In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender--a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood. Ranging from Cold War tensions to gender anxiety to controversies around doping, Lindsay Parks Pieper explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Pieper examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify--and eliminate--athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. Pieper shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. She also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing--ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous--degraded the very idea of female athleticism.

This book critically explores the history of gender verification in international sport, to show how culture, politics, and science come together to produce "femaleness" and, consequently, the female body as we know it. Tracing gender verification policies and practices in sport since the 1930s till the present, the book shows how and why medical "sex tests" have been used to "verify" women athletes’ femaleness, in ways that both reflect and have shaped broader social and scientific ideas about femaleness in the process. Exploring how geopolitics, gender, class and race relations intertwined with scientific ideas about femaleness and womanhood to shape gender verification, the book shows how sports competitions became a battleground where new and old ideas about sex difference collided. By mapping the social, historical, and material instability of sex and gender, it shows why so much investment has been placed in distinguishing femaleness from maleness in sport and beyond. The book will be of interest to researchers, later-year undergraduate and graduate students in a broad range of areas including gender studies, sports studies, social and historical studies of science and medicine. It will also be relevant to sports policy as it historically and conceptually contextualises gender verification policies.

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Health - Sports science, grade: 1,0, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: In the context of this thesis the topic of the gender construction is taken up. Subject areas of the social and natural sciences try to find the causes of the gender-specific differences with the aid of various theories. At first, an analysis of the relationship between society, gender and sport should make it clear how the social subsystem Sport was influenced and structured by everyday theory. Using the example of the controversial phenomenon of sex tests in sport, it should be shown that the gender of a person cannot be measured using biological-medical criteria only. This thesis is contrary to the widespread opinion in medicine and biology that sex can be clearly determined based on five criteria. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of the procedure and basics of gender testing should be created by summarizing these criteria. In a second step, it is shown that it is possible by a social-scientific point of view to question hypotheses of a purely biological, pre-social nature of man. A basic insight is that the society in which we live is a result of our own actions. At first glance, the question of a person’s gender acts as if the answer is obvious. Gender is one of the central structural principles of our society. The population consists of women and men, girls and boys. There is a social system of the two sexes and sex seems to be given by nature. In everyday life it is associated with the idea of a recognizable and invariable distinction between woman and man. This is closely linked to the assumption of gender polarity. Thus, there are assumptions of different characteristics and behaviors, as well as a natural gender hierarchy and performance. Girls play with dolls, put on make-up, wear pink clothes and are especially tender and sensitive. Boys, however, are ambitious and self-reliant, playing with toy cars and crafts. But the fact that this societal system received such great social significance for the two sexes is not based solely on the natural conditions. Rather, it is a social order that has developed in our society since the eighteenth century and has been proven by biology and medicine since the nineteenth century. An understanding was developed by supposedly scientifically precise facts of the natural sexual characteristics of women and men.

Young, white men have dominated action sports for many years, yet women have refused to accept positions on the margins of these unique sporting cultures. Developing in a different context to many traditional sports, girls and women have adopted highly proactive approaches and developed unique strategies to negotiate space alongside their male peers in the waves, skate parks and cityscapes, on mountains and climbing walls, along trails, as well as around rinks. This international collection features contributions from a group of leading and emerging researchers, many of whom are passionate action sport participants themselves. With authors representing a range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, sociology, performance studies, media studies, sport for development, and education, this book offers the first collective focus on women in action sports cultures in the past, present and into the future. Ultimately, the book offers a vivid and powerful illustration of the new and ongoing struggles facing women in contemporary sporting cultures, as well as the various strands of activism, agency and politics being performed in the surf, on the slopes, and at the crag. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology of sport and physical culture, gender studies, youth cultures, sport history, and pedagogy and education.

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape – from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.

The landmark, prize-winning, international bestselling examination of how a gender gap in data perpetuates bias and disadvantages women. #1 International Bestseller * Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Winner of the Royal Society Science Book Prize Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this insidious bias: in time, in money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in Invisible Women. Examining the home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more, Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women’s lives. Product designers use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to everything from pianos to cell phones to voice recognition software, when in fact this approach is designed to fit men. Cities prioritize men’s needs when designing public transportation, roads, and even snow removal, neglecting to consider women’s safety or unique responsibilities and travel patterns. And in medical research, women have largely been excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. Built on hundreds of studies in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, highly readable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.

The Tokyo Olympic Games are likely to feature the first transgender athlete, a topic that will be highly contentious during the competition. But transgender and intersex athletes such as Laurel Hubbard, Tifanny Abreu, and Caster Semenya didn’t just turn up overnight. Both intersex and transgender athletes have been newsworthy stories for decades. In Sporting Gender: The History, Science, and Stories of Transgender and Intersex Athletes, Joanna Harper provides an in-depth examination of why gender diverse athletes are so controversial. She not only delves into the history of these athletes and their personal stories, but also explains in a highly accessible manner the science behind their gender diversity and why the science is important for regulatory committees—and the general public—to consider when evaluating sports performance. Sporting Gender gives the reader a perspective that is both broad in scope and yet detailed enough to grasp the nuances that are central in understanding the controversies over intersex and transgender athletes. Featuring personal investigations from the author, who has had first-person access to some of the most significant recent developments in this complex arena, this book provides fascinating insight into sex, gender, and sports.

Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads. In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all. Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. “The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure...Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.”