Gender in the Olympics: The NYT

This morning's New York Times has a fascinating piece today about gender in the Olympics. You know they test sometimes to make sure men don't compete as women, that's pretty easy to understand and goes back to the sixties, when it was believed that Communist countries were sending guys into the women's competition.

But when you look at it very closely, it turns out not to be actually possible to crisply classify individuals into one of two bins, into 100% male and 100% female. There are different measures and they give different results. In fact, the Olympics don't have a rule against transgender athletes competing, under certain conditions, it must be so-many years since their surgery and they must take such-and-such hormones.

I am tempting to copy and paste this whole thing, but it's so long. Well, it could be worse, I guess, I could have posted one my Sunday morning brain-dumps. I'll post some sections of it. This was written by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender English professor and much-published writer.

First, I skip the catchy introduction...

On the surface, it seems reasonable for there to be some sort of system by which Olympians can be certain that female medalists really are female. The problem is that China’s tests are likely to produce the wrong answers, because they measure maleness and femaleness by the wrong yardsticks, and in the process ruin the lives of the innocent.

It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles. People can be forgiven for wanting to live in a world as simple as this, a place in which something as basic as gender didn’t shift unsettlingly beneath our feet.

But gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than afraid of it.

At the original Olympic Games, no gender testing was considered necessary. Back in 776 B.C., the Games were for men only, and they were conducted in the nude (with female spectators prohibited).

The modern era of gender testing began in 1968, at the Games in Mexico City, when it was believed that Communist countries in Eastern Europe were using male athletes in women’s competitions. (The truth was that some of the Eastern European athletes had been on a regimen of testosterone and steroids, giving them the physiques of young Arnold Schwarzeneggers.)

Over the past 40 years, dozens of female athletes tested in this manner have tested “positively” for maleness. That’s because these tests don’t measure “maleness” or “femaleness.” They measure — and not always reliably — the presence of a Y chromosome, or Y chromosomal material, which no small number of females have.

The condition, known as androgen insensitivity, occurs in about 1 in 20,000 individuals. Basically, a woman may have a Y chromosome, but her body does not respond to the genetic information that it contains. Some women with androgen insensitivity live their lives unaware that they have it. By any measure, though (except the measure of the Olympic test), they are women.

In 1996, eight female athletes at the Atlanta Games tested positively. Seven of these women were found to have some degree of androgen insensitivity, and one an enzyme defect. All were subsequently allowed to return to competition. The XY Games

In our county, a large part of the uproar over the new gender identity nondiscrimination bill comes from the implication that transgender women are "really" men in dresses. I think it's perfect to see how this question is addressed in the Olympics, where it is strictly necessary to make sure there are no "men in the women's locker-room," where it would be unfair to let men compete as women. A lot rides on the Olympics, there's a lot of hard work and money involved, and you can see these rules are important.

Skipping a little bit ...

You might think that gender testing at the Olympics is conducted to weed out transsexual women, who might be perceived to have some sort of physical advantage over natal females. Yet this is not the case. Since 2004, the International Olympic Committee has allowed transsexuals to compete as long as they have had sex-reassignment surgery and have gone through a minimum of two years of post-operative hormone replacement therapy. (As for the advantages that people born male supposedly have in competing against people born female, the combination of surgery and hormones appears to eliminate it entirely. Studies show that postoperative transsexual women perform at or near the baseline for female athletes in general.)

In the four years since the ruling, there have been no transsexuals — or at least no athletes who are open about it — in Olympic competition. But this year, Kristen Worley, a Canadian cyclist, came close to qualifying. If transgender athletes are now allowed to compete officially, and if gender testing has been shown frequently to render false results, then what exactly are the Chinese authorities testing for?

The Olympic hosts seem to want to impose a binary order upon the messy continuum of gender. They are searching for concreteness and certainty in a world that contains neither.

Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.

For most of us, the test proposed by "Doctor J" at the CRW blog would work: most people can just look down in the shower and know all they need to know about their gender identity. But that doesn't work for everybody, there is some complicated stuff going on with the chromosomes, the hormones, the whole body is involved here as sex and gender identity are not as tightly linked as we tend to think.

So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?

The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person’s gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

How do we test for the gender of the heart, then? How do we avoid out-and-out frauds, like Hermann Ratjen, who said he was forced by the Nazis to compete as “Dora” in the 1936 high jump? (He lost, finishing fourth.)

A quick look at the reality of an athlete’s life ought to settle the question. Ratjen was male not because of what was in his genes, but because of who he was. He returned to his life as Hermann after the Berlin Games. “For three years I lived the life of a girl,” he said in 1957. “It was most dull.”

It’s hard to imagine a case like Ratjen’s recurring today, but if it did and he slipped through the cracks, then so be it. Surely policy for the Olympics — and civilization — shouldn’t be based on one improbable stunt perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

Nor should our county's law be affected by one improbable stunt perpetrated by the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever, who sent a man in a dress into the women's showers at a local gym, hoping to attract media attention.

Which brings us back to Stella Walsh [mentioned earlier in the story, a female Olympian who, after her death, was discovered to have male sex organs]. While the autopsy revealed that she had male sex organs, a chromosome test ordered by the coroner was more ambiguous. She may well have had androgen insensitivity or some other intersex condition. More important, she spent the whole of her life as a woman. She should be celebrated for her accomplishments as an athlete, not turned into an asterisk because of a condition beyond her control.

The triumphant fact of a life lived as a woman made Walsh female, and the inexact measurements performed by strangers cannot render her life untrue.

Maybe this means that 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.

It sounds like the Olympic committee did learn to live with the ambiguity. It's hard to tell here how much of this year's absolutism is coming from the international committee and how much is coming from the Chinese hosts.

As grown-ups, we have to learn to live with the ambiguity here in Montgomery County. It usually works to put people into one of two boxes, you can tattoo an "M" or "F" on most people's foreheads and that will work. But it's just more complicated than that in some cases. Some people aren't what they look like. And those people need to be treated with respect, if they hail a cab the cab ought to stop, if they have to pee they ought to be allowed to use the restroom.