OLD THREAD REPOST: A brief history of the practice of "sex verification" in sport.
This thread will mention anti-intersex discrimination, FGM practices and body shaming.
The story of sex verification in sport begins with the original Olympic games in Ancient Greece. Let us take you back to around 400BCE, and a woman named Kallipateira...
The original Olympics were distinctly men-only. Women weren't even allowed to cross the river Alpheios during the Games. The penalty was death if they dared.
Kallipateira was a widow, and her son was boxing in the Olympics. She wanted to support him, so disguised herself as his trainer.
Her son won, and Kallipateira was STOKED. To celebrate, she jumped over a fence to congratulate him. And in what was probably a hilariously slapstick pratfall, her clothes fell off, exposing her as a woman.
Remember, the penalty for a woman being anywhere near the Olympics was death.
Luckily, the story had a happy ending. Everyone was so stoked for the son and they respected her deceased husband, so they let Kallipateira live.
But to ensure it never, never happened again and the Olympics remained free from girl cooties, a new rule was introduced: like competitors, trainers had to attend the Games naked.
Getting naked, as we'll see later in the thread, is going to be a recurring theme of this history of "sex verification".
We'll now fast forward about two and a half millennia to the 1930s, when concerns began to be raised about men disguising themselves as women to compete in women's categories.
At least three men did compete in women's categories in the 20s and 30s, but not in the direction of their concerns: Zdeněk Koubek, Mark Weston and Heinrich Ratjen were assigned female at birth, raised as girls and were what we might call trans men in today's language.
All three men were living as women when they competed in the Olympics, but later changed their names and pronouns. Koubek and Weston had genital reconstruction surgery, and Ratjen said he'd known he was a boy since he was a child.
It's likely that all three athletes were intersex.
