Dr. Linda Blade was an All-American, a Bolivian National Champion, and a Canadian National Champion. She also served as a member of the United States Olympic Team and served on the Board of Directors for the International Olympic Committee. In this episode, Dr. Blade talks about her athletic career, her experience as a female athlete, and how she became a woman in sport.
00:00:00.540Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line, but first...
00:00:10.980There, the last one. Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that refreshes.
00:00:18.040Welcome back to the Games for Girls podcast. I'm super excited about today's guest. Her name is Dr. Linda Blade.
00:00:34.000She was an athlete herself, accomplishing incredible things. ACC champion, she's an All-American, a Bolivia national champion, and a Canadian national champion.
00:00:43.680But also, I want her... She's going to dive into all of the progress, or I should say the lack of, that the Olympics has made and how it went from sex verification testing through a cheek swab to now we're in global discord where they're allowing men to self-identify as women to get into women's sports.
00:01:04.940The progression is interesting, to say the least. All of the different policies and stuff that have been implemented and how we got here.
00:01:12.560So, check out the interview with Dr. Linda Blade.
00:01:16.200So, Dr. Blade, you have been someone over the past year and a half, I guess, who has really inspired me.
00:01:22.660I came to find out later that you were actually at that national championships where Tom and I competed against each other.
00:01:29.320And so, I just want to give you the chance to talk about your background, both athletically, of course, you're a doctor, and kind of the experience and the work you've done sitting on governing boards and creating policies.
00:01:43.320So, yeah, I have quite a history in sport, you know, I'm well into my later years of life, I guess, second or third phase of life, just turned 60 a little while ago.
00:01:56.180And all of this time, it's like my life just has been building up to this point where I've had to fight this battle about men self-identifying into women's sports.
00:02:06.940And it really started way back when I was a little child.
00:02:11.040My parents were religious, were Christian missionaries in Bolivia, in South America, and they were Bible translators.
00:02:16.460And I happened to just grow up in a place where we had no TV, no electronics.
00:02:21.740I just played soccer in the streets all the time with the boys.
00:02:24.660I was a guest at the Convoy, and a lot of my parents' fellow missionaries didn't really like the fact that I was this little girl running around, always dirty and playing soccer and coming to church late with sweating because I'd been on the track team and all these things.
00:02:41.020But, I mean, I really loved, loved, loved sports.
00:02:44.360And then I got to back to Canada, and then I immediately was recruited to the NCAA and finished, well, I was on the University of Maryland team, Maryland Carapins.
00:02:58.220And this was about exactly almost like 10 years just after Title IX, and I felt so appreciative of the fact that, you know, this little sweaty ragamuffin little girl with no money got to go and go get a university education and ended up, of course, with my Ph.D. in kinesiology.
00:03:20.260So, I'm a doctor as far as research, but not medical.
00:03:23.160And so, basically, but going back to that, I mean, I was team captain of Maryland Carapins and NCAA all-American, and it was just an amazing experience.
00:03:33.860Came back and was trying to train for the Olympic team.
00:03:36.300I ended up not getting to the Olympics in 1988.
00:03:42.420At the time then, I was also engaged to be married, and I just figured, okay, four more years, my husband was actually doing his agriculture.
00:03:53.360He's a farm boy who grew up and did work with African farmers, and, like, his Ph.D. was in Africa.
00:03:59.340So, after I had national championships and all kinds of things and international, I competed with everybody who was at the Olympics that year.
00:04:07.560I just didn't get to the Olympics, and it was just too bad.
00:04:10.020But I got to compete with Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
00:04:12.000She was in my event, the hip path one, and she still got the world record, and I just feel so, like, wow.
00:04:19.060I got to compete with her probably on three or four occasions.
00:04:21.740Of course, I didn't come close to beating her.
00:04:24.600She's an American hero, an amazing athlete.
00:04:28.700But anyway, so got married, thought I was finished with sport completely.
00:04:34.400I got a new name, new place to live, living on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Africa.
00:04:40.560And I thought, okay, well, I've been working on my Ph.D., and I'm going to go to a local university and just say, I help you teach or do whatever, because I was a little bit bored while he was doing his agriculture research.
00:04:53.700So, that was in the area, you know, where Boko Haram is kidnapping the little girls and stuff.
00:04:58.060And so, that was, like, a center for Islamic studies.
00:05:06.640And they said, well, you have to have an activity, you know, course that you teach, along with biomechanics and nutrition and everything else.
00:05:16.520So, I wrote to World Athletics and said, like, this is who I am, and I'm a Canadian living in Africa, and I need coaching materials.
00:05:26.160And they were thrilled to send me some stuff, because they had started a new program where coaches coach other coaches as a mentorship thing.
00:05:35.040And so, and they were surprised that I was a woman teaching at an Islamic university.
00:05:41.720In fact, I was the only woman professor.
00:05:45.440And actually, my first welcome to professor, welcome to university celebration was me getting my food and sitting in a different building than the men, because it was like I had to do that.
00:05:58.640And so, I had to really navigate this, like, different cultures and different religious perspectives and different things.
00:06:05.700And I was there, but they were very respectful of me.
00:06:09.820But then, the World Athletics sent me to, like, they got me certified, and I became, like, a global lecturer for teaching coaches how to coach.
00:06:19.540And my expertise was coaching muscle women how to coach the girls.
00:06:22.760And so, I, like, I went to Iran, and I went to the Middle East.
00:06:25.900But by that time, my husband, we had moved back to Canada, and then I just started having children.
00:06:32.360And as a private sport performance consultant and coaching athletes in more than 15 different sports.
00:06:40.240Because my expertise is human movement studies, you know, sports sciences, and particularly the growth and development, like puberty and stuff.
00:06:48.340That was part of my PhD in terms of the functionality of how the body goes through and changes over time and function.
00:06:54.840And so, like, I could apply that with my track and field, you know, run, jump, throw, even if you're a swimmer, pushing off the wall as a jump.
00:07:04.160So, I can actually help people actually improve their performances by taking them off their, away from their sport and actually working on specific features of their movement pattern.
00:07:15.300And so, that's how I just made a private consultation.
00:07:18.000And then, by 2014, I was elected as president of track and field in the province of Alberta.
00:07:25.280And that's when I got to national meetings and found out that they wanted to push a policy.
00:07:46.360I'm looking at the words on the paper and it's saying, like, no, no surgery required, nor no hormone.
00:07:52.700Like, the one in Canada that they were pushing at the time and still are, is, like, completely self-idea.
00:07:58.100A man can come in one day and say he's a woman and then compete with females and then the next day can be a man again.
00:08:04.100Like, it was, like, the most extreme one.
00:08:07.420And I couldn't, I thought I had fallen into some sort of different universe.
00:08:11.940Like, I just thought, how in the world is this even possible?
00:08:16.120And it, and everything came into view perfectly clear to me when I said to the men around the table,
00:08:23.860because I'm the one, I'm the president of one province, like one state, and all the other presidents are there around the table at the national capital.
00:08:30.620And I'm saying, wait, like, you know that records, you know the record books, you know that men's records are way better than women.
00:09:19.940And then, when I got the president of the time of the national track field, then I took him for dinner and I just said, you know this isn't right.
00:09:50.820And he goes, I said, but don't you know that there's 50%, like the overwhelming number of women and girls are going to be feeling like they were discriminated on the basis of sex.
00:10:01.980And don't you think they're going to sue?
00:10:08.140So, when he told me that girls would not sue, women would not sue, that their worry is about the males, the men, the entitled men, because women would never sue, I thought to myself, boy, you have no idea about female athletes.
00:10:25.140And, like, you have, I mean, it turned me into an activist.
00:10:30.720I'm telling you, Riley, it just turned me into an activist.
00:10:32.960Because I'm like, this, I just, you know, all those years when I was teaching in Islamic countries and we had to wear the veil and I had to go around and do all these things.
00:10:41.720And I thought, well, this is what it's like over here, but, you know, in the West, we respect women and we, you know, like, I just assume all kinds of things.
00:10:52.120And then when push came to shove, the clarity of it all was just, it hit me like a lightning bolt because I realized we're no different than anybody.
00:11:03.260Like, when push comes to shove, men will have the priority.
00:11:06.740Totally, absolutely have the priority.
00:11:54.340And so I want you to go through the progression starting back in, you know, 1960 when, here, you take it away.
00:12:01.420Yeah, so there was ever since, like, the first time, well, I can speak for track and field, the Olympics, the first Olympics was 1928 that women were allowed in.
00:12:11.700I think swimming was much earlier, maybe like even 1904 or something like it was women could swim much earlier in the Olympics than in track and field.
00:12:19.420But anyway, so ever since, you know, women were starting to compete more and more in the Olympic Games, instantly the International Olympic Committee had a problem where men were self-identifying or pretending to be women or whatever and coming in and competing, trying to compete against women.
00:12:39.460And so they realized, like, right away, there had to be something that they did for gatekeeping, like, as a screen, right?
00:12:47.960Like, like, how do you keep out the males out of women's sports?
00:12:51.260And so there was different things tried.
00:12:53.660Like, there was about six or seven different methods.
00:12:56.200I mean, in the 40s and, well, 40s was World War II, so they didn't have Olympics then.
00:13:01.160But right after that, they had, you know, they had things where they would have to be going to a medical exam with a gynecologist.
00:13:11.040And it only happened once, but they always go back to this one where it was called the naked parade, where the women had to parade before the panel of doctors naked and just to show that they were women.
00:13:21.920So, and that was horrifying, obviously, and it only happened once, but, you know, all of the people who are in favor of don't screen are always pointing to that one moment.
00:13:31.740But since that, by the 1970s and 80s, they had what we call the cheek swab, which is like you take a Q-tip and you swab the inside of a person's cheek.
00:13:41.920Like, you get a little bit of the cells from the body and you look under the microscope and women have, like, because we have XX chromosomes in each cell, one of the X's turns into a little ball kind of thing.
00:13:55.700So you see this little black dot in the cell and the presence of this black dot tells you, oh, this is a woman.
00:14:03.860But, I mean, sometimes the black dot is not seen visibly, you know, it's not visible under the microscope.
00:14:09.780And so they think, oh, this might be a man.
00:14:11.320So then you have to go further testing.
00:14:13.060So really, it's just a screen to say, initially, do we see the black dot there?
00:14:17.980Well, that was, there was a few false negatives or, yeah, like a few females were considered or found to be male, but not really in that screen test.
00:14:29.020So they decided in 1996 Olympics in Atlanta that they would switch from the cheek swab to doing a blood test and just doing the genetic testing and looking for the SRY gene on the Y chromosome.
00:14:50.000They took a huge number of, they tested a huge number of female athletes, almost everybody.
00:14:56.360And, uh, basically, um, it, you know, it did work.
00:15:02.300It did identify a few males in the female group and they let them compete anyway, which I just don't get that part.
00:15:09.120Uh, they were DST type athletes, um, with Y chromosomes, which obviously meant they had male advantage, but for some reason, the IFC didn't have the guts at that time.
00:15:18.740Even though our screen showed us they were male, they had the Y chromosome.
00:15:22.760This was just kind of a test of the system.
00:15:26.260And then that, you know, they real, then there are more and more committees that was like social justice was coming in on board, like in universities and stuff.
00:15:33.700And by 1999, um, they had a meeting, just decided to scrap the testing altogether.
00:15:40.520And their excuse was that it made female athletes feel uncomfortable, but this is not true because in their actual genetics of medicine,
00:15:50.340they had published the results of a survey they did in, at the Atlanta Olympics, when they were doing that, um, testing, they did a survey of, uh, like many, many female athletes and all of them, like 82, 82% of the athletes thought that they wanted sex verification to continue.
00:16:12.220And 94% had said it didn't make them feel uncomfortable.
00:16:15.840So for the, the IOC on the first lie that this made women feel uncomfortable on that first premise, it's just started out from the beginning, telling a lie that, that women didn't want this.
00:16:28.620And yet by 1999, they had this special and they just had like some of the guys on an athlete commission kind of think about it.
00:16:35.760No, yeah, that probably isn't a good idea.
00:16:37.840And they scrapped the sex verification screen.
00:16:41.000So that was where we started down this path.
00:16:43.600And so in 2003, there was another meeting and there was a, uh, scientist named Louie Guerin who had done a research on, um, on transsexual or trans, yeah, transsexual.
00:16:58.200So males who are doing the surgery and transitioning and trying to look like females.
00:17:03.620And he did the testing, like in terms of strength and different things before transition, and then tested them after and found that most of the changes happened in the first year of transition, but they didn't mitigate very much at all.
00:17:18.100Um, but nevertheless, um, he said they, he went to the IOC medical commission and basically said, they all said, based on the best information available at the time, we should allow transsexuals to compete with females.
00:17:34.120Um, and it was only because they were assuming there weren't that many, they were saying, oh, one or two men, we'll let them cheat, you know, in a sense, that's what my words are.
00:17:43.020But let's let one or two of the transsexuals that had the surgery and did the three years and I, the restrictions were very, you know, severe.
00:17:51.840Like you had to have, uh, two years, uh, having had the surgery and live two years as a woman and, and all the hormonal profiles had to be low and all of this stuff.
00:18:04.020So basically going to an ectomy where they take off testes and then you have zero testosterone.
00:18:09.560Um, and so basically the best available evidence.
00:18:15.580Well, what, what does like, if they said in that meeting in 2003, so that was, that was called the Stockholm consensus.
00:18:22.680Cause that was in Stockholm, that meeting.
00:18:24.420And, and basically what it's, it, the best available evidence at the time, if they were honest with themselves, even with that only one study that Dr. Louis Noren had done.
00:18:37.100Um, it was like males, they knew males already because of their Olympic records and stuff.
00:18:42.440They knew males were stronger and bigger and, and taller and larger than women.
00:18:47.000And they knew that males outperformed female athletes.
00:18:49.420They knew that, um, you know, even after three years of transition, um, it didn't take away many of the male advantages, especially in the terms of strength.
00:19:00.700Um, maybe hemoglobin levels came down, but I don't even know if they measured that.
00:19:04.300We found that out later, but everything else, you know, all the, the many variables that make men better than women, not better, but different than women.
00:19:12.440Uh, as far as athletes, and then their performances are distinctly different.
00:19:17.340Um, all of those physical differences are not mitigated, but nevertheless, they let them compete.
00:19:23.720And basically the, the statement by Dr. Louis Noren at the time sums it up.
00:19:29.940He says, and I'll quote, depending on the levels of arbitrariness, one wants to accept.
00:19:35.620It is justifiable that reassigned males can compete with other women.
00:19:39.520So they were basically admitting it's arbitrary, that it's completely political.
00:19:44.340And it was a bunch of men making this decision.