4 August 2008
Gee whiz, what will China do next? Female athletes suspected of being male will be tested and evaluated on their physical appearance and will give blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes. When you know that there are a lot of false positives on tests all the time, think what damage will be done if someone is declared to be a male and it was in error. Another problem arises, China’s tests are likely to give wrong answers, because they measure maleness and femaleness by the wrong yardsticks.
There are really no firm rules to determine maleness and femaleness. In the Original Olympic games in 776 B.C. there were no gender problems as only men could compete, everyone was nude and no female spectators allowed. How times have changed over the centuries. The first gender testing began in 1968, at the Games in Mexico City because it was thought that the Communist countries in Eastern Europe were using male athletes in women’s competitions. In truth, they were on a regimen of testosterone and steroids.
The more modern tests measure — and not always reliably — the presence of a Y chromosome, or Y chromosomal material, which no small number of females have. The condition is known as androgen insensitivity. A lot of these women live their lives unaware that they have it and for the most part are allowed to compete. Since 2004, the International Olympic Committee has allowed transsexuals to compete as long as they have had sex-reassignment surgery and have gone through a minimum of two years of post-operative hormone replacement therapy which allows them to perform at or near the baseline for female athletes.
The best test for gender is the way a person lives their life, what is in their heart. How is this tested to weed out frauds? There are accidents of birth that allow men or women to grow to maturity with a sex that is not true by scientific standards. That is the person who lives their life by what is in their heart. Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity in a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.
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