Just before the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the now-defunct British humor magazine Punch ran a number of cartoons about them. One showed the sex test that would be run there for allegedly female athletes suspected to be male (the Soviets had a record of fielding ambiguously sexed athletes, most notably the Press sisters, Tamara and Irina, sometimes known as the Press brothers, who disappeared from the sporting scene once chromosomal sex tests were introduced).

The cartoon showed a man, the Soviet tester, and a woman, the athlete, standing next to a tractor. “If you were a woman,” says the tester, “you …