Gender verification in sports (also known as sex verification, or loosely as gender determination or a sex test) is the issue of verifying the eligibility of an athlete to compete in a sporting event that is limited to a single sex. 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 an intersexed person competed as a woman. Sex testing began at the 1966 European Athletics 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 Winter Games in Grenoble. While it arose primarily from the Olympic Games, gender verification affects any sporting event. However, it most often becomes an issue in elite international competition.
While it would seem a simple case of checking for XX vs. XY chromosomes to determine whether an athlete is a woman or a man, it is not that simple. Fetuses start out as undifferentiated, and the Y chromosome turns on a variety of hormones that differentiate the baby as a male. Sometimes this does not occur, and XX people with two X chromosomes can develop hormonally as a male, and XY people with an X and a Y can develop hormonally as a female.[2]
Contents |
For a period of time these tests were mandatory for female athletes. A New York Times article suggests it was due to fears that male athletes would pose as female athletes and have an unfair advantage over their competitors.
Nowadays, gender verification tests typically involve evaluation by gynecologists, endocrinologists, psychologists, and internal medicine specialists.
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 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.[3]
The practice has come under fire from those who feel that the testing is humiliating, socially insensitive, and not entirely accurate or effective. The testing is especially difficult and problematic in the case of people who could be considered intersexual. Genetic differences can allow a person to have a male genetic make-up and female anatomy or body chemistry.
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." [4]
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 subjected to Gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up was rarely available for athletes "failing" the test, which often was performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up was crucial because the subjects were not male impostors, but intersexed individuals." [4]
Sex testing has been done as recently as the Atlanta Olympic games in 1996, but is no longer practised, 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." In individual cases the IOC stills holds on to the right to test on gender. [5]
New rules permit transsexual athletes to compete in the Olympics after having completed sex reassignment surgery, being legally recognized as a member of the sex they wish to compete as, and having undergone two years of hormonal therapy (unless they transitioned before puberty).[6] These controversies continue with the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing.[7]
The International Association of Athletics Federations ceased sex screening for all athletes in 1992, [8] but retains the option of assessing the sex of a participant should suspicions arise. This was invoked most recently in August 2009 with the mandated testing of South African athlete Caster Semenya. [9]
The Olympic Council of Asia continues the practice.