Gender verification in sports
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Gender verification in sports (also sometimes loosely referred to as sex determination) is the issue of verifying the eligibility of an athlete to compete in a sporting event that is limited to a single gender. The issue arose a number of times in the Olympic games where it was alleged that male athletes attempted to compete as women in order to win, or that a natural intersex competed as a woman. Sex testing began at the 1966 European Track and Field Championships in response to suspicion that several of the best women athletes from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were actually men.[1] At the Olympics, testing was introduced at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. While it arose primarily from the Olympic games, sex determination affects any sporting event. However it appears it most often becomes an issue in elite international competition.
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[edit] The test
For a period of time these tests were mandatory for female athletes (not male ones). The NYTimes article suggests it was due to fears that male athletes would pose as female athletes and have an unfair advantage over their competitors. It seems this has only actually happened once, however, and it was not discovered with any of these tests.
Nowadays, sex determination tests typically involve evaluation by gynecologists, endocrinologists, psychologists, and internal medicine specialists.
[edit] History
United States Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage requested, during or shortly after the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, that a system be established to examine female athletes. According to a sympathetic Time magazine article about hermaphrodites, Brundage felt the need to clarify "sex ambiguities" after observing the performance of Czechoslovak runner and jumper Zdenka Koubkova and English shotputter and javelin thrower Mary Edith Louise Weston. Both individuals later had sex change surgery and legally changed their names, to Zdenek Koubek and Mark Weston, respectively. [2].
- Stanisława Walasiewicz, a Polish athlete who won a gold medal in women's 100 m at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but was found to have partially developed male genitalia in 1980 after her death, and is perhaps the earliest known case.
- Another Polish athlete Ewa Kłobukowska, who won the gold medal in women's 4x100 m relay and the bronze medal in women's 100 m sprint at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, is the first athlete to fail a gender test in 1967. She was found to have a rare genetic condition which gave her no advantage over other athletes, but was nonetheless banned from competing in Olympic and professional sports.
- Eight athletes failed the tests at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics but were all cleared by subsequent physical examinations.
- Indian middle-distance runner Santhi Soundarajan who won the silver medal in 800 m at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar failed the sex determination test and was stripped of her medal.
[edit] Controversies
The practice has come under fire from those who feel that the testing is humiliating, socially insensitive, and not entirely accurate or effective anyway. The testing is especially difficult and problematic in the case of people who could be considered intersexual. The genetic tests provide potentially inaccurate results and discriminate against women with disorders of sexual development. Genetic anomalies can allow a person to have a male genetic make-up but be physiologically female.
A commentary published in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated,
"gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate. Furthermore, these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors (eg, some 46,XX males), are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who 'fail' a test." [3]
The article also states:
"Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticists, endocrinologists, and others in the medical community. One major problem was unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male pseudohermaphroditism). ...
A second problem is that only women, not men, were stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up was rarely available for female athletes "failing" the test, which often was performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up was crucial because the problem was not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism." [3]
[edit] Current status
Sex testing has been done as recently as the Atlanta Olympic games in 1996, but is no longer practiced, having been officially stopped by the International Olympic Committee in 1999. This followed a resolution passed at the 1996 International Olympic Committee (IOC) World Conference on Women and Health "to discontinue the current process of gender verification during the Olympic Games." [4]
The International Association of Athletics Federations too stopped conducting the tests in 1991. However the Olympic Council of Asia continues the practice.
New rules permit transsexual athletes to compete in the Olympics after having completed sex reassignment surgery, being legally recognized as a member of the target sex, and having undergone two years of hormonal therapy (unless they changed gender before puberty). [5] These controversies continue with the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. [6]
[edit] Notable incidents
- Sisters Tamara and Irina Press won five track and field Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union and set 26 world records in the 1960s. Their careers suddenly ended when they failed to appear for gender testing at its introduction in 1966. [1]
- Princess Anne of the United Kingdom was the only female competitor not to have to submit to a sex test at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal; as she was the daughter of the host country's head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, such a test was seen as unseemly. Princess Anne was a member of the UK equestrian team.
- Prior to the advent of sexual verification tests, German athlete Dora Ratjen competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and placed fourth in the women's high jump. She later competed and set a world record for the women's high jump at the 1938 European Championships before it was revealed that she was actually a man named Hermann Ratjen who was forced to disguise his gender by the Nazis.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b R. Peel, "Eve’s Rib - Searching for the Biological Roots of Sex Differences", Crown Publishers, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-517-59298-3
- ^ [1] "Change of Sex" 24 Aug 1936 Time
- ^ a b J.L. Simpson et al., "Gender Verification in the Olympics", JAMA, vol.284, pp. 1568-1569, 2000.
- ^ K. Mascagni, "World conference on women and sport", Olympic Review XXVI. vol. 12, pp. 23-31, 1996-1997.
- ^ If a man has a sex change, can he compete in the Olympics as a woman? The Straight Dope. 22 Aug 2008
- ^ A Lab Is Set to Test the Gender of Some Female Athletes. New York Times July 30, 2008. [2]
