I’ve been following this problem since 2006, when I read about how Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of her medals after a “sex verification test.” The news story I read was incredibly short, and I remember thinking, “wait, what is a ‘sex verification test’?” From there, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this issue and the many athletes who’ve been impacted by it.

Professional athletes are already pushing themselves to the brink of human capabilities. That’s why we tune in, to see them do things that nobody has ever done before. Put on top of that the scrutiny that the media and fans put on them for everything from their relationships, to their facial expressions, to, in the case of my project, their gender, and it’s enough to break even the strongest people in the world (literally). More than one athlete has committed suicide due to gender verification policies. A lot of what TESTED is about is the idea of “fairness” and ethics (and who gets to decide), and it’s important for us to remember that these are human beings whose health and wellbeing have to come before tradition, entertainment, and the egos of those running international sporting bodies.

I can rant about this for hours (and have, sorry to my friends) but I’ll try to keep it short. The landscape is wildly different than when I started. It’s much more difficult to break in and succeed as an independent podcast now than it was before. Hollywood now believes that podcasting is a “cheap” and “easy” way to test out IP and is thus flooding the audio world with half baked ideas that they simply want to option back to film or television. For those with huge platforms already, podcasting seems like a great additional way to make money. For those trying to push the medium forward, it is far more challenging than it once was.