You Ain’t Woman Enough: Tracing the Policing of Intersexuality in Sports and the Clinic

Abstract

This article traces the continuities and discontinuities in the history of sporting and clinical rules concerning intersexuality. Through the parallel investigation of how intersexual bodies have been monitored, examined, and modified in the sporting and medical worlds, I argue that neither of them have ‘progressed’ to become more ‘respectful’ or ‘inclusive’. Rather, changes in the management of intersexuality in both areas consist in different iterations of a pervasive conceptualisation of bodies as dichotomously gendered. I contend that medical and sporting bodies’ supposedly ‘scientific’ search to ‘determine’ gender not only is a failed endeavour, given the contradictory gender ‘markers’ that have been ‘discovered’ and enforced on bodies, but also constitutes an attempt, disguised through discourses of health and fairness, to render intersexuality a problematic form of embodiment.