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sexism
World Athletics’ Sex Testing Policy Revives a Harmful, Discredited Practice
World Athletics calls it “protecting” women’s sports. History calls it discrimination.
Apr 09, 2025
On March 25, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe announced that the track and field governing body would introduce chromosomal testing of women athletes to “doggedly protect the female category.” Concern around “protecting” women athletes and the women’s category has resurged in recent years as the issue of transgender participation in sport has become politically expedient in the United States culture war, culminating in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January banning athletes from participation on teams that don’t align with the sex assigned to them at birth.
Sex and gender verification has been utilized by sport organizations for over a century. Previous methods included “nude parade” physical examinations requiring genital inspection, chromosomal testing, and testosterone level testing. However, World Athletics (previously known as the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF) stopped mandatory sex testing in 1991, due to scientific inaccuracy, inability to prove unfair advantages, and ethical concerns. Women athletes could continue to be tested if their gender presentation was deemed “suspicious.” Notably, Indian track star Pratima Gaonkar committed suicide in 2001 after failing a sex test. In the 2010s, South African distance runner Caster Semenya and Indian hurdler Dutee Chand endured intense public scrutiny over their sex and gender after they were assumed to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. This is one of many conditions that are broadly classified as differences of sexual development (DSDs), and can occur for many reasons but are usually linked to sex chromosomes or anomalies in how the body produces or responds to hormones such as testosterone.
Unlike the World Athletics’s 2023 policy that banned trans athletes from competing in the women’s category, this policy targets women who were assigned “female” at birth, identify as women, and have always lived as women. They simply don’t have the XX chromosomes that World Athletics now deems necessary.
Chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical.
The new policy requires mandatory chromosomal testing, including a check swab and dry-blood test. While World Athletics claims to have consulted 70 sporting and advocacy groups, it is unclear who was included. Their cited scientific bibliography is largely authored by individuals affiliated with World Athletics, ignoring significant research questioning the ethics and efficacy of female eligibility policies in sport. Notably absent are two pieces by Roger Pielke and colleagues: one exposing flaws in World Athletics’ original 2011 policy and another reaffirming those issues after the organization admitted its female eligibility research was flawed.
The well-established problem with World Athletics’ chromosomal testing is that it actually has no linkage to performance. Put simply, “failing” a chromosomal, DNA, or sex test tells us nothing about whether an athlete will destroy a world record or even win a race. “Failed” tests, more often than not, indicate a chromosomal anomaly—something that neither enhances an individual’s athletic ability nor impedes their quality of life (if this were the case, it would probably be diagnosed way before an elite sport competition!). The inability of chromosomal testing to determine an “unfair” performance advantage was resoundingly proven by geneticists, bioethicists, medical researchers, physicians, and endocrinologists in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was what led to the abolition of mandatory sex testing.
Systematically, policies like these disproportionately target women from the Global South and reinforce racial and gender biases. A 2020 Human Rights Watch report detailed discrimination, surveillance, and coerced medical intervention that elite athletes from the Global South experienced when seeking to comply with sex testing practices. The women interviewed detailed how medical practitioners did not fully explain the tests and procedures conducted, and the humiliation and discrimination they experienced in their communities when their medical records were disclosed without informed consent. This may be why earlier, in 2019, the World Medical Association released a notice imploring physicians to “take no part in implementing new eligibility regulations for classifying female athletes.”
These concerns highlight the urgency for educating sport governing bodies, and the general public, about the broader implications for the autonomy and safety of girls and women that can result from “protective” policies in sport. While the new World Athletics policy does not mandate surgical alteration, history shows the risks of such regulations. In 2013, four elite women athletes underwent gonadectomies and partial clitoridectomies—an unnecessary and harmful procedure classified as a form of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C)--to comply with eligibility rules. These policies can serve to legitimize and reinforce cultural practices with serious health risks for girls and women.
Women athletes must already carefully negotiate their athleticism with market-driven expectations of femininity to secure sponsorship deals, which are especially critical for women athletes because of the sport industry’s pervasive pay inequity. Mainstream beauty norms—favoring whiteness, thinness, and hairlessness—inform which bodies will be deemed “suspicious” under World Athletics’ new policy. Black and brown athletes, particularly those with more muscular builds and deeper voices, are more likely to be targeted. Research shows that elite women athletes already feel they are forced to choose between appearing “strong” or “feminine”; the reintroduction of sex testing may add further pressure for women athletes to conform with rigid gender norms to avoid harassment and surveillance. Athletes like Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Semenya endured an onslaught of online attacks following public scrutiny of their gender. Women in sports generally already face disproportionate abuse, with an NCAA study finding that women basketball players receive three times more abusive messages than their male counterparts.
World Athletics’ claims that chromosomal testing will protect women athletes and the women’s category. However, chromosomal testing does not determine athletic performance and has been condemned by scientists and human rights organizations as discriminatory and unethical. Rather than “protecting” the women’s category, these regulations reinforce harmful gender norms, disproportionately target women from marginalized backgrounds, and risk severe personal and professional consequences for women athletes.
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When Fascism Comes to America
The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories.
Apr 03, 2025
There's a relatively obscure quotation, sometimes attributed to the 20th-century American author Sinclair Lewis, that reads, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip. Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States. Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.
The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done.
Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S. president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric of Donald Trump and the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?
Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern, though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators, past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these characteristics.)
Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies
After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.
Fascist Dictators Blur the Distinction Between Private Business Interests and the Public Good and Put Wealthy Business Leaders in High Governmental Positions
At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and toward his own.
Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other Propaganda
Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading statements that Trump made during his first term as president. Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.
Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats
Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers,”and who he claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do; they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.
Fascist Dictators Put Grossly Unqualified Sycophants in Key Governmental Positions
The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism
Trump boasted in a 2005 video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once worked as a prostitute.
The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of innocent people.
Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.
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3 Reasons the Senate Should Reject Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense
I will protest the nomination of Fox News commentator and Trump’s buddy Pete Hegseth to lead the DOD over sexual assault allegations, his views on women in the military, and his history of financial mismanagement.
Jan 14, 2025
On January 14 at 9:30 am, the Fox News commentator and Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth is scheduled to be questioned by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in a confirmation hearing on President-elect Donald Trump's nomination for him to be Secretary of Defense.
I, along with many other women and men military veterans, will be at the hearing to strongly protest Hegseth's nomination and demand that the committee refuse to send the nomination forward for a vote of the entire Senate.
I am an unlikely protester. I served 29 years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves. I retired as a colonel. I was also a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001. I resigned from the U.S. government in March 2003 in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq.
Sexual Assault Allegations
I will protest lackluster Army National Guard Major Pete Hegseth's nomination on several points, but my primary concern is his physical and psychological violence toward women.
I am 78 years old. I joined the Army in 1967 when less than 1% of U.S. military forces were women. Now, 17.5% of U.S. military forces are women.
Sexual assault in the military is rampant, and Hegseth has a history of sexual violence toward women. He secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017.
Even Hegseth's mother, Penelope Hegseth, in 2018, during Hegseth's divorce proceedings from his second wife, strongly criticized his treatment of women. In an email obtained by The New York Times, Hegseth's mother wrote:
As a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out... You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. [...] It's time for a someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women. [...] On behalf of all the women (and I know it's many) you have abused in some way, I say... get some help and take an honest look at yourself.
The Associated Press reported that "Tim Palatore, Hegseth's attorney, has revealed that the woman who made the allegations was paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 as part of a confidential settlement to head off the threat of what he described as a baseless lawsuit."
A 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired—one that is at odds with Hegseth's version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event, and Hegseth.
Considering the horrific history of sexual assault in the military, Hegseth's payoff to someone who has accused him of sexual assault must disqualify Hegseth from confirmation as Secretary of Defense.
With sexual assault in the military a continuing problem for women…and for men, there is no way that a person who has been involved in even allegations of sexual assault should be Secretary of Defense… or president, for that matter, but that's another issue for evangelical Christians, Catholics, and other religious conservatives who voted for Trump to explain to their daughters.
The number of sexual assaults in the U.S. military is likely two to four times higher than government estimates, according to a study from Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. "During and beyond the 20 years of the post-9/11 wars, independent data suggest that actual sexual assault prevalence is two to four times higher than DOD estimations—75,569 cases in 2021 and 73,695 cases in 2023," the authors wrote in the report, which was released August 14, 2024.
The Costs of War Project report comes a year after a Pentagon report found that reports of sexual assault at the country's three military academies increased by over 18% between 2021 and 2022, setting a new record.
A 2016 Department of Veterans Affairs study of over 20,000 post-9/11 veterans and service members found that 41.5% of women and 4% of men experienced some form of sexual trauma while serving. One in three women and 1 in 50 men have reported military sexual trauma during VA healthcare screenings.
And finally, if the previous concern about on sexual assault allegations isn't enough to torpedo Hegseth's nomination, his statements on women's role in the military should sink his nomination.
Hegseth's Negative View of the Role of Women in the Military
In a podcast, Hegseth said the military "should not have women in combat roles" and that "men in those positions are more capable." In another podcast he said that female soldiers "shouldn't be in my infantry battalion."
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a former Army National Guard member and a Purple Heart recipient, said Hegseth was "dangerous, plain and simple." Duckworth was one of the first women in the Army to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She lost both of her legs and partial use of her right arm in 2004 after a rocket-propelled grenade struck her helicopter. "Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight? I'm pretty sure I was in combat when that happened," she told CNN. "It just shows how out of touch he is with the nature of modern warfare if he thinks that we can keep women behind some sort of imaginary line, which is not the way warfare is today."
Additionally, Sen. Duckworth added: "It's frankly an insult and really troubling that Mr. Trump would nominate someone who has admitted that he's paid off a victim who has claimed rape allegations against him... This is not the kind of person you want to lead the Department of Defense."
If sexual assault issues and his negative view of women's role in the military do not convince the Senate's Armed Services Committee that Hegseth's nomination should not go forward, then the mismanagement of funds of tiny organizations compared to the massive Department of Defense budget should take him out of consideration for the extraordinary position of Secretary of Defense.
Mismanagement of Tiny Organizations Compared to the Massive Department of Defense
In the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct while in the organizations, Hegseth was forced to resign from the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
According to CBS, "Hegseth received a six-figure severance payment and signed a non-disclosure agreement when he exited the organization Concerned Veterans of America" in 2016. "The payment came amid allegations of financial mismanagement, repeated incidents of intoxication and sexual impropriety, as well as dissension among its leaders over Hegseth's foreign policy views," CBS reported.
Prior to joining Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth faced allegations of financial mismanagement from Vets for Freedom (VFF), where he worked from 2007 to 2010.
"Donors were concerned their money was being wasted and arranged for VFF to be merged with another organization, Military Families United, which took over most of its management," CBS reported further. "Revenue at VFF dwindled to $268,000 by 2010 and by 2011, the organization's revenue was listed as $22,000. Hegseth joined Concerned Veterans for America the following year."
Margaret Hoover, host of the PBS program "Firing Line" and a former adviser to Vets for Freedom, said in an interview on CNN that Hegseth had managed the organization "very poorly." Hoover expressed doubt about his ability to run the sprawling Defense Department when he had struggled with a staff of less than 10 people, and a budget of under $10 million.
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