The false claims of men masquerading as women offered a distraction from the realities of the IOC's contemporary sex testing project. What the IOC and the IAAF largely failed to acknowledge was that, by instituting sex tests, they were constructing their own definitions of femaleness. The IOC and the IAAF revised their policies to lend the categories of "woman" and "man" an air of coherence. First, they relied on physical inspections of each athlete's outward body; then they shifted to chromosomes, which they claimed would be more precise and scientific; later, and continuing into the present, they tried defining sex based on testosterone. Even as these shifts were underway, it was clear to astute observers what the IOC was doing. Daniel F. Hanley, the top physician on the US Oolympic Committee, complained in 1967 that chromosome-based sex tests "will establish a new definition of femaleness." Even de Merode once admitted that "it was practically impossible, scientifically, to define the sex of an athlete." Yet the IOC had backed itself into a corner. By implementing sex tests, they were keeping alive the illusion that sports could be inherently segregated by sex, as they had been since the earliest days of the Olympics. Sex testing became part of the fiction tat "men's sports" and "women's sports" were logical concepts. Abolishing sex testing would mean acknowledging that people cannot be sorted inherently into male and female categories. And if human sex is not built on a binary, fans might start to ask: Why, then, should sports be?
Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 279.