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The Humiliating Practice of Sex-Testing Female Athletes
For years, international sports organizations have been policing women for masculine qualities and turning their Olympic dreams into nightmares. But when Dutee Chand appealed her ban, she may have changed the rules.
One day in June 2014, Dutee Chand was cooling down after a set of 200-meter sprints when she received a call from the director of the Athletics Federation of India, asking her to meet him in Delhi. Chand, then 18 and one of Indias fastest runners, was preparing for the coming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, her first big international event as an adult. Earlier that month, Chand won gold in both the 200-meter sprint and the 4-by-400-meter relay at the Asian Junior Athletics Championships in Taipei, Taiwan, so her hopes for Scotland were high.
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The tests were meant to identify competitors whose chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive organs or secondary sex characteristics dont develop or align in the typical way. The word hermaphrodite is considered stigmatizing, so physicians and advocates instead use the term intersex or refer to the condition as D.S.D., which stands for either a disorder or a difference of sex development. Estimates of the number of intersex people vary widely, ranging from one in 5,000 to one in 60, because experts dispute which of the myriad conditions to include and how to tally them accurately. Some intersex women, for instance, have XX chromosomes and ovaries, but because of a genetic quirk are born with ambiguous genitalia, neither male nor female. Others have XY chromosomes and undescended testes, but a mutation affecting a key enzyme makes them appear female at birth; theyre raised as girls, though at puberty, rising testosterone levels spur a deeper voice, an elongated clitoris and increased muscle mass. Still other intersex women have XY chromosomes and internal testes but appear female their whole lives, developing rounded hips and breasts, because their cells are insensitive to testosterone. They, like others, may never know their sex development was unusual, unless theyre tested for infertility or to compete in world-class sports.
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No governing body has so tenaciously tried to determine who counts as a woman for the purpose of sports as the I.A.A.F. and the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.). Those two influential organizations have spent a half-century vigorously policing gender boundaries. Their rationale for decades was to catch male athletes masquerading as women, though they never once discovered an impostor. Instead, the athletes snagged in those efforts have been intersex women scores of them.
The treatment of female athletes, and intersex women in particular, has a long and sordid history. For centuries, sport was the exclusive province of males, the competitive arena where masculinity was cultivated and proven. Sport endowed men with the physical and psychological strength that manhood required. As women in the late 19th century encroached on explicitly male domains sport, education, paid labor many in society became increasingly anxious; if a womans place wasnt immutable, maybe a mans role, and the power it entailed, were not secure either.
Well into the 20th century, women were discouraged from participating in sports. Some medical experts claimed that vigorous exercise would damage womens reproductive capacity and their fragile emotional state and would make them muscular, mannish and unattractive to men. Critics fretted that athletics would unbind women from femininitys modesty and self-restraint.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-humiliating-practice-of-sex-testing-female-athletes.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
philosslayer
(3,076 posts)And fortunately, this will shortly (I would guess) go the way of the dodo. As gender self-identity becomes increasingly accepted, the need to "test" athletes for their specific gender will go out the window, and they'll be able to compete as they see fit.
niyad
(113,074 posts)Ilsa
(61,690 posts)There are variations in sex chromosomes, variations in how the body uses androgen and estrogen and testosterone, etc. A person can be one way genetically, but have ambiguous or opposite-looking genitalia.
I think modern geneticists think Wallis Simpson, spouse of abdicated King Edward, was in a rare genetic situation. There have been clues about this, disclosures to friends, etc.
niyad
(113,074 posts)that is for sure.
and, I had heard some things about wallis. very interesting indeed.
Albertoo
(2,016 posts)A tall, muscular man who transitions to woman would win all the female boxing events.
There has to be some sort of rule, which definitely will have to give some kind of sex 'divide'