Quick Hit: The Sex Test
If you missed the New York Times op-ed this last weekend on the "sex test" at the Olympics game, be sure to read it here. Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby, analyzes the Olympic history of testing whether athletes were "legitimately" female. The Olympic committee's struggle to define female--by chromosome? by secondary sex characteristics? by genitalia?--is a fascinating microcosm of our larger societal struggle. Boylan writes:
Maybe...Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity, and make peace with a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.
That, if you ask me, would be a good thing, not just for Olympians, but for us all.
Beautifully, beautifully put.
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I completely agree. and they should never base a person on 'femaleness' or 'maleness' on their apperance. that just wrong.
In many sports, men still outperform women. This sex test seems to be more about keeping a man from presenting himself as a woman in order to win a competition that he couldn't win if he were competing with other men. Am I missing something?
I'd like to hear what the female atheletes think about this. I knew one Olympian, and she was in favor of testing.
For more on this debate, check out my post about the olympics and gender/sex testing.
If they're asking people to drop trew in front of a testing committee, then obviously that's degrading and invasive. But, as I understand it, it's just a clinical DNA test based on cheek scrapings.
Given the fact that it can be hard to assess gender by appearance alone, the alternative would be to get rid of "male" and "female" events, and just have everyone compete together. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?
The problem with these tests is that not all "legitimate" women fit into the narrow definitions. Some women have XXY chromosomes. I think there was also a woman turned away for having and "over-sized" clitoris, which was considered to be highly suspect. The article also mentioned intersex and trans participants. Where do they fit in?
But I find it generally offensive that women have to be put through these incredibly invasive tests, when the men don't have to have any to prove that they are, in fact, men. It assumes that all men will naturally surpass women. So any star female athlete is suspected as being a man in drag simply for being too good. And why would a woman pose as a man to compete?! Why, she'd just get her ass kicked! (Which is funny that the one man mentioned in the article who posed as a woman, actually lost!)
Yeah I think this protects all athletes. Depending on the sport, men or women may have a competitive advantage just based on biology. Take track. The world record in the women's 400-meter sprint is 47.6 seconds. That's a time your better high school boy sprinters can beat. Literally as many as 10% of high school boy sprinters rival that time. Even if some guy identifies himself as female, having him compete in a woman's event as a woman would give him an unfair advantage. And with the widespread doping abuse we've seen, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guy try it.
For more on this, see my post over at girlwithpen: http://girlwithpen.blogspot.com/2008/08/xxxy-xxoo.html
Another thought: That "ambiguity" that Courtney quotes the article as thoughtfully touting might be elaborated upon as flexibility of perception--not just identity. So...with an op-ed like this, and the conversations it triggers, do we now have the opportunity to be flexible enough to recognize that sometimes and in some ways bodies matter--and sometimes they don't?