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she blinded me with science

IAAF Gender Testing Policy Denounced As Bad Science And Discrimination by Bioethics Panel

by Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez | 2:23 pm, June 14th, 2012


In 2009, South African athlete Caster Semenya won gold in the women’s 800m at the World Athletics Championships. With barely enough time to bask in her achievement, Semenya was thereafter subjected to a publicly humiliating “gender test” and forced to withdraw from the rest of the competition. Now, a Stanford bioethics panel is contesting this practice, citing it as an unnecessary, poor application of the science of hormones.

Semenya was essentially turned into a spectacle because she is an intersex person, a term that denotes a category of conditions that result in uncommon combinations of physical sex characteristics. In her case, her medal was contested because she does not have ovaries, she has internal testes, and consequently produces a larger amount of testosterone than most women.

In light of her testosterone levels, and the fact that she had won the race, the International Association of Athletics Federations instituted a policy that held that women with unusually high levels of testosterone would be banned from competition unless they lowered their hormone levels via surgery or drugs. This policy was based on the assumption that “androgenic hormones (such as testosterone and dihydrotestosterone) are the primary components of biologic athletic advantage.” The IAAF planned to instate these regulations as early as this year’s London Olympics.

However, a panel of scientists, sports experts, and bioethicists from the Stanford Center for Biomedical Research has recently stepped up to challenge this policy and the entire notion that higher levels of testosterone result in a fundamental physical advantage in sports, releasing a critique of the policy today in the American Journal for Bioethics.

In addition to the gender test being a gross invasion of privacy, it is fundamentally flawed in that there is no simple link between testosterone and athletic advantage. According to Rebecca Jordan-Young, ”individuals have dramatically different responses to the same amounts of testosterone, and it is just one element in a complex neuroendrocrine feedback system.” The panel argues that athletic performance is not wholly decided by hormone levels, and that there are a variety of other biological variations that could influence performance that they are not testing for, including a “rare mitochondrial variations that give them extraordinary aerobic capacity” and “acromegaly, a hormonal condition that results in exceptionally large hands and feet.”

These conditions likely aren’t tested for, however, because they aren’t tied up with a rigidly enforced sex and gender binary, where women and men fit into discrete categories with appropriate levels of certain hormones (regardless of the fact that “it’s not known what typical testosterone levels even are for elite female athletes.”) As Monica Roberts on TransGriot points out, “if it coincides with what the ‘experts’ consider as ‘too rapid’ athletic performance for a woman, she may find herself being subjected to a battery of embarrassing and invasive tests just to prove to cynical skeptics that she’s ‘woman enough’ to compete in elite sports with other women.” As such, “gender testing” functions less as an instrument to “level the playing field” for women and more as a tool to police the gender of women athletes, women who are often denigrated for being “too manly.”

The panel recommends that the IAAF end gender testing entirely, citing both the psychological impact that such discrimination has on women athletes who undergo the test, and the fact that it is a policy wholly formulated upon misused science and a threat of cheating that has never proved to be a significant problem.

(via I09.)

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  • http://twitter.com/bichu_ Emilie Bichu

    As a trans woman I’m happy regulations like this are being challenged.  No one deserves to be told they aren’t man or woman enough to belong.

  • Sharmie Taffe-Fletcher

    this information makes me happy dance. i knew there was something fucked up about this whole “gender test” thing.

  • Terence Ng

    In complete agreement. The idea that intersex people should be forced to change who they are through surgery and hormones in order to compete in sports is completely asinine. You’d think people would make all these suggestions and rules and then step back at some point and realize that maybe it’s the ridiculous need to fit everyone into a gender binary that’s the problem, and not intersex people.

  • Anonymous

    easy way to solve this, get rid of the gender segragation in sports

  • http://twitter.com/Nyoka_ Nyoka

    Difference in hormones should be banned! Also, difference in income, training, coaches, equipment, upbringing, diet, and everything else that affect physical performance. Riiight.

  • Bryan Gillis

    The risk with doing that is that women’s presence in sports would decline if there aren’t female-only variants. I’m not sure that it actually would, but I suspect that even if we assume that there’s no biological cause for a difference between the performance of men and women, we’d still have to contend with social factors. Sports is seen as primarily a male thing in almost every country (and I’m only saying “almost” because I don’t actually know of any exceptions, but can’t rule them out). This would lead to boys and men training and practicing more than girls and women, which would lead to greater representation. This greater representation would further reinforce the notion that sports is for men.

    However, if we have sports segregated by gender, this affords a better chance that women can compete at high levels. They could then act as role models for younger girls, and hopefully help to even things out over time.

    But then this leads to a problem of how to handle cases that don’t fit into the male-female binary. Even if you try to as liberal as possible, and allow people to compete as whatever they identify as, there still are people out there who don’t identify as either male or female. Perhaps you could let them choose to participate in whichever division they choose, though. It could be that in the end, the best solution might be to have no enforcement whatsoever in who participates in which division.

    And this doesn’t even get into the complications that biological trends between genders causes.

  • http://oaktree.dreamwidth.org/ oaktree

    Yay!

  • Anonymous

    Ideally perhaps the best way to segregate sports would be based on size/frame. Even though genders tend to have a certain build to them there’s still a lot of variation from man to man and woman to woman so a “medium” and “large” division, for example, that is gender blind could possibly work. Of course this is an ideal so putting something like this into practice would be far less practical and simple than it sounds. There are so many factors involved as you’ve mentioned.

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  • Adam R. Charpentier

    I agree that no one should be forced to change who they were born as in order to participate, however, since the term I’m using used is “intersex,” not precisely biological male or female, why not an abandonment of the segregated sexes altogether?

  • Vixen Butler

    The IAAF planned to instate these regulations as early as this year’s London Olympics.

    http://www.allaboutdiet.com/500-calorie-diet-plan/
     

  • http://twitter.com/Super_Widget Joanna

    Yeah…they do something like that in wrestling sure.

  • Angelina Elway

    Now, a Stanford bioethics panel is contesting this practice, citing it
    as an unnecessary, poor application of the science of hormones.

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  • Anonymous

    The problem, of course, is that there is no such thing as a definition of “woman” or “man” outside of our subjective perception of others (and ourselves).  Attempting to define such a category biologically when engaging only the already-genetic-anomalies that are elite athletes is an exercise in futility. 

  • Anonymous

    Okay, this is ridiculous. Of course she has a unfair advantage, just as a woman with an unusually tiny heart or lungs would have an unfair disadvantage. While I’m opposed to the suggestion that similar intersex individuals should take hormones for the sake of participating in sports rather than for the sake of their own health, I don’t think it is appropriate to consider a woman with testicles completely comparable to biologically typical women. She is not less or more, she is different, and it is not fair to judge her to the same standards or to bump other women down because they were born with ovaries.

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