The Olympics are a celebration of athletic prowess, an event that incidentally highlights the diversity of the human body. Take height for example. Simone Biles, the GOAT, hurtled herself through her Paris 2024 floor routine at 4’8”. Meanwhile, on the basketball court, some players seemed to barely reach the waist of the 7’4” French star Victor Wembanyama (that’s over 1.5 Simone Bileses).
Height may be the most obvious difference, but there are others. Broad shoulders can make a difference in rugby, weightlifting and swimming. Then there are the ones we can’t see: sprinters have more of fast-twitch muscle fibers for short, explosive bursts. Long distance runners have more slow-twitch muscle fibers to go the distance. Genetic tweaks could increase some athletes red blood cell count—a definite advantage for endurance. Some Paris athletes probably had extra vertebrae. Extra ribs. They could help, they could hurt—or they could do nothing at all.
Our bodies are festivals of variation. And in sports, we celebrate those differences—until we don’t. In certain sports, people are much more skeptical and far less accepting of variations among women athletes. With all our uniqueness, it seems strange to me that we laud some anatomical variations and are so hostile towards others. What matters is not whether a particular variation is common or rare, but how we perceive it in terms of the societal categories we have made. And because of our perceptions, some athletes end up adored. Others are shamed for some of the very characteristics that could help make them great.
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People routinely categorize and put things in boxes, and societal requirements even make us do this to ourselves; check one box for nationality, another for age group. Check a box for race (a social construct and not a biological reality, though the consequences are extremely real). And check yet another for your sex. Make sure you use a number two pencil, and whatever you do, don’t mark outside of the box.
How we study the human body is not immune to this box-checking either; anatomists have strived to work out the structure of a “normal” human body, regardless of how “normal” any of us actually are. But in spite of us having an idea of how a body is most likely to look, there are still plenty of ways our bodies can veer out of this “normal” box we’ve created. The appendix, for example, is only in the expected position (flipped up over the tip of the cecum of the large intestine) 56 percent of the time, meaning almost half of the population has one pointing an unusual way. We’re taught that our skeletons, too, have 33 vertebrae, but around 8 percent of people will have 32 or 34 vertebrae instead. While 99 percent of the population has 12 pairs of ribs, a lucky 1 percent has a 13th pair. Another 1 percent has an entire extra lobe of the lung, called an azygos lobe, which even doctors can mistake as an abscess. Another incredible variation that pops up in a mere 0.3 percent of the population, including the famous cross-country skier Eero Mäntyranta, is the ability to produce excessive red blood cell count—which is, of course, very advantageous for endurance sports.
It's easy to see why anatomists, and by extension doctors, might want to establish a “normal” idea of how a human body looks and works; if there ever comes a need to go inside one, it’s helpful to know what’s likely to be where. But when our anatomical variations intersect with our social ideas of how people should look and behave—especially around the ideas of femininity and masculinity—the unexpected can often be labeled “abnormal.” And with “abnormal” comes societal judgement.
For people assigned male at birth, variations in anatomy that enhance their athletic abilities are often deemed impressive, such as wide “wingspans” or a long stride. People with large amounts of those explosive, fast-twitch muscle fibers may pack a powerful punch or hoist a massive clean and jerk. But for people assigned female at birth, some of those same variations are suddenly unfair advantages. This is especially true when those variations cross over into what people perceive as traits that are “manly.” No one complains of the flexibility and strength of female gymnasts—it is merely amazing. A powerful triple axel on the ice is perfectly feminine when done in a skirt. But a powerful punch? A cheetah-fast sprint? Variation is suddenly of deep concern.
In competition, categorizing becomes especially strict. We so desperately want to know who is the best, but we also want to control what “best” really means. For “feminine” sports, such as women’s gymnastics or figure skating, the sky is the limit for what these women can do. We praise their perfect builds for their sport and cheer their accomplishments. But for other sports, it seems female athletes can only achieve so much and still retain the approval of their audiences and fellow competitors. One merely needs to look it this Olympics’ boxing controversy to see this, but there are many other occasions where female athletes have been shunned or flat-out banned for their naturally occurring “masculine” traits.
This leads us to, of course, hormones. As Rose Eveleth points out in their excellent podcast Tested, female athletes often experience rigorous testing, particularly of their testosterone levels, which must be within specific ranges to compete. But hormone levels are yet another bodily feature that can’t be neatly put into a checked box—there is plenty of natural variation, with levels changing throughout lifespans and from person to person. And some people naturally produce more or fewer receptors for those hormones too, affecting how “visible” these chemicals are to cells, regardless of the blood test result. The human body can respond to these naturally occurring hormonal differences in a variety of ways; for example, during male puberty, many kids will have a temporary enlargement of their breast tissue, known as pubertal gynecomastia, in response to swelling hormones. One might think such an occurrence is rare, but it’s been found that up to 70 percent of kids assigned male at birth will experience this tissue enlargement—and the stigma and bullying that goes with it—even though it can statistically be considered as an anatomical “norm.”
Hormones are one of the major check boxes where our desire for entertaining, “fair” competition and social ideas of what “female” should be clash against the variability of nature. But our competitive sporting categorization of what “female” is—of how much testosterone they’re naturally allowed to produce, of how much their physicality is allowed to deviate from what’s considered the “normal” female body—this categorization is yet another one that we have created. A categorization that considers only some anatomical variations passable as female, and others strictly not.
The difference isn’t in which parts of anatomy or physiology are too large, too small, too high, or too low, too wide or too narrow, too much or too little. People assigned female at birth exist well outside either end of the narrow biochemical definitions we have set. The difference instead is in what people perceive: what they believe female athletes should be like, how well athletes assigned female at birth should perform.
These narrow definitions not only harm athletes, but sport itself; when Michael Phelps blows every other swimmer out of the water in a race, we do not think twice about it being his natural gifts (his variations) as an athlete. But when a female runner or boxer does the same, suddenly people begin to jump to conclusions about how “female” they really are.
The vast array of bodies at the Olympics shows there is no one way an athlete looks. Beholding our amazing variability—and learning a little about our anatomy—makes it clear that acceptance of some variation, and punishment of others, is much more about society than it is about any athlete at all.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.