The podcast Tested was released last year by NPR’s Embedded banner, an audio platform for untold audio documentaries told through a deeply reported narrative lens, along with CBC in Canada. Written, reported, and hosted by journalist Rose Eveleth, Tested dives into the 100-year history of sex testing in elite sports that led to the identical conversations we are having in 2025.
Specifically, Tested follows the stories of two athletes: Christine Mboma, the Olympic silver medalist from Namibia, and Maximila Imali, who holds two Kenyan national records. In the spring of 2023, track and field authorities set new regulations stating that athletes could not compete as a female unless they lower their body’s natural testosterone levels.
Mboma and Imali were assigned female at birth. They never questioned their identity — but they have bodies that some have said give them an “unfair advantage”. That said, the new rules offered them three choices: give up their Olympic dreams, try to challenge the rules, or alter their bodies.
The same conversation is happening in 2025 with Olympian Imane Khelif.
In the in-depth six-episode podcast series, Eveleth along with historians, scientists, doctors, and other athletes asks: What is fair and who decides?
“I want to be clear that the women that Tested is about are not trans, and only some of them are queer,” said Eveleth in a recent interview with GLAAD. “They are victims of a series of policies that decide their identities for them, that puts labels on them that don’t apply or that they don’t connect with. They are caught in the crosshairs of an attempt to control people’s bodies and insist upon simple, binary categories when those don’t hold, and to erase those who don’t comply.”
Read GLAAD’s full interview with Eveleth below.
What was the initial spark that opened the floodgates to creating Tested?
Would you believe that it was actually Oscar Pistorius? Many years ago (before Pistorius murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp) I was reporting a story about the debate over whether his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair advantage or not. In doing that research I re-encountered a story I had sort of forgotten about — Caster Semenya’s. Semenya is another South African track athlete, also accused of having an “unfair advantage” but for a very different reason. I started reading articles from 2009, about Semenya, and so many of them were, frankly, bizarre. The head of World Athletics (the international governing body of track and field) at the time said “yes she is a woman, but maybe not 100%” And I thought “what does that mean?” Then I learned that these ideas and tests and regulations went all the way back to the 1930s! The more I learned about all the women over time who have been accused of this same exact thing, the more I was convinced there was something to be told here.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while making Tested?
For me, a sports fan and a sports history fan, the thing that surprised me the most was that for thirty years — from 1968 to 1999 — every single woman* who competed in the Olympics, at every single event, had to take a chromosome test to verify that they were female. If they passed they got a little card (imagine a library card) that verified that they were female, that they had to bring to every event before they could compete. (*The only person who was ever exempted from this requirement was Princess Anne, who competed in 1976 in equestrian.)
What were some of the major obstacles that you had to overcome while making the podcast?
Frankly the biggest obstacle was convincing someone to let me tell this story. It took me eight years of pitching to sell Tested. I pitched 26 places, and got 26 no’s, until finally, on number 27, CBC said yes. Over those eight years I spent my own money to travel around the world to talk to women involved in this story, look at archives, and meet with experts because I knew this story mattered and was important. But I would go into pitch meetings and be met again and again with editors and executives who clearly had very little interest in the experiences of anybody who didn’t look like them. One outlet told me, point blank, that “anything that questioned the gender binary was simply not interesting to them.” Another told me that they thought I was overstating how much any of this mattered — that this was only really impacting a couple of women who weren’t that famous anyway so why should their audience care? I’m really grateful to the folks at CBC for seeing the vision of the series and giving me the chance to tell it, and to NPR for coming on board as well.
Tested spills into an LGBTQ narrative but is very much a story about humanity. How do you
navigate the varying opinions and baggage that come with the history of the topic you’re exploring? In other words, how do you brace yourself for all the backlash?
Personally, I find it pretty easy to brush off people who attack me. I have friends and family and a community that cares about each other, that looks out for one another, that is trying to build a better, more equitable, just, creative, and open world. I’m happy. These people clearly are not.
And I also like to think about all the folks who found Tested helpful in understanding something they had previously found hard to grasp. There are folks with a vested interest in making this topic seem totally impenetrable so that the average person doesn’t try to engage. We see this tactic all the time — powerful actors pushing the idea that people can’t possibly have an opinion because something is “too complicated” in order to avoid having to truly defend or face the consequences of their actions. But I got a lot of really heartening messages from people saying that listening to Tested prepared them to have the hard conversations with their family, or friends, about access to sports, gender, fairness, and equity.
When the “mandatory sex testing” story of Imane Khelif recently resurfaced, what were your initial thoughts?
I think, like most folks who know about this story, I thought “oh no here we go again.” One of the things I find most frustrating about this topic is that you see, almost verbatim, the same exact conversations happening over and over and over again. Many of the quotes and headlines we saw last summer, could have easily been written in 1928, or 1966, or 1988, or 2009. Again and again we see these same ideas around what women are supposed to look like; accusations that some women are too strong, too fast, and too good to be women; the assertion that random strangers can know more about a person’s “true identity” that they do themselves. Why does this loop seem inescapable for some people? How do we break folks out of it? I don’t have the answer, necessarily, but it’s something I think about all the time.
How important is it for queer journalists like yourself to research and report stories like these?
These are problems that I think many queer and trans folks are familiar with — control, erasure, categorization.
Queer and especially trans journalists face discrimination in all facets of life, and the media industry is no exception. There is a harmful, persistent notion among many powerful mainstream outlets that trans journalists cannot be “impartial” on issues that might effect them and that any trans journalist writing about gender is an “advocate.” (Of course the same allegations are never made of cis reporters, or white reporters.) And yet, you wouldn’t hire someone to write about basketball who had never watched a game. You shouldn’t hire someone to write about a place they’ve never been. Experience, and expertise, in nearly every other realm of journalism, is celebrated. Queer and trans folks have expertise that should be valued, not written off as antithetical to the profession of journalism.
Why is it important for stories to reach mainstream media, specifically in the current socio-political climate?
I think for me Tested is about more than just sports, and more than just gender. This story really forces people to examine their prior assumptions, to think about big hard questions of fairness and equity, and to maybe reimagine the world as a lot more interesting and complex than it might seem. But more than that, it forces us to all think about the kind of world we want to live in. If we allow a government or organization to ban people from entire realms of public life like sports, simply because of the way they were born, that is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set. And that’s what we’re talking about here. That’s what is happening to these women.
What was one thing that gave you hope after doing Tested?
I mentioned this earlier but I’m really buoyed by the messages I got telling me that Tested helped people push back on friends and family who were repeating misinformation about sex and gender in sports. I can’t make World Athletics, or the IOC, change their minds on this topic. They’ve both heard and seen every argument under the sun. But what I can do is help the average person understand, and I’ve found that so many times when you actually talk it through with people they come out the other side realizing that we should let these women compete as they are.
