ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the IOC’s on-site gender verification program, which was introduced in 1968. The programme was motivated by Cold War geopolitical concerns but additionally shaped by an increasingly medico-scientific model of sports, as scientific approaches were becoming integrated into the heart of sport governance. This was epitomised by the creation of the IOC’s Medical Commission tasked with “sex control” and “doping control,” the former of which was built on medical models of diagnosis around sex “normality” and pathology: female athletes “sex chromosomes” were first screened and cases with “abnormal” results then sent for further examinations and, if necessary, for corrective treatment to re-align “abnormality” with the medicalised sex binary. The effect was that sex categories were explicitly framed as medical categories, and bodies failing to conform to medical norms were conceptualised as pathological.
