VICE News & Hulu
2020
Producer/Researcher/Writer
This story was part of a series called VICE Investigates. The episode discusses how transgender and intersex people are being policed in sports. Sports have historically been organized into two strict categories: male and female, but what about those who challenge the binary?
This story was difficult to tackle for multiple reasons:
- Explaining the history of “sex testing” and how it shifted to measuring athletes’ testosterone levels and how the science behind that is problematic and flawed. We also had to explain the difference between transgender and intersex and how that factors into regulations.
- We reconstructed and tried to find evidence for the allegations made by an intersex athlete that doctors working with World Athletics coerced her into unnecessary surgeries that ended her career as an athlete.
- Gaining access to characters and experts was challenging. Many didn’t want to speak at first because the topic is very polarizing and many had been burnt by other media outlets before.
The episode can be watched with a Hulu or Apple TV account.