err, what?

[cellio]

The winner of a major women's footrace is being required to prove her gender. Err, what? But it gets weirder -- tests are being done and it will take some days or weeks to get the results.

The back-story is that the woman (age 18) beat her previous record by a noticeable margin and has a masculine build. So just to make sure, somebody wants to check. There's a rather straightforward way to do that, but that's not what they're doing so they must not believe it would answer the question. So what's going on -- do they suspect that a teenage athlete might have had major surgery in order to win a race?

This got me thinking about gender and sports more broadly. It's common to have men's and women's divisions, presumably out of a belief that men and women are sufficiently different that it's not fair to make them compete. Does this mean that the division is intended to be by birth status, that a transsexual person would compete in the "wrong" (by appearance) category? In which category does a hermaphrodite compete? When these kinds of sporting events were being invented these would have been deemed frivolous questions, but I imagine that some people have had to wrestle with these issues by now.

Is gender segregation the best way to achieve balance among entrants? I would think that, all other factors being equal, in a race a woman who's a foot taller than me would have much more of an advantage over me than a man of my height does (longer stride). Isn't it time for the short-person division? (Ok, now I'm being frivolous...)

Comments

[cellio]

When I mentioned this to Dani he suggested that they might be looking for a XXY. I hadn't thought of that.

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what they're looking for.

Long discussion about this case, and other historical examples like it, over at Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com/84300/Caster-Semenya-and-sex-varification-controversies).

Female atheletes have been disqualified from international competition before, based not on external genital appearance, but instead based on their chromosomes. This is a great recap of the issues involved (http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/08/caster-semenya-male-or-female.html) and why its not really the "straightforward" way you're thinking of, it is enlightening.

[cellio]

Thanks for the links!

That was very educational. I had no idea it was that complicated.

[fauxklore]

There is, in general, a good reason for mens and women's divisions in sports on biological grounds. There are several factors in how people built muscle and, of course, there is considerable overlap between the sexes, but there are few women who could even approach the top part of the bell curve for men. (Women do have an advantage in flexibility, of course.) It's also quite dangerous for women to have body fat lower than about 18-20%, while men can get down to around 9-10% safely. Throw in things like women having wider hips, which can necessitate different equipment - skis are best designed in a gendered manner, as are bicycles and you can start getting into various slippery questions of fairness.

Of course, there are some sports where sex makes no difference, e.g. equestrian events, dog sledding, and probably archery and riflery, We need more research to determine which those are.

The thorny question is how we define sex. There are a lot of possible intersex conditions, not just XXY, that they could be looking for. I remember an article on this in Ms. around 1980ish, in the context of the allegations about East German swimmers.

What I do find offensive is that the battery of tests they are planning to use includes psychological tests.

[cellio]

Psychological testing? I hadn't heard that, and I agree that that's offensive. Are they fishing for self-identity? If they wouldn't let a genetic male run in the women's division because he identified female, then the reverse, if present, would be irrelevant. So either they don't think so or they're looking for something else that I can't think of. (I have no relevant qualifications, of course -- not a psychologist, not an athlete, not a sports fan.)

Thanks for the other comments. (It occurs to me belatedly that I could partially test my hypothesis about other differences mattering as much, if I sought out a large amount of data from past events. It wouldn't be perfect, as we're likely to only have gender, run time, and perhaps age. But it might be interesting to know what the distributions for men's and women's divisions look like plotted on the same axes.)

[fauxklore]

I'm not convinced that the source in which I read that it will include psychological testing is a reliable one. My experience with the South African press is that fact checking is not, in general, a strong point.

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

"Of course, there are some sports where sex makes no difference, e.g. equestrian events"

There's a local rodeo that always has a small trophy for the best woman's score as well as the overall winner. One year, a woman took best overall. They awarded the small trophy for the best man's score. The announcer even said into the mike, "don't worry about what it says on the brass, we'll get that fixed in a few days." :)

It seems someone got a really great action pic of her whipping around the barrels so fast that she and the horse were at a 45* angle to the ground. She gave permission for retail use, provided a given percentage of profits went to a specific woman's clinic. The caption that was printed under the picture read, "You WISH you could ride like a girl!" Coffee mugs, T-shirts, sweatshirts, mouse pads, it was nearly a year before anything with that photo stayed in stock!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

As far as "short people division" goes: wrestling and boxing go by weight classes, so there is precident for basic body size as a determiner.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, women's boxing (http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/olympics_add_womens_boxing_but_restricts_weight_classes) has been voted in for the 2012 Olympics, but with only 3 weight classes, which are not contiguous.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

When these kinds of sporting events were being invented these would have been deemed frivolous questions,

I dunno. The Greek Olympics were not only closed to women as competitors, but as attendees, weren't they?

And the Talmud discusses all sorts of eligibility issues for androgynosim, tumtumim, and others who do not fit into the neat categories of "male" and "female." So clearly thousands of years ago people were grappling with these problems. [I *love* it when modern queer theorists insist that they're the first to formally recognize transgender categories.]

It's just that now we have more tests. Two thousand years ago it was all based on which set(s) of genitalia a person presented externally. Now we know about XXY individuals, and (according to today's Times) individuals who who have a disorder where (if I understand the article correctly) their XX chromosomes express as XY.

but I imagine that some people have had to wrestle with these issues by now.

Pun not intended, I'm sure.

[cellio]

Thanks for the talmudic info.

(I wasn't really thinking about the ancient Olympics when I talked about these types of events; I was thinking about gender-segregated, as opposed to gender-barred, events.)

Pun not intended, I'm sure.

Naturally.