This is from a few days ago, so I hope that I haven't missed an earlier thread on this article.
slate.com/life/2024/07/olympics-2024-paris-trans-intersex-sex-testing-history.html
https://archive.ph/4BzYk
'That many young athletes—trans, intersex, or cis—may have been, for decades, pulled out of elite sports for failing sex tests is already troubling. But it is especially damaging when you consider how astonishingly subjective the tests themselves were. The sexed nature of the human body exists on a spectrum: As one endocrinologist put it to journalist Katie Barnes, sex is the result of the complex “interplay and the collective of your sex chromosomes, sex hormones, your internal reproductive structures, and what gonads you have, and your external genitalia.” Yet sports officials have, since 1936, invented and reinvented ways to enforce a strict binary anyway. The first rendition of sex testing involved crude gynecological exams, like the one Dillema refused to take part in. By the 1960s, sports officials embraced chromosome testing, but this too received criticism from scientists. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to have a difference in sex development, for example, and never even know it. The pivot to hormone testing presents its own problems, seeing as all women have a natural range of testosterone levels.
Today, these long-running efforts to keep trans and intersex women out of sports have become a mainstream political weapon. Twenty-three states now restrict the ability of trans girls and women to participate in school sports. It is the more explicit and draconian version of what has been playing out, again and again, throughout competitive sports for over half a century: Trans and intersex athletes, and potentially others who failed these highly subjective tests, are being pushed out of sports before they even get a chance to become stars.'