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]

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.