Extract
Gender verification tests for female athletes have been contentious since their inception in the 1940s, but they have continued to persist in one form or another. World Athletics’ regulations requiring ‘suspicious’ female athletes to undergo medical examinations to prove their femininity came under renewed popular and legal scrutiny when athletes Dutee Chand and Caster Semenya challenged them in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). In the ensuing debates, a general agreement emerged regarding what the key problem was: the need to balance ‘fairness’ for ‘normal’ female athletes with the inclusion of non-binary athletes. This problematises individual athletes whose bodies defy normative expectations of femaleness while institutional arrangements of modern sport that necessitate sex-segregation as a means of ensuring fairness are left unproblematised. The dominant conception of sport as a test of physical abilities under conditions of fairness and the indexing of athletic advantages to sexual differences, which reflects and reinforces the idea of sport as a confirmation of insurmountable sexual differences is also left unchallenged.