ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how androgenic or “male sex” hormones were erected as the foundational substance for regulating “femaleness” in international sport. It examines regulations introduced by the IAAF and IOC in 2011 and 2012, respectively, that established an androgen threshold for women’s sports competitions. Focused on “female hyperandrogenism,” the regulations implicitly conflated hyperandrogenism with steroid doping and relied on the assumption that androgens are the essence of both sex difference and men’s sporting advantage over women. The chapter charts the scientific controversies that erupted around these regulations’ empirical basis. It analyses the introduction of new IAAF regulations in 2018, which were also controversial but shifted the exclusive emphasis from androgens to a framework of sex difference that combined hormones with chromosomes. The chapter ends with a consideration of the most recent regulations’ reliance of contested notions of “biological femaleness” to delineate the boundaries of the female category in sport.
