ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the emergence of concerns over “gender fraud” or “masquerade” in women’s sports during 1970s and 1980s, and it shows how these concerns resulted into genitalia being centred as the foundation of sex difference by the early 1990s. This was contextualised, firstly, by broader sexual and gender liberation politics. As they speared into sport, transsexual women participating in women’s competitions became a visible and controversial issue. Secondly, scientists were disputing the use of chromosome screening for gender verification, because it could screen out some (intersex) women who have XY chromosomes while enabling some men with chromosomal abnormalities to “pass” as females. These issues became tangled in ways seen to threaten the “authenticity” of femaleness. The threat was associated especially with the possible presence of penises in women’s sporting spaces. A new definition of sex was consequently coined where “a man has a penis and a scrotum, a woman does not,” and the IAAF begun using “health and gender examinations” requiring visual observation of women’s genitalia.
