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.

[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.

[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.

[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.