Sex Typing for Sport

Abstract

Sex Typing for Sport Alice Dreger (bio) In January, the International Olympic Committee sponsored a meeting of medical professionals in Miami aimed at revising the "gender verification" policies of the IOC and the International Association of Athletics Federations. These are the policies that come into play when someone questions whether a particular athlete should be allowed to compete as a woman. The Miami meeting failed to produce any clear consensus and only seemed to create confusion about what is now considered fair or allowable so far as sports gender divisions go.1 It's obvious that more policy meetings are going to have to happen, with more definitive outcomes. This policy revision is happening in the wake of the fiasco surrounding the young South African runner Caster Semenya, who, after blasting past competitors in Berlin last August, had her sex called into question on the international stage. Semenya's story demonstrates that a clear policy that allows for definitive, consistent, private, precompetition rulings is necessary not only to clarify what's going to count as fair in gender-divided sports, but also to protect individual athletes at risk for challenges.2 Semenya has essentially gone into hiding following her hellish media-circus experience. (Imagine finding out, by watching TV reports about yourself, that the flurry of medical exams you recently had was aimed at determining your "real" sex, as Semenya apparently did.3) Santhi Soundarajan, another runner, even attempted suicide after she "failed" a "gender test" and was stripped of her 2006 Asian games medal.4 At this point, not having a policy that allows athletes to know privately, in advance, if they will be disqualified as women is like asking bobsledders to head down the track without helmets: it's downright dangerous. Before we get into the details of why the IOC and the IAAF continue to have a tough task before them, we need to clarify the difference between sex and gender. "Sex" refers to the conglomeration of anatomical and physiological features that differ between typical females and males. Sex is about what your body includes. "Gender," by contrast, is about who you are. "Gender identity" refers specifically to your self identity, and "gender role" refers to your social identity. In practice, athletes show up with genders—as men or as women—and sex becomes an issue only if (a) an athlete competing as a woman is suspected of being "really" male or (b) an athlete became a transsexual after puberty, using medical technologies to "switch" from a male-type anatomy to a more female type, or vice versa. Typically, (a) happens because an athlete was born with a disorder of sex development (DSD, sometimes called intersex, and formerly called hermaphroditisms) and (b) occurs when an athlete is transgender. The standing IOC and IAAF policies on disorders of sexual development and transgender necessarily overlap somewhat, but as we'll see, they probably should overlap more, to be fairer.5 Gender division in sports isn't just a quaint tradition. Gender division allows many girls and women a real shot at play in sports in which they otherwise could not compete. Gender division also probably adds a degree of pleasure for many amateur and professional athletes, in that it provides "men's only" and "women's only" spaces that many may enjoy. (Restriction brings privilege, and privilege brings pleasure.) Gender divisions can also benefit fans; for example, children and adults get to see powerful women more often than they otherwise would, and fans can divide themselves into the types who enjoy the differing atmospheres of, say, men's or women's college basketball games. But sometimes an individual athlete's atypical sex history forces us to ask about the basis of gender divisions. Obviously gender isn't really the issue in cases like Semenya's; Semenya was raised a girl and showed up in Berlin as a woman, but that stable gender history wasn't considered good enough reason to let her just take her medal and go home happy. The suspicion was about her sex. The fairness issue at play here, of course, is that, on average, male bodies come with competitive advantages in sports [End Page 22...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.