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.