The attacks on Imane Khelif’s gender at this year’s 2024 Paris Olympics is not new. In fact, the focus on women’s appearance and gender expression goes back to the founding of the Olympics, the minute women entered elite sports.

We talk to Rose Eveleth, host and producer of the podcast Tested, about the history of sex testing in the Olympics; why it existed in the first place; why there’s no easy way to classify the natural, biological variation that exists in human beings; and why we might want to consider new ways of organizing athletes that is less sexist, racist, and more accepting of genders outside of a simple binary.

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