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."
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
XX = Woman XY = Man
Gender is not what they want to test for, it is a PROXY for what they want to test for.
This is not a technology problem, and it's not even about genitalia.
It's about a definition of fairness, and that's harder to elaborate.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some sports are all about genetic abnormalities. Bolt's genetic material must be quite unusual for him to go that fast.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, you must also understand that some (most? I'm not that clear on the subject) don't believe to be women. They don't believe to be men either. They believe they're 'third' gender.
And they should have the right to be.
Re:Why seperate competions by gender anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason is that, at least in theory, the Olympic games are about the effort and discipline it takes to get to the elite level than about genetics. Throwing out the hard work of women because they are biologically different(most specifically this relates to the structure of their hips, though other factors certainly play a part) doesn't fit that spirit.
Now you can argue that the Olympics are won largely by genetic freaks, and there's no Olympics for the "normals", but that's really rather beside the point, because the genetics won't give you the whole puzzle. It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.
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. The fact that an entire army of genetically superior super people could probably be defeated by a cripple with a brain and a chemistry lab doesn't fit into the world view of the kind of people who started this crap.
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Say you had separate a basketball event for people under 6 feet tall.
Than anyone in that event who seemed to have excess height would need to be carefully tested.
As it is we have separate events for men and women.
So any woman who gets too close to the line defining male needs to be carefully tested.
And make no mistake, you need to draw that line somewhere, and where ever you draw it there are going to be people who straddle it.
Obfix: get rid of gender categories (Score:5, Interesting)
The only catch all, fool proof and totally fair fix for this is the simplest of all: get rid of men's and women's events, and let both compete in the same event. Maybe add performance based tiers instead, so the very best women will mostly compete with guys (and lose, because, you know, testosterone really does work) and the second tier guys will be mostly competing against the best women (and win, again the testosterone thing). Ok, in most sports, women wouldn't get to compete at the highest level any more, but it would be completely fair towards the non-standard gender community!
Re:How hard can it be? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some sports are all about genetic abnormalities. Bolt's genetic material must be quite unusual for him to go that fast.
This is a rather fatalistic misconception about talent. Bolt is as fast as he is, not because of some lucky draw in the gene pool, but because of proper training and starting at a young age. He wasn't born with his perfect technique, he got that through training. Of course you have to be healthy and have a bit of luck as well, and the right mix of fast and slow twitch muscles for your sport, but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.
Another American has accused her of cheating (Score:4, Interesting)
http://news.discovery.com/adventure/ye-shiwen-doping-scandal-olympic-swimming-120801.html [discovery.com]
Jonathan Dugas, adjunct professor of exercise physiology at Loyola University in Chicago, has openly doubt the Chinese girl's achievement being "natural"
And this is what Mr. Dugas has said:
"âoeThe differences in the athletes at that level are very small,â Dugas said. âoeTo suggest she was much slower and then sped up so much at the end, it goes against everything that we know about how athletes pace themselves at that level.â
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who don't consider themselves to be either would be lumped into a category like "genderqueer" rather than "transsexual". It's interesting how culture plays into gender identity and sexuality, too. Each society has different "bins", categories people can fall into, and you only get a sort of revolution, a breaking of the norms, when the limits of said categories are too confining for enough of the people in the society. The standard of course, at a minimum, is straight male and straight female. But many societies have had more. Two examples among thousands:
1) Historic (and to a very tiny degree, modern) Albania had the "sworn virgins". These were people born as woman who would swear an oath to never sleep with a man. They then would live in men's clothing, could marry women, had men's property rights, and so forth; they were legally treated as men. There was no reverse situation. The concept was created to deal with families who only had female heirs, and the person would often swear at a young age, but some people would swear later in life, so there's some mix between "obligation" and "wanting" in the concept.
2) The Samoan Fa'afafine is people who are anatomically male but live as women and are fully treated as women by society. It's so accepted that it's rare for parents to try to discourage an anatomically male child from living as a Fa'afafine. It is a much more informal concept.
When you look at societies like that, you find that a lot of people living as the third gender identify specifically as the third gender. Some, however, do not, but said "third gender" is the closest that's accepted in their society to how they feel - for example, a person who is simply gay, or simply transsexual but not attracted to members of the same anatomic sex, is put in a bind. In some cases, being seen specifically as a member of the opposite anatomic sex, rather than a third gender, is very important to the person. And of course, rarely in societies do you see matching pairs of concepts - there may be an accepted third gender for anatomic males or anatomic females without an equivalent for the other.
A really extreme example of people being forced into specific categories from modern society can be found in modern Iran. Transsexuality is accepted in Iran - not to a great degree (although to a surprising degree) among the populace, but fully accepted within law (actually, it's handled better in Iranian law than in most western nations). Homosexuality, however, is punishable by death. So there can be significant pressure for gay individuals to physically alter their sex.
Passing drug tests != competing clean (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it true that the Chinese girl has passed all the drug testing? Is it true that she is clean?
You can pass all the drug tests and still have doped. Marion Jones is an admitted doper who never tested positive. Drug tests are rather specific in what they test for and what they can find. The dopers are typically a step ahead of the tests to catch them. Saying an athlete is clean and saying they passed all their drug tests are completely different statements. You cannot conclusively prove that an athlete is competing clean - that would be trying to prove a negative. You can say that an athlete has not failed specific drug tests but that tests only a limited number of possible doping methodologies.
Re:Obfix: get rid of gender categories (Score:2, Interesting)
The only catch all, fool proof and totally fair fix for this is the simplest of all: get rid of men's and women's events, and let both compete
That has serious problems....
better idea... If it's going to be about sex, let's make it about sex.
If you can or once could produce viable sperm (and no other genetic material) that can fertilize an ovum = Olympic Man
If you can or once could produce a viable ovum (and no other genetic material) that can be fertilized = Olympic Woman
Then do not label but still disqualify everyone else. After all, if Olympians can't contribute to the human gene pool (or haven't already) what good are they even if they are the best at what they do? The Olympics is about human excellence, not evolutionary or mutant excellence.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Interesting)
Try Lydia Fairchild she gave birth to three children that were hers biologically, but blood tests showed she was unrelated to ... she is a Human Chimera and has two sets of DNA and chromosomes
It is therefore possible that the two sets could be different genders... and the answer could really be both ...
Re:Intersex is not the same as gay or transgender (Score:4, Interesting)
Why did nature create them?
Well it turns out in nature families with a gay relative are more successful in times of stress. The non-child bearing additional adult contributes to the success of the family without adding the weight of another child to feed. In colloquial terms, the gay uncle brings food to the family when they are starving, when he wouldn't do that if he had his own kids.
There are studies on this, if you go looking for them.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing you haven't met many transsexuals if you think they tend to live to gender stereotypes any more than other members of the target sex. The standard joke about how to tell the difference between a MTF-crossdresser and a trans woman is that when the crossdresser gets home from work, he takes off his pants and put on a dress. When the transsexual gets home from work, she takes off her dress and puts on a pair of pants.
It's easy to say that something is just a societal construct, but everyone in this world interacts with societal constructs and has elements of their identity impacted by them and has it change how they interact with others. Try going into a party and saying that you work as a pizza deliveryman when they ask what you do for a living, then go into a different party and say you're an investment banker, and judge the reactions in how you're treated. There's whole social constructs built even around concepts like "pizza deliveryman" and "investment banker", let alone something as fundamental as gender.
Beyond that, there's very good evidence that transsexualism is not simply a "social construct", nor is gendered behavior in general. There are both structural and functional differences in male and female brains, and in some very specific regards, transsexual brains tend to more closely match those of the target sex (both in functional and structural exams) than the anatomic sex.
Re:Is that a man or a woman? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Of course it's possible. The feminists might be a bit pissed off that the women keep losing, because they aren't as strong or as fast, but that doesn't stop them from competing.
Separate competitions for different genders is simple sexism. Gender testing wouldn't be necessary if they just held one race for all-comers and let the fastest person win, irrespective of gender.