ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the introduction and manifestations of gender verification performed for “gendered suspicious” athletes, contextualised by the racialised geopolitics of sport during the 1990s. As China became dominant in post–Cold War international sports, older concerns over gender-suspect Eastern bodies in international sports were transferred onto Chinese athletes in ways that merged with racialised imaginaries about Asian women. This was re-enforced by revelations about state-sponsored steroid programs in former East Germany, which seemed suspiciously similar to the Chinese “behind-closed-doors” sports system. Suspicions about “hypermuscular” female athletes were mapped onto Chinese bodies in ways foregrounded by racialised gender norms that pre-established some bodies as more easily gender suspect than others. The consequence was that bodies identified as gender suspicious via suspicion-based gender verification have since disproportionately been racialised bodies from the Global South, who became the most significant “other” in early 21st-century women’s sport.
