regulatory agendas that subject their intersectionally marginalized peers to harmful scrutiny and potential exclusion.
Toward a Theory of Feminist Dialogue in Sport
Hamilton and colleagues’ (2019) theory of hegemonic femininity could be read as a pessimistic account of the prospects for system change via women’s sport. However, a key factor could be whether the institutional setting provides opportunities for women who are differently positioned vis-à-vis relations of intersectional domination to engage in meaningful forms of dialogue (Travers, 2008). Social scientists and activists have long recognized the value of dialogue across differences of power and privilege to reconfigure relations that perpetuate harm and inequality (Fung & Wright, 2003). From deep canvassing to intergroup dialogue, interpersonal connection—particularly where it involves the voices of stigmatized or less privileged groups—has been shown to have a powerful influence on how individuals form their views on divisive issues, including marriage equality and abortion (Broockman & Kalla, 2016; Frantell et al., 2019; Loscher, 2018; Miles & Shinew, 2022). Structured opportunities to listen across differences may render visible the humanity that disappears in more abstract ideological debates, enabling more privileged actors to develop their viewpoints from a place of empathy and with a commitment to the collective good (Fung & Wright, 2003; Young, 1997).
Dialogue has been vital to trajectories of feminism, with intersectional scholars and activists leading conversations on the role of hegemonic femininity within feminist thought and movements. White Global North feminists have had the opportunity to recognize their false universalism and paternalistic politics by hearing from Black and Global South feminist voices (Hooks, 1984; Lépinard, 2020; Mohanty, 1984; Spivak, 1988). In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, Phoenix et al. (2020) have similarly reflected on “the power of narrative, of sharing rarely spoken stories with people who stand in different power relations to us,” emphasizing the need for “ongoing commitments to speak and to listen across differences” (emphasis added). Building on these insights, Ryan-Flood et al. (2023) have developed the concept of “difficult conversations” as intrinsic to feminist and progressive social change, rooted in the Latin verb conversari—meaning to turn toward, as opposed to against, with “a commitment to listen, being listened to, and to being open to change” (p. 2).
This attention to listening is also central to Ahmed’s (2021) concept of a “feminist ear” (p. 3), which Ahmed develops in describing her efforts to make complaints of sexual harassment from students “legible” to university authorities (p. 6). In Ahmed’s (2021) account, to be heard is typically a signal of institutional privilege: “ideas are heard if they are deemed to come from the right people” (p. 4). As such, “[t]o hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard” and to “become attuned to those who are tuned out” (p. 4). That is, Ahmed conceptualizes the obligation to listen as falling on those feminist actors who find themselves in positions of relative institutional privilege. Lépinard (2020) develops a similar approach in analyzing relations between white feminists and racialized, Muslim women in France and Quebec. Lépinard offers the concept of a feminist ethic of responsibility, according to which privileged feminist actors decenter their own positionality, recognize their relations to marginalized others, and seek common ground through listening.
Yet, a variety of voices may claim to not be heard, including those that occupy privileged locations. Lobby groups advocating for the exclusion of trans women and girls from women’s sport often argue that women approximating the unregulated majority have had their right to speak taken away in a climate that threatens to “cancel” them (Ahmed, 2015; Pape, 2022). This emphasis on speaking and speech rights can be considered a power move: as Ahmed (2015) has argued in relation to so-called gender critical feminists in the United Kingdom, “Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.” While those in hegemonic positions might ideally be invited to listen, their presence as speakers could come at the price of further harm to more vulnerable groups. As Ahmed (2015) has observed, “[t]here cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect or intent arguing for the elimination of others at the table.” Such concerns also arise in classroom interventions such as intergroup dialogue and intercultural education, with critical scholars arguing that minoritized students, such as women of color, are often made to endure the uninformed and emotionally distant responses of their white peers (Gorski, 2008; James-Gallaway & James-Gallaway, 2023; Jones, 1999).
A key challenge, then, is to transform the role of intersectionally privileged actors from speaking to listening. According to deep canvassing and intergroup dialogue techniques, it is beneficial—even necessary—for members of privileged groups to feel heard and understood before they will be open to hearing more diverse perspectives (Demetrious, 2022; Miles & Shinew, 2022). After all, particularly in the male-dominated context of sport, many women may feel legitimately unable to exercise voice and influence policy decisions—including those that concern women’s sport (Adriaanse, 2017; Schull et al., 2012).
This raises the question of who can take up the work of preparing actors who occupy hegemonic positions for the work of listening so that this burden does not fall solely on the shoulders of minoritized groups. In the case of eligibility regulation, expert policy actors may serve as intermediaries with the potential to satisfy the need of more privileged groups to feel heard, and therefore to be able to listen, without causing further harm. However, although experts with the platform to influence wider stakeholder understanding may at times be presented with opportunities to do so, they may instead choose to deploy other tools at their disposal to prematurely close avenues for dialogue.
Case Study: Background and Methods
Sex testing practices in international sport were officially introduced in the late 1960s in the form of compulsory gynecological examinations for all women athletes, followed by a roughly 20-year period of mandatory sex chromatin testing—an approach the IOC relied upon to issue women competitors at the Olympic Games with a femininity certificate5 (for detailed analyses see Bohuon, 2015; Erikainen, 2020; Henne, 2014; Pieper, 2016). The 1990s represented a period of instability for sex testing practices in international sport, during which the IOC and IAAF adopted contrasting positions. In 1991, the IAAF abandoned compulsory chromosome screening in favor of “health checks” followed in 1992 by ambiguous discretionary testing, in line with the preferred policy position of the fax club. The IOC continued mandatory chromosome screening for women athletes until 1999.
I was expelled from our athletes’ residence, my sports scholarship was revoked, and my running times were erased from my country’s athletics records. I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I lost friends, my fiancé, hope, and energy. (Patiño, 2005)
Patiño wrote to fax club member Albert de la Chappelle, a geneticist, who shared her story with IAAF Vice President Arne Ljungqvist, paving the way for a rule change at the IAAF.
What the new “health checks” approach of the IAAF meant in practice was not immediately clear—for example, which women the policy was aiming to protect and who, if anyone, it would seek to exclude—as evidenced by various exchanges within the group.6 It appears, however, that fax club members believed an opaque system of discretionary testing could protect women with intersex variations by preventing their detection—an approach that, with the benefit of hindsight, can now be seen as a naïve strategy at best (Karkazis et al., 2012; Pieper, 2016).
At the core of the analysis to follow is a publicly available archive of correspondence among members of the “Gender Verification Fax Club,” an informal collective of experts that influenced the decision of the IAAF—and ultimately also the IOC, in 1999—to abandon mandatory chromosome screening for women.7 Fax club members included Ljungqvist, who was also Chair of the IAAF Medical Commission and member of the IOC Medical Commission; Elizabeth Ferris, a British diver and Olympic medalist, doctor, and member of the IOC’s Women in Sport Commission; geneticists including de la Chappelle and Malcolm Andrew Ferguson-Smith; and Alison Carlson, a biologist, coach, and women’s sport advocate. The archive is unique in containing informal correspondence between individuals who were strategically positioned to influence policy decisions.
In this exploratory case study, I focus on the group’s correspondence during the period when the IAAF and IOC had different policy positions: from July 1991 to June 1999. Much of the correspondence discussed how to consolidate the new IAAF position and influence that of the IOC, with a key strategy being to explain the group’s (and IAAF’s) position in scientific journals. However, group members also discussed engaging with a wider range of stakeholders, including the U.S.-based Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) and the IOC Athletes’ Commission. Of particular importance to my analysis is how fax club members discussed engaging with women who supported mandatory eligibility regulation, most notably a group of international long-distance runners, supported by a track-and-field newsletter editor named Janet Heinonen, as well as IOC member Anita DeFrantz. While there is no definitive evidence that these women were more than a vocal minority, fax club members appeared to consider they might be representative of a wider phenomenon, in part due to several surveys undertaken at major championships during the 1990s in which a majority of women respondents were described as supporting eligibility regulation (Ljungqvist, 2000). In the analysis that follows, I treat these Global North women as acting in the name of the “unregulated majority”; that is, as a group of athletes supposedly exempt from eligibility rules who resisted regulatory changes perceived as undermining their hegemonic position at the center of the women’s category.
I identified 32 documents in which fax club members discussed the views of current and former athletes—and women athletes in particular—on gender verification, with 19 of these documents cited in the analysis that follows (Appendix 1 [1–19]). I closely read each document and extracted relevant passages, with a particular focus on what views were expressed by women athletes and how the fax club discussed their strategy for engaging with and/or circumventing such views. I summarized the extracts in the form of analytic narratives and then iteratively coded the material using process-tracing methods, which are well-suited to analyzing contingencies in how actions unfold over time and with what effects (Beach & Pedersen, 2013; Bennett & Checkel, 2015).
My analysis proceeds in two parts. First, I consider how the workings of hegemonic femininity were revealed in efforts by some women to influence gender eligibility rules of international sports governing bodies, regardless of the potential harm to the women affected. In the second part, I turn my attention to the response of fax club members and consider how some opportunities for dialogue were circumvented by these experts in ways that may have had enduring consequences for the contemporary role of intersectionally privileged women athletes in eligibility debates.
Analysis
Harm and Hegemonic Femininity
In March 1994, Arne Ljungqvist wrote to the fax club with news of “an interesting document” he had received from an unexpected source: 16 international-level distance runners, all women, had written a two-page letter outlining five key demands, at the core of which was the reinstatement of chromosome screening and gynecological exams for all athletes who win medals or prizemoney in international competitions [3]. The letter [4], signed by 16 athletes (14 Americans, one Australian, and one South African) was also sent to the organizers of major marathons and chairs of the IAAF Women’s Committee and Athletes’ Commission, indicating the range of actors deemed capable of influencing IAAF policy. Janet Heinonen, editor of a U.S. track-and-field newsletter called Keeping Track, was listed as the letter’s contact person, prompting fax club members to name the group the “Heinonen sixteen” [14].
The letter is striking in showing how, even in inviting gynecological examinations, these athletes perceived themselves as separate from the targets of eligibility regimes and therefore as protected by them. As they emphasized, “We agree that the buccal smear alone is not a fair test of gender ... We are all willing to undergo testing as outlined above to ensure that women are competing for women’s awards” (emphasis added) [4]. The Heinonen 16 thus claimed womanhood as theirs, and a status that sport governing bodies should police on their behalf. As observed by fax club member Alison Carlson, “[T]he writers need to know they are asking doctors to play god and make subjective assessments of advantage and womanhood” [9]. Under the athletes’ proposal, “[g]ender testing” would take place within 48 hr of an elite event, taking the form of “the buccal smear and a pelvic exam, ideally performed by a female gynecologist” [4]. The 16 athletes added that “further tests, such as a blood hormone screening” should be performed where medical officials suspected “gender abnormalities” in order to establish whether the athlete had any “unfair” athletic advantages [4].
The combination of “pelvic exams” and chromosome screening made the Heinonen 16’s proposal considerably more invasive than the previous IAAF regime, prompting alarm from fax club members. Myron Genel, an endocrinologist, noted: “Were one to add pelvic exams and hormonal measurements, this would unleash a nightmare which exceeds anything which has occurred with the use of buccal smears/DNA probes” [8]. Albert de la Chappelle agreed that “[t]he proposed new tests would, as usual, make things worse rather than better” [14]. In assuming they would not themselves be subject to “further tests” and providing no guidance as to what would become of any women who were, the signatories disregarded the ultimate consequences of their proposal for the women affected.
The logic behind the proposal was elaborated by Heinonen in an editorial she published that same month, a copy of which was circulated among fax club members [5]. In it, she called for a reintroduction of both the buccal smear and “a pelvic exam, performed by a female gynecologist” (p. 1) and similarly ignored the potential harms to women deemed the targets of eligibility rules, stating: “In most cases, those exams would be enough. If there were anything questionable, you’d do further testing,” with the next steps (and their consequences) left undefined. One target group for such “further testing” was women with “those rare conditions, such as ambiguous genitalia or congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which may confer an athletic advantage” (p. 1), who were depicted as erroneously included in the women’s category: “In a bygone era of women’s athletics often characterized by strapping farm-girls with husky voices, it’s not unthinkable that a few Olympic medals went home with women who could never bear children” (p. 2). Desirable women athletes—and those who were imagined to escape the harms of regulatory regimes—were women who approximated hegemonic norms of femininity through their appearance, voice, and childbearing ability.
In an updated editorial several months later and following a string of distance world records set by Chinese women, Heinonen appeared to further associate sexual ambiguity and questionable morality with non-Global North countries: “Knowing that drug testing is only marginally successful, some track women at least wanted the reassurance that drugs or no, all those new marks on the all-time world lists were being set by women, not men” [13]. As feminist scholars have shown, emerging notions of doping and cheating in the 1970s became entangled with and reinforced gendered logics of regulation and “fairness” (Bohuon, 2015; Henne, 2015): harms to women with intersex variations were presented as justifiable collateral damage in order to preserve the Global North-dominated status quo, even in instances when doping was considered the true culprit.North American and African track athletes tell stories of women runners of dubious gender on their respective Olympic teams who made it all the way to the Olympic village before making a hasty exit when it became obvious they wouldn’t pass the buccal smear. (p. 2)
While the potential harms to women with intersex variations were indeed known to Heinonen, she did not share such concerns. In a revealing excerpt from her first editorial, she responded to fax club member and geneticist Joe Leigh Simpson who, writing in an editorial, had called for the respect of “personal dignities” and a “humane” approach to eligibility regulation (Simpson, 1986, p. 1938). Simpson had asked whether “an occasional unintended medal [is] worth the price of damaging an athlete’s psyche?” (Simpson, 1986, p. 1938), to which Heinonen responded: “One suspects a number of Olympic finalists who finished just out of the medal count might reply loudly, ‘Yes.’” [5]. Heinonen rejected the idea of preventing harm to the women targeted by eligibility regimes and emphasized instead harm to the women who occupied hegemonic positions: “[W]hat of the sensibilities of the women left at home because they were displaced from the team [by athletes that would fail gender verification tests]?” (p. 2). In a letter shared with fax club members, Heinonen even presented her proposed protocol as providing a benevolent service to the women who would fall afoul of such a testing regime, who could request an “educational screening ... to avoid public embarrassment” [11]. In suggesting that access to such testing would “help athletes whose countries may not have the resources to identify/investigate sex abnormalities” [11], Heinonen conveyed the Global North paternalism that scholars have associated with contemporary eligibility policies, whereby international sports organizations present the correction of intersex variations as a benevolent move and as beneficial to the affected athlete (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018).
Despite their small numbers, fax club members perceived the Heinonon 16 as sufficiently empowered to influence policy decisions, as evidenced by the considerable exchange of letters to strategize a response. As psychologist Anke Ehrhardt observed, “it is important not to let this go unanswered since the abolition of gender verification for IAAF may be fragile enough to be overturned again” [7]. In the next section, I consider how members of the fax club sought to engage—or not—with such women. In exercising their expertise and institutional influence, I show how members of the fax club circumvented direct engagement with women deemed to represent the unregulated majority as part of convincing the IOC to abandon chromosome screening—a move that arguably undermined a key opportunity for dialogue.
Expertise, Power, and Circumventing Dialogue
Though she referred to hearing “their viewpoint,” Ferris first suggested a one-way exchange in the form of a “written explanation to all athletes, coaches, etc.” to address misconceptions about the efficacy of chromosome screening and the merits of the new IAAF approach.Whilst it is the case that we may be dealing with unfounded and irrational fears, I think we have to address the issue from their viewpoint and provide reasons why the present system does not protect women athletes if we are to persuade them to adopt the new procedure. [1]
In responding to Ferris’ concerns, geneticist Albert de la Chappelle asserted his epistemic authority, observing that “sports women are deplorably badly informed about the facts” [2]. He recognized further, however, that the views of women athletes occurred not in a vacuum but in an uneven institutional context where, given the influence of actors like the IOC Medical Commission, certain narratives about “cheating men” and the biological bases of fairness and the female category were entrenched: “Dr. Hay and his colleagues in the IOC are responsible for this gross misrepresentation of the facts” [2]. De la Chappelle noted that “what is needed is information” yet acknowledged that the efforts of fax club members to distribute such information “has had little effect.” He reflected that “understandably, sports women have believed the IOC, the sports officials and sports doctors rather than the critics” [2].
De la Chappelle, like Ferris, perceived a need for an epistemic correction in the form of a one-way exchange: “What is needed today is for the IOC to come forward with the correct information. I am convinced that sports women will understand” [2]. When the group received the petition signed by the Heinonen 16, geneticist Ferguson-Smith similarly assumed an expertise deficit on the part of women athletes and proposed one-way speech as a solution: “the problem is still one of communication and information and we should take advantage of this opportunity to help clarify the situation” [6]. Genel agreed, referring to their proposal as “rather pseudosophisticated” and stating the fax club had “not succeeded in effectively communicating with the athletes themselves” [8]. Several fax club members thus coalesced around the notion that the views of intersectionally privileged women athletes could be resolved by speaking with the authority of science.
Yet, Heinonen and her supporters had at least sought certain scientific opinions to support their policy perspective; for example, in her first editorial, Heinonen referred to “Dr Paul Kaplan, a Eugene gynecologist and endocrinologist,” who called for an expert panel to assess athletes, stating “In reproductive endocrinology there are some clear lines” [5]. Recognizing that the Heinonen 16 were not merely ignorant, Alison Carlson observed that the “athletes had bothered to do their homework” [9]. She also indicated that it might be necessary to do more than simply communicate the fax club’s scientific opinion, expressing instead a desire to hear the views of women athletes themselves and to share in exchange “the evolution of our thought process” and “any of the relevant written materials they are willing to read.” Demonstrating a commitment to listening, Carlson suggested that the signatories should not have to “wade through our entire Sports Medicine review article.” Instead, Carlson suggested contacting each signatory personally (“I would like to make contact with ALL of the athletes personally, to hear what they have to say individually” [9]) and making use of the WSF as a platform for engaging with the unregulated majority more broadly.
The archive does not contain comprehensive details of Carlson’s actions following this letter other than her engagement with the WSF—resulting in a position statement opposing the regulation of women with intersex variations [16]—and an exchange with Janet Heinonen, which she described as unsuccessful. According to Carlson, “I have explained how [Heinonen’s proposal] still leads to a Pandora’s Box dilemma ... [but] [t]he question remains, for [Heinonen and the Heinonen 16], about what ‘grey areas’ (sex identity-wise) constitute unfair advantage” [10]. Upon seeing the unchanged position of Heinonen and her supporters, Genel reflected: “[n]otwithstanding our attempts to communicate with this group, [their position] does not appear to be substantially different” [12], though there is no evidence in the archive that these women were engaged beyond the actions taken by Carlson.
Two years later, in 1996, some members of the fax club encountered an opportunity to reach a wider group of stakeholders at one of the biggest international policy stages in women’s sport: the first IOC World Conference on Women and Sport. The conference was chaired by Anita DeFrantz, potentially posing a challenge to the group’s efforts to promote its perspective on eligibility regulation. As Liz Ferris later reported, “gender verification was notable by its absence” from the draft program for the conference, which she and Ljunqvist “agreed had to be rectified” [15]. In Ferris’ retelling, Arne Ljungqvist used his “considerable influence and discretion” to rectify the situation, including the topic of eligibility regulation in the program but under the “disguise” of a paper entitled “Women athletes and sport” [15]. After his presentation, “Anita DeFrantz ... made it clear that she preferred not to have the subject debated or any such resolution passed” [15]. Yet, following Ljungqvist’s lead, the delegates ultimately decided to carry a resolution “calling for the abandonment of gender testing” [15]. There remained the risk that the resolution would be blocked by the IOC Executive Board, particularly since DeFrantz was a member. However, according to Ferris, Ljungqvist “has reassured me that as an IOC member he can make sure that does not happen” [15].
The resolution was ultimately passed unchanged and called on “the IOC to discontinue the current process of gender verification during the Olympic Games” (IOC, 1996, p. 1). In these extracts, it is striking that Ljunqvist was able to use his influence as a (white, male, and European) IOC member—at no less than the first IOC conference on women and sport—to circumvent the wishes of DeFrantz, a Black woman. While a victory for the fax club, these actions raise the question of whether and how DeFrantz, who remains a key figure in the women’s sport movement, might have been engaged otherwise.
To this question, fax club members had few answers. Following the news of the conference resolution, de la Chappelle reflected that “it has always been a mystery why most sports women have been either uninterested or outright negative ... The attitude of DeFrantz is intriguing ... I wonder if we could do something to influence her” [17]. He reflected on who among the group “might have the best chance of making her listen” (emphasis added; Source 29). DeFrantz was also a trustee of the WSF at this time, suggesting that although the WSF had adopted a position in support of women with intersex variations, this was not necessarily shared among its own trustees. Carlson responded that she had spoken with DeFrantz the year prior “to once again see where she is about the issue—and as you say, despite our efforts to engage her in dialogue, she remains unreceptive” [18]. What kind of “dialogue” had been offered to DeFrantz, however, was unclear.
The IOC did ultimately abandon chromosome screening in 1999 to reflect the preferred position of the fax club, in part due to Ljungqvist’s efforts to convince the IOC Athletes’ Commission that the IAAF approach offered a better model [19]. This was two years after inaugural member, Sebastian Coe, had left the commission. This is a notable detail because Coe went on to oversee a strict gender eligibility regime for women with intersex variations at World Athletics. In sum, although the fax club achieved its ultimate goal, it appears that there was only limited engagement during this period with athletes who perceived eligibility regulation as protecting their own interests and little beyond fax club members communicating their own expert views.
Discussion: Engaging Hegemonic Femininity
This study has looked at the case of the “Gender Verification Fax Club” in the 1990s to consider how hegemonic femininity and the concept of the unregulated majority are implicated in the regulation of inclusion in the women’s category. I have sought to develop a dual argument: first, consistent with the theory of hegemonic femininity (Hamilton et al., 2019), intersectionally privileged athletes can invite harm to women they perceive as unsettling their hegemonic position, in exchange for the perceived individual benefits of upholding a (Global North-dominated) system rooted in unambiguous gender segregation. Second, I have shown that experts occupy a key position in relations among women athletes, with an opportunity to prepare those women who wish to preserve the status quo to consider the perspective of those harmed by eligibility rules. In this case study, while some fax club members quickly identified the need to engage with certain women athletes, the group often misdiagnosed the problem as one of a knowledge deficit, leading them to favor a one-way imposition of their expert views. This occurred in a context where women were rarely afforded opportunities to be heard and decide the conditions of their own participation (Lenskyj, 1986). While those athletes who participate in intersectional domination should be considered accountable for their actions, this case shows that other factors, including the role of experts as gatekeepers in the policy process, could impede opportunities for athletes to engage otherwise with the topic of inclusion in the women’s category.
I suggest that the concept of feminist dialogue is useful for diagnosing the limitations of existing approaches to resolving eligibility debates in sport but also for reflecting on what could offer a way forward toward a more inclusive sporting system. The promise of feminist dialogue rests on the assumption that listening across differences of power and privilege can foster both individual and system change (Ryan-Flood et al., 2023). A reasonable criticism, based on the analysis above, may be to conclude that there is little value to engaging with women athletes who wield the imaginary of the unregulated majority to preserve their hegemonic position, given their potential to further intersectional harms. On the other hand, an outright dismissal of such women could play into the hands of incumbent leaders in sports organizations, who arguably have little incentive to support women to challenge the cisnormative, binary system of sporting competition (Kane, 1995; Travers, 2008). While there may be little value to engaging the most extreme exclusionary voices, the history of feminist movements suggests there is much to gain from supporting intersectionally privileged women to hear minority perspectives on harm and privilege (Ryan-Flood et al. 2023).
There is now some institutional recognition of the importance of hearing the voices of those athletes at risk of being harmed by eligibility regulations. In 2021, the IOC released a framework that emphasized the principle of a “stakeholder-centered approach” (IOC 2021, p. 5) and specifically the importance of hearing from transgender athletes and/or athletes with intersex variations (Martowicz et al., 2023). While realizing such engagement in practice is likely no easy task, an additional step implied by the IOC Framework is the question of how to best engage women approximating the unregulated majority—a task that is also fraught with practical challenges. Beyond the potential harms to the women deemed excludable (Ahmed, 2015), there is the risk of elite capture where dialogue—whether with minoritized groups or the majority—is leveraged for the purpose of legitimizing an existing exclusionary agenda and preserving the status quo (Táíwò, 2020). Women’s sports organizations, such as the WSF, appear in the analysis as groups who could support policymakers to engage directly with athletes and move dialogue beyond hearing the science, but considerable work remains to be done to establish precisely what practices can contribute to undoing the unregulated majority as a powerful imaginary in contemporary eligibility debates.
Unrealized dialogue opportunities during the historical period of the fax club may have had an enduring legacy. As Pieper (2016) has documented, other prominent women athletes from this period were supportive of chromosome screening. For example, Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar (United States)—who has campaigned in recent years against the inclusion of transgender women in sport—embraced the opportunity to demonstrate that her body met normative definitions of womanhood: “I looked forward to the opportunity to show that I was not cheating” (Pieper, 2016: p. 166). As Pieper discusses, Hogshead-Makar later acknowledged that such tests were discriminatory. However, in more recent years, Hogshead-Makar appears to have shifted her view again: following the Paris Olympic Games, Hogshead-Makar joined a list of Global North cisgender women athletes and women’s sport advocacy groups calling upon the IOC to “immediately reinstate the cheek swab sex screening for all athletes” in the women’s category (The Countess Sports Working Group, 2024). Consistent with the notion of the unregulated majority as a tool of intersectional domination, the two athletes targeted in this letter and described as “males” were women from Algeria and Taiwan. Consideration of the substantial harms that a return to gender verification practices could inflict on some women—be they trans, cisgender, or with or without intersex variations—has been sorely missing from campaigns led by such lobby groups (Bekker et al., 2023; Bekker & Posbergh, 2022). The present study serves as a call to feminist and queer scholars and activists alike to find where and how avenues for dialogue could be productively explored.
Notes
As women with intersex variations are often also cisgender, the term “unregulated majority” is not a synonym for cisgender women.
At the 2011 Fédération Internationale de Football Association Women’s World Cup, members of the Swedish national team were required to undergo genital exams after the Equatorial Guinea team was accused of having “men” among their players (Ingle, 2023).
As Pieper (2016) has documented, the new approach of the IAAF pushed the criteria for inclusion underground and paved the way for suspicion-based testing.
In a related argument about the complementarity of “the sexes,” binary biological sex difference was coconstructed with ideologies of whiteness and Western imperialism, whereby white European people claimed greater sex differentiation between their women and men and therefore the superiority of their “race” and society (Fausto‐Sterling, 1995; Markowitz, 2001).
As Erikainen (2020) has documented, informal sex testing practices in international sport date back to the 1930s. The IOC formally adopted sex chromatin testing from 1968 until 1992, then switched methods to the polymerase chain reaction test, which it continued until 1999 (Ljungqvist, 2000).
The primary group of women deemed in need of protection from eligibility regulations was women with intersex variations. While fax club members did not express a desire to protect transgender women, they also did not support their exclusion, noting at times that a pragmatic approach was needed and that transgender women were in no way men “masquerading” as women.
Papers of Malcolm Andrew Ferguson-Smith. “Material relating to gender verification in sport.” UGC 188/8. Available at: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/v3kpd4b8
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the reviewers and editors who offered challenging but generous comments, which supported me in redeveloping and strengthening many parts of this paper. I thank Rose Eveleth for prompting me to revisit the rich archive of the Gender Verification Fax Club. This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation Grant Number PZ00P1_208890/1 and the Flax Foundation.
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