The 2024 Olympic Games come to an end today.
For weeks, the best athletes in the world have been competing in Paris for the chance to claim a medal.
I love watching Simone Biles and the us gymnastics teams with my daughters, just, you know, seeing that excellence and them winning big.
It's been just incredible to witness.
Now it's par for the course for us to see extraordinary female athletes on the international stage.
But there's something, something many people don't know about the women who compete in elite sports.
For nearly a century, women athletes have faced questions about whether they were in fact women, and over the years, they've had to take tests to prove it.
This is the subject of a new podcast series called Test it.
It's from NPR's embedded and CBC in Canada.
Tested digs into the history of sex testing in elite sports, and it focuses on a particular group of runners who these days are labeled DSD athletes.
DSD stands for differences of sex development as a catch all medical term used to describe a condition in which a person's chromosomes, sex hormone balance, internal anatomy, or external genitalia don't develop as expected.
And sports authorities believe some women with DSDs have an unfair advantage in sports because they have higher levels of testosterone than what is considered average for a woman.
These questions about fairness and who can compete as a woman are alive and well.
Just last week in Paris, two female boxers, Iman Khalif of Algeria and Lin Yuting from Taiwan, faced questions and hateful commentary about their gender.
Last year, the International Boxing association had disqualified the two boxers, saying they failed unspecified sex eligibility tests.
But the International Olympic Committee, known as the IOC, defended them and said they were eligible to compete in the women's category in the Olympics.
Over in track and field, the people who govern the sport say that in order to be eligible for the female category, athletes with DSDs must lower their testosterone, and that requires taking medications that can have pretty bad side effects.
Rose Eveleth is the host of tested, and they've been reporting on this story for a whopping ten years before the latest boxing controversy broke out last week, my colleague A.
Martinez spoke with Rose about the series, how it came about, and how this history of sex testing continues to resonate today.
Stay with us.