The Tricky Science of Olympic Gender Testing 559
First time accepted submitter erdos-bacon sandwich writes "Gender tests may be the most controversial obstacle the athletes face. The London Games tries a new approach based on testosterone. Of all the obstacles athletes have had to overcome to compete in the Olympics, perhaps the most controversial has been the gender test. Originally designed to prevent men from competing in women's events, it is based on the premise that competitors can be sorted into two categories via established scientific rules. But the biological boundaries of gender aren't always clear."
Overcomplicating things? (Score:0, Insightful)
I always figured a gender test involved dropping your breeches in front of a doctor. How does that not cover it? If you have a vagnia but too much testosterone, you should be competing with the fellas?
Re:Overcomplicating things? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, intersexed persons make a bit of a mess of that. Since you can have both sets physical features in various strengths in some people. That's been where the biggest controversies have come up in recent history.
Confusing terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
TFA makes a bit of a mess of it by consistently using the term "gender" where they are really talking about "sex". Gender is what your head feels you are, sex is what the body makes you. There is absolutely no rule against a physically female athlete participating in a women's race if she phychologically identifies herself as male. The latter is gender, the former sex.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is they key point. "Freaks of nature" are over-represented in the elite athlete community already. That's part of what makes them elite. Why should abnormalities related to sex chromosomes or hormones be any different?
Re:Why seperate competions by gender anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.
The answer... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test (Score:2, Insightful)
Because Chinese athletes beating US ones must be due to China having access to advanced future technology, because there is no way they could beat americans otherwise? No, wait, what?
Re:Why seperate competions by gender anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
More importantly the original revival of the Olympics was just part of the whole Eugenics craze of that era in history and you can't really breed a super race without super women as well as super men.
That certainly explains all the sex in the Olympic village. Although, it doesn't explain why they hand out condoms.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yes, how hard can it be...
Check one:
[ XX ] Woman
[ XY ] Man
What if I'm XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome) ? What if I'm just X (Turner Syndrome) ? What if I'm XX but SR-Y positive due to gene translocation ? What if I'm XY but Completely Androgen Insensitive (CAIS) ?
What if some of my cells are XY, but the others are X, or XX, or XXY (mosaicism and chimerism, sometimes combiend with the syndromes above, see the famous case of Lydia Fairchild for a primer) ? Do we decide sex on the cells' majority+1 ? Or should part of my body compete in the Mens' races, and the other part in Womens' ?
Re:The answer... (Score:4, Insightful)
is to remove "men's" and "women's" and just have events.
I can see your point. Training is one factor in an athlete's ability to perform, but so is genetics. You might have a gene that allows you to build muscle mass faster, or make more efficient use of oxygen, yet someone without those genes still have to compete at the same level as you. Yet if you don't have a Y chromosome you get to compete on a different level without having to compete with people with that particular genetic advantage.
Obviously a Y chromosome isn't the only deciding factor though. I have one, but i wouldn't stand a chance against any decent athlete who doesn't have one, but at the top level you'll find that in most events involving strength the athletes with a Y chromosome outcompete those without.
I vote we keep men's and women's events as is and like the rest of us who lucked out in the high performance genetic lottery, people with indeterminate sex will just have to miss out too (or put up with the category they are assigned to for competition).
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
So if a person's body develops as a woman, they're still a man, even though by all objective standards beyond the chromosomes, they're a woman? That's a really strange conception.
And hey, lets just blur your chromosome standard. What about a person who has a Y-chromosome but a broken SRY (the gene region that triggers the initial male-development cascade)? What if they have a Y with *no* SRY? What if they're XX but contain a migrated SRY and developed into a male as a consequence? What if they're a chimera and gained their male-developmental trigger from a minority of their body's cells? What if the cascade began without SRY due to another genetic defect? What if it failed despite SRY due to another genetic defect?
And think about the practical aspects of your standard. Should a man who's XX but has fully male traits, from genitalia to musculature, get to compete in womens' events? Really? You're going to have a *lot* of ticked off women if you do that, let me tell you...
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gender is generally considered a separate thing from sex. This article about determining an athletes sex, in which a ladyboy would be considered male, whether they like it or not.
Re:Confusing terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
Gender is not just a linguistic term, it's also a sociological term. If society treats you as a (man|woman), then your gender is (male|female).
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.
No, actually there isn't. You need only to go to any adolescent training area to see that the very top athletes do not come from the ranks of those who have neither inherent strength, agility, and/or flexibility, and yet train with the masters. It would be like saying that anyone can become a nobel prize winning scientist if they simply studied more, or one of the top two or three musicians on an instrument/voice in the world by just practicing at an early age. It's not that easy or we would all be masters of our craft.
Genetics plays a primary role in selection of the top 1e-8 fraction of athletes in the world. I'll agree that without proper training, that'll get you no more than a spot in your local rec league, but without the proper genetic mix you can probably forget about multiple olympic gold medals no matter how hard you train.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we should just create a "freak Olympics" where the rules regarding doping, genetic or mechanical manipulations and other stuff like that is just "go nuts, just don't kill anyone."
Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it true that Chinese girl pass all drug test (Score:5, Insightful)
She beat her own best time by five seconds, which is unheard of in swimming which is the only sport measured to the thousand-of-a-second.
Actually a few top British swimmers made gains of a few seconds during their teenage years. There was another claim about her going faster than the fastest man in the last 50m of the race, but actually so did another British female swimmer in her event. The man in question was so far ahead he didn't need to go top speed to win, so presumably saved some energy for the next race.
As training and technique developers this sort of thing does happen. Look at Bolt, the guy beat the 100m world record without even trying (he was slowing down at the end when we realized he had an unbeatable lead). He is also quite tall, which used to be considered a hindrance in the 100m, but it turned out our understanding of the sport was wrong.
She won, she tested clean for all known doping agents, she has been tested at least four times over the previous year and several times at the Olympics. No need for sour grapes and innuendo.
Wait a second there ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Didn't woman tell us they where equal? And didn't they tell us we should hire them in the same proportion as man, for any job, as they are equally good at it? Including jobs where physical strength might be important? If so, why is it that they don't compete with everyone else?
Let's take the 100 meter event:
From Wikipedia:
"The 10-second barrier is a term used in track and field athletics which refers to the physical and psychological barrier of completing the men's 100 metres sprint in under ten seconds. The achievement was traditionally regarded as the hallmark of a world class sprinter, but its significance has become less important since the late 1990s as an increasing number of runners have surpassed the ten seconds mark.[1]"
Ok, great. Man's 10 fastest times ever goes from 9.58 (record) to 9.84. Woman's 10 fastest ever goes from 10.49 (record) to 10.77.
So, essentially we have two categories in the Olympics: Really fast, and somewhat fast. And the gold medal given in both is equal. Hey, I want equality too. I'm a 28 year old man who smokes 2 packs a day, and I want to compete too. We should create another category for people who can finish the race within 20 seconds. So we'll have: the 9 seconds race, the 10 seconds race, and the 20 seconds race. How about that?
Fuck this kind of equality. I'm all for real equality. Real equality means no special imposed barriers for anyone based solely on gender. Open up the olympics, let man and woman compete in any category freely. That's equality. Creating special slow groups so that woman can win too is not equality, it's Bullshit.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Insightful)
So define that? It will not be easy.
Do you base it on sex organs? Genetic tests, which may not match sex organs? Levels of certain hormones in the blood?
All of these methods have edge cases.
Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender (Score:3, Insightful)
Then why did nature create them?
Nature does not tell you anything, you are a fucking edge case that probably should not exist. What with your upright walking.
If it exists it exists, there is no room for should when it comes to biology.
Re:The answer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now we create a women only category because otherwise they aren't represented
Why do we care if women aren't represented? If they are inferior physically, why should they be represented?
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's precisely the problem at hand. Unless you want to abolish gender segregation in sports (and thus effectively abolish women from most sports, an option which few would support), you have to draw the line. And there is no clear line to draw. Hence the reasons for complexity and debate.
The problem isn't that "it's work to support a small minority". It's that this small minority has an advantage in womens' competitions. So you need to draw the line where to stop this "small minority" from having an unfair advantage in womens' competitions. You *have* to deal with the issue.
Personally, I'm of the view that since most athletes are to some degree or another genetic freaks, that one should err on the side of inclusiveness. You just need to make sure that the line isn't weak enough that gender-straddling individuals are always winning female competitions, or otherwise the point of a female division is ruined.
To reiterate in conclusion: there is no solid line between male and female, you need a line for competitions, you have to set it somewhere, this takes debate, and in the process one should err on the side of inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness.
Re:Wait a second there ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly right. Having seperate Olympic games for women is like having a separate Fields medal for women. No woman has ever been awarded the Fields medal for her work in mathematics. Does that mean we should create a woman's Field's medal?
I don't understand why women don't consider the women's events condescending. In any other circumstance, if you tell a woman "you're good at X, for a woman", she'll be offended. But if you hand her a gold medal while saying the same thing, somehow it's OK.
Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender (Score:5, Insightful)
the only difference from every other woman is that they could not have children since they had no ovaries
That's Nature trying to tell you something. Weird edge cases like that should not exist.
On the contrary, it's "Nature" that produced the described intermediate case, and Nature is never trying to tell us anything. Nature isn't an intelligent creature, and is incapable of having thoughts or purposes, much less communicating them.
There are plenty of species that produce non-reproducing individuals as a normal part of the population. In bees and ants, the overwhelming majority are such sterile, non-reproducing "females". In such species, this is not just normal; it's the basis of their evolutionary success. And note that there's at least one species (the domestic honeybee) that's quite important to us humans. All those little worker bees busy pollinating our crops are non-reproducing somatic females. If you think they're a weird edge case that shouldn't exist, you're asking for a major agricultural disaster. ;-)
Granted, in humans it really is an edge case. But it's really nothing more than a biochemical accident. There's no intelligence or "life force" or whatever trying to tell us anything.
Telling "Nature" that something shouldn't exist is utterly futile. The universe produces what it produces, and doesn't care what you or I think. Punishing such "weird" individuals amounts to punishing innocent victims of random biochemical accidents. Do you really want a society in which such punishment is allowed or encouraged?
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why bring science into this?
The whole reason we have the distinction between male and female competition is because the male body gives an "unfair" advantage mostly by providing heightened levels of testosterone.
If you want to make things simple, just have everyone compete together instead of splitting men and women. If you want to split up men and women, then we need a way to determine the difference between men and women and categorize people correctly.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except categories in sports are defined by sex not gender so what they believe to be does not matter when it comes to decide in which category they can compete.
Not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between sex and gender. It can be confusing because "gender" now means what we used to call "sex". You have likely read books written before 1950 in which characters use expressions such as "a member of my sex", "the battle of the sexes". The statement "I want to talk about sex." would likely have been understood to mean "I want to talk about the social implications of being male and female."
I have here a dictionary written in 1955 which under "sex" gives the meaning of maleness or femaleness and "the attraction of one sex to the other". It doesn't even meantion that it could mean the sex act. This meaning appears to have become popular in the 1960's. With sex now being a word that made small boys titter, those who wanted to talk about the social implications of sex (maleness or famaleness) borrowed the term from grammar. It would be too embarrasing to say that one was taking "Sex Studies" in college, so they called it "Gender Studies".
Having thought about the above, you think you are saying that the problem is deciding who is female biologically as opposed to who can function as a female in society. The problem is that a small but significant part of the population displays testable physical characterisics of both sexes. For example, there are persons who are genetically male, but have female bodies. The IOC is thrashing around trying to find a definition of a female body.
I think the reason they have dropped testing of all athelets who claim to be female is that once you select women with strong, athletic bodies, you increase the likelihood that some measure of their bodies will be closer to that of male bodies. If you then disqualify them as "technically male", you create a scandal and humiliate them. If, when her picture appears in news stories, the public perceives her as being a member of the female sex, you then look ridiculous as well.
On the other hand, if you test no one, soon the women's division of sports requiring strength will be filled with men without beards and underdeveloped genitals.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:4, Insightful)
There really isn't a way to have men and women compete together in most sports.
One of my pet peeves about feminists is that they want to claim that this is possible, but it simply isn't. Men are much more adapted to hunting, fighting, and running than women, women have evolved in a more sedentary role and as such are built for that role.
Certain sports that involve much more raw intellect women could compete on, but if it significantly involves a physical challenge, forget about it.
There are a lot of female soldiers in the US and Canadian military that have spoken out about this as well. Significantly in the Canadian military back when they were talking about lowering the physical requirements bar for more women to get in the women already in the military were among the loudest protesters. The fact of the matter is a 5'4"(Average height) 110lb(average fit weight) soaking wet woman has near-zero chance of being able to carry her 5'9" (average male height) 180lb(average fit male weight) off the battlefield or help him in a significant way beyond providing fire support and basic emergency triage.
Beyond that because men get more out of adrenaline plus get a boatload more testosterone and muscle mass we shoot straighter, faster, and more often than female counterparts. You have to get into the top 20% of women to begin competing with the barely-average man, purely because of biological differences. Wanting it to be different doesn't make it different.
None of this changed the decision for the Canadian military of course. Men have to pass a physical that is over twice as difficult just to get in now, and have to pass more stringent regulations in Boot Camp. A lot of the women who go through the program complain about this afterwards significantly. If they're not good enough, they shouldn't be there, period. Regardless of gender.
I personally know a set of Native-Descent sisters who are currently both high-ranking officers purely because of minority quotas within the Canadian military. One of them can't even fucking pass the sight qualifications and the military paid for eye surgery for her to TRY to get her to pass it and she still failed then gave her a pass anyways.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not let the non XX or XY folks compete in one or the other category?
Why exclude people at all?
This is not PC bullshit this is basic biology. These people are already genetic freaks for being able to what they do, why exclude those that also have other genetic anomalies?
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender (Score:5, Insightful)
In the cases of Ants and Bees, the difference between a Breeding female (queen) and a worker female (drone) is not genetic, it is environmental.
Nonsense. It's completely genetic. The suppression of the workers' reproductive system is triggered by pheromones produced by the queen, and the queen contains genes that control this production. The workers' reaction to the pheromones is controlled by their genes. Actually, the genes are shared by the queen and worker, whose caste is determined by the activation of other genes. The entire setup is determined by the colony's shared genes, not by anything in the environment.
Treating the queen an workers as independent creatures and treating the reproductive pheromones as "environmental" shows a severe misunderstanding of the concept of "environment". Honeybees were one of the primary species that led biologists to develop the concept of a colonial "super-organism", treating bee and ant colonies as a single "individual" for many purposes. There are a lot of problems and open questions with such concepts, but it's clear that treating interactions between different members of a Hymenoptera colony as "external" is simply wrong. You can only make sense of such social creatures by treating the colony as a third "level" between the individual and the environment. The colony's properties are in many respects more similar to our bodies' internal properties than they are to the colony's environment.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:2, Insightful)
As a "real" woman, I ask that you not speak for me. Rather, I demand it. Any woman who has committed herself to the years of rigorous effort required to pass as female, much less actually opted for surgery, is going to be taking so much estrogen and so many androgen blockers that we 'real' women will mop the freakin' floor with her unless she was already a gifted athlete in her prior life. And if she was, she deserves the right to compete and demonstrate that against her peers.