Chromosome Testing Will Take Sports Back To The Dark Ages

In the late 1990s, Olympics officials were suddenly eager to exit the business of testing women’s DNA. After three decades of requiring all women athletes to sit for chromosome tests in order to compete, the International Olympic Committee, in a daze, seemed to realize it was on the wrong side of history. The American Medical Association had recently come out against DNA testing in sports, and so had a formidable coalition of sports doctors, media commentators, Hillary Clinton, Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and—not to be outdone—the entire national government of Norway. Even Olympic athletes themselves were railing against the chromosome tests, with an athletes’ commission recommending in 1998 that the Olympics drop their testing requirements.

There was something frankly queasy about the whole DNA testing business, which the IOC had first embraced in the late 1960s, during the height of U.S. and USSR hostilities. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, the logic of DNA tests seemed woozier than ever. When the IOC announced it would ditch chromosome tests beginning in 2000, the Salt Lake City Tribune wrote that “an unfortunate vestige of the Cold War” had finally been eliminated. Everyone seemed prepared to move on; a member of the IOC’s medical commission declared that, soon, “gender testing will be gone forever.”  

The sentiment sounds preposterous today. This month, as the world gathers for the Winter Olympics in Italy, chromosome tests have quietly returned—copy-pasted from the ‘90s, just with a new sheen. Sports officials are positioning the very DNA tests they had once left for dead as a “noninvasive” and “extremely accurate” way to protect “the integrity of female competition,” the new chosen euphemism for disqualifying trans and intersex women. The international federation that governs track-and-field events, World Athletics, and the boxing federation World Boxing recently announced that all women athletes in their sports will have to sit for a chromosome test.