Sports

“I have come across no examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. Zero,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”

The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.

“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women in sport.

In many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men in the 100-meter. In the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the pro men. And in ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, in fact, outpace men.