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

[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!