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Nikolai Mather: Rose, thank you so much for joining us. So tell us – what drew you to these stories about testosterone testing?
Rose Eveleth: Yeah, well, so I am a sports guy. I love sports. I've always loved sports. I played sports. I'm also a science reporter, and this story really intersects with a lot of those things, with this question of, "what does it mean to have an unfair advantage – if that's just how your body is made – in sports?"
And I have really been interested in questions around fairness and sports and science for a long time. Actually, I started working on this series an embarrassingly long time ago, 12 years ago, and I was pitching it actually for eight years before I found a place that would take it. But it's just always been really compelling to me to hear these stories – about women who are told that perhaps they're actually not totally women and they can't compete the way they are, but they're also not men, and there's this unfair advantage. And when I came across it, I was like, What does any of this mean? And I needed to know more. And here we are.
NM: I thought it was just so interesting, because as I was listening to the first two episodes, I just – the thing that kept coming up for me was the same point of contention we see everywhere: people trying to categorize something that just naturally resists all categories.
RE: Yeah, totally, right. I mean, I think there's so much about, you know, the world is messy and confusing and complicated, and I think people have different reactions to that. And one reaction is to try and really organize everything super clearly into these categories. And other reactions maybe are to allow for that spectrum to be more sort of loose and interesting, and, to me, sort of more joyous. But I also, you know, appreciate that it's hard. Sports, you know, if you're going to have categories, you do have to decide what those categories are going to be, right? Once you, you know, create a boundary, you have to police that boundary. Once you divide sports by sex and say, "Okay, there's gonna be men's sports and women's sports," you commit yourself to policing that line. And the more we learn about how hard that is, you know, the more complicated this becomes. But as long as you're committed to that, you know, that kind of bucketing, you're gonna end up in an uncomfortable situation
NM: Absolutely. And we learn in this podcast just how complicated it is. But this problem also seems to have a potential to totally reshape sports. Since restrictions based on sex can be so flawed, can we think of another category? Mixed gender leagues? No gender whatsoever? What do you see as the future here?
RE: It's a big question. It's a hard question. I would never sit here and say, like, "I've got the answer for all of sports," because it is tough, right? It is hard. I think, you know, women's sports are really important to a lot of people, and you know, I think also we've seen the ways in which policing that boundary can be really damaging. I think that to me… it perhaps sounds like a cop out, but I think it is true, which is that I do think it's going to end up having to be sport by sport. I think there are some sports where you might have a division based on… for example, like wrestling does weight classes right? And some people have said, "Okay, let's just do that for all sports, maybe by height or weight or blood oxygen level or some other marker that is not connected to your sex." And in some sports that might work, but in other sports it won't, right?
Or maybe you say, "Actually, you know, let's keep the gender binary, but let people compete in whatever category they are," right? Which I think is what a lot of advocates would say. Then you have the question of non binary athletes. Should they be given their own category? Should they be allowed to compete, you know, in the male or female category, depending on how they feel?
It is quite complicated, and I have a lot of sympathy for the people who organize sports who are trying to figure this out. Because it's not like, oh, there's an obvious solution. I think it's pretty fair to say that, in my opinion, what we're doing now is not appropriate, and it's not working. But it's not as though it's super easy to necessarily say, like, wave a magic wand and make sports, you know, magically, you know, equitable and fair and have clear divisions in some way.
NM: Rose, thank you so much for joining us, and I can't wait to hear the rest of the podcast.
RE: Thanks, Nikolai.
