Is there really a point to "gender" verification?

December 22, 2014 10:37 AM

Is there any real, concrete reason for genetically testing female athletes like Castor Semenya? It seems to me to be an exercise in gender policing and humiliation rather than anything else.

I'm not sure I understand gender verification in sports. I understand that the premise is that male athletes "pretending" to be female would have an unfair advantage due to increased levels of testosterone, but if a woman has lived her entire life as a woman and is female as far as she knows, is testing them for any other reason than them looking "too masculine" for the status quo?

If I am understanding correctly, these are women with androgen insensitivity syndrome, right? If that's the case, doesn't that mean their bodies don't respond to testosterone, and that they wouldn't really have any advantage over other women? What does gender testing accomplish, other than public humiliation for these athletes? Is this a practice that has any rational or scientific basis?

posted by Enchanting Grasshopper to Society & Culture (19 answers total)

Either/Or: Sports, sex, and the case of Caster Semenya. (2009 New Yorker article on the subject).

"Unfortunately for I.A.A.F. officials, they are faced with a question that no one has ever been able to answer: what is the ultimate difference between a man and a woman? “This is not a solvable problem,” Alice Dreger said. “People always press me: ‘Isn’t there one marker we can use?’ No. We couldn’t then and we can’t now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male.”
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:43 AM on December 22, 2014 [5 favorites]

Keep in mind that men are born with a muscular advantage of about 23%. The gender testing thing started with Iron Curtain country 'female' athletes who swept the Olympic and other sports contests. It was eventually admitted that they had been given male hormones to increase their strength and stamina. Like the clean cyclists who competed against the heavily fortified Lance Armstrong, the women who competed against the Iron Curtain women were at a great disadvantage.
posted by Cranberry at 10:52 AM on December 22, 2014 [3 favorites]

Best answer: What does gender testing accomplish, other than public humiliation for these athletes? Is this a practice that has any rational or scientific basis?

I think there are several ways to interpret your question:

(1) Does sex testing actually test real biological phenomena that correlate with sex, or is it spurious?

(2) Does sex testing actually test biological phenomena that define sex?

(3) Do people who "fail" sex tests have a biological advantage due to whatever it is that caused them to fail the test?

(4) Is sex testing rational? That is, are the concerns that it addresses reasonable, does it address those concerns as intended, and do the benefits outweigh the costs?

These aren't the same questions. The answer to (1) is usually true; the answer to (2) is false; and the answer to (3) seems to be "maybe sometimes, but definitely not as much as people think" and (4) is much more subjective and in my opinion is "no."

is testing them for any other reason than them looking "too masculine" for the status quo?

Although I think that sex testing is wrong, I also think that it's dangerous to lump everyone who thinks it has value into the same box as cultural conservatives. Many are concerned for women's ability to compete. The establishment of women's-only events allowed women to participate in events where they had a chance of winning. Although the gap in performance between men and women in some sports has narrowed over the years, and there is hope that we'll start to value skills women excel in more, it will probably never disappear.

So there is a concern that without sex testing, either men will compete disguised as women, gaining an unfair advantage -- or more subtly, that it will not be harder to compete in women's sports unless you have a condition that confers some "male" physical advantage over women without that condition. Two problems with this concern are obvious: that women with these conditions are women who also want to compete, and that at an elite level, everyone who competes is physically abnormal in some way.

Still, I think we are more likely to win people over by recognizing that some of them have a genuine concern for equal representation in sports.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:09 AM on December 22, 2014 [25 favorites]

For a quick review of athletic achievements for men and women, here's the Wikipedia list of Olympic records for men and women.

Anecdotally, I recall hearing about a mountain climber who was born male but identified as female, and later had corrective surgery. She talked about how it was harder to do the same climbs she had done prior to the surgery. I've looked for more information on this lady, but I've had no luck.

None of this is to say gender testing is appropriate in this or other cases, but to provide some more information on this complex topic. But I think the best comment I've heard on this general topic was from Kutsuwamushi: "an elite level, everyone who competes is physically abnormal in some way." International competitions are pitting some very exceptional people against each-other. I don't believe that is a level attainable by the public at large, even if you were to train from a young age.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:22 AM on December 22, 2014

Anecdotally, I recall hearing about a mountain climber who was born male but identified as female, and later had corrective surgery. She talked about how it was harder to do the same climbs she had done prior to the surgery.

Here's an interesting phenomenon to keep in mind (I'm going to state this inaccurately but in a way that's correct for all relevant purposes, because my medical knowledge is limited): Testes and ovaries, when functioning normally, produce both testosterone and estrogen. Obviously, testes produce a large quantity of testosterone and only a tiny amount of estrogen, while ovaries produce a large quantity of estrogen and only a tiny amount of testosterone. Testosterone contributes to muscle growth and athletic prowess. If a woman is born with testes, undergoes an orchiectomy, and takes supplemental estrogen, her body actually contains less testosterone than a woman born with ovaries.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:33 AM on December 22, 2014

FoB: the adrenal glands produce small amounts of both estrogen and testosterone, in both men and women, and also in kids. I don't think the ovaries produce testosterone and I don't think the testes produce estrogen. (IANAD)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:45 AM on December 22, 2014

"Ovaries secrete estrogen, testosterone[4][5] and progesterone. In women, fifty percent of testosterone is produced by the ovaries and adrenal glands and released directly into the blood stream."
posted by rtha at 11:59 AM on December 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

If you Google 'Caster Semenya sociology' a number of interesting write-ups should pop up. The 'Sociological Images' blog has a couple of posts that might be of interest.
posted by kmennie at 11:59 AM on December 22, 2014

This question is specifically about "genetic testing". So things like the purported East German practice of giving Androgens to young female athletes, however terrible, isn't directly relevant except to the extent that it led eventually to genetic testing.
posted by alms at 12:10 PM on December 22, 2014 [2 favorites]

Like Cranberry says above, males have a definite muscular advantage over females. And yeah, the old East German government especially had a known tendency to pump their female athletes full of male androgens, almost entirely without those athletes knowledge --- the trainers usually told them they were getting "vitamin shots". Some of those female athletes got so much that they basically underwent sex changes, and are now living as males. The result of all those "vitamin shots" was a massive upswing in the number of Olympic medals won by East German athletes, and, yes, the current sex testing.
posted by easily confused at 12:22 PM on December 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Specifically about genetic testing I think the general consensus these days is indeed that there is no scientific basis for that. Wikipedia says: One form of gender identification, which was mandated for all female olympic athletes by the International Olympic Committee in 1992, tested for the presence of the SRY gene, which is found on the Y-chromosome, to identify males potentially disguised as females. This method of testing was later abolished, as it was shown to be inconclusive in identifying maleness.[4] Nowadays, gender verification tests typically involve evaluation by gynecologists, endocrinologists, psychologists, and internal medicine specialists.
posted by blub at 12:25 PM on December 22, 2014

This basically raises the question of whether Men's and Women's athletics should be divided at all. If they should be, why? Is it due to a sense of identity & shared team space? Or is it because male and female athletes have distinct physical capacities and are classed separately to make competition fair, the way boxers are separated by weight?

If it is the second, then what matters is what specific physical capacities a person has biologically, and not how they identify.
posted by mdn at 4:25 PM on December 22, 2014

This basically raises the question of whether Men's and Women's athletics should be divided at all. If they should be, why?

I don't think this is a hard question. Yes, they should be, unless you don't want women to be able to excel in athletics ever again. Paula Radcliffe is nearly three minutes faster in the marathon than the next fastest woman ever and her time is good, but not great, among male runners (2:15 is pretty damn awesome from my perspective, but male runners broke 2:10 nearly 200 times last year).

That's the problem - this distinction matters. Marita Koch is the WR holder in the 400m for women. She was doped to the gills (but did not have her gender questioned, so far as I know). Her time is beaten by high school boys.

Is it due to a sense of identity & shared team space? Or is it because male and female athletes have distinct physical capacities and are classed separately to make competition fair, the way boxers are separated by weight?

It's at least partially the latter.

I agree that there is something very weird going on. We know that elite athletes are genetic freaks. Usain Bolt is a freak. Paula Radcliffe is a freak. We know that they have to be merely to be competitive. What we seem to be saying with women is that they are allowed to be freaks, but only in certain ways. If they are freaks in this other way then it's unacceptable. Maybe that's not right.

Maybe the IAAF should just say to hell with it and say that XX is female and everything else is male and it really doesn't matter how you do or do not identify. They are making a distinction and that's the distinction. It wouldn't pass muster in society at large, but it doesn't have to.

I should also point out here that I don't know what to think about Caster Semenya specifically and I think that the athletics organizations and media handled this all with a spectacular lack of tact. None of that means that there isn't a real issue at stake here.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 5:45 PM on December 22, 2014 [4 favorites]

For team sports, player safety is a perceived issue. I'm marginally involved in women's Australian Rules football where I live (a contact sport), where there is a bylaw that allows for transgender players to compete. It has been controversial in the past because there is a problem that transitioning players tend to have much, much more muscle as a proportion of bodyweight than others: I know some players feel that it's not fair or safe for many smaller women players to take to the same field, to tackle and be tackled. The bylaw reads:

13.20 All players who participate in the Women’s competition must be female. Transgender women who have established their identity as females and are living as women in their everyday lives are eligible to play...

In practice the only gender 'test' applied is one of honesty, and the AFL has an official policy of inclusion.

On the subject of hormones: the more important point about the East German and other eastern bloc countries' regimes of doping wasn't that it gave their women athletes an unfair athletic advantage (though it did). It was that the doping and hormone practices were experimental, unethical and unconsented, and had extremely negative health consequences for the athletes at the time and ongoing throughout their lives. Preventing abuses like those are a much more reasonable basis for anti-doping policy.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:57 PM on December 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

There are some sports where the gender separation makes obvious sense if you want women to ever compete (track), and there is some feeble logic behind testing, though practically it often comes out as gender policing.

Then there are sports were there seems to be no justification for gender separation except awarding more medals (shooting). Goodness knows if they will ever sink low enough to gender test those sports, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

As far as I recall the olympic equestrian events are the only mixed ones, I presume for historical reasons — I know it’s really the horse that does all the work, but with sailing the boat does the work and they still segregate.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 10:36 PM on December 22, 2014

I can't help but wonder why it is bad for a person competing in a track event as a woman to have the "unfair" advantage of more testosterone, while it is not bad for a person competing as a man or a woman in a track event to have the unfair advantage of being tall or being raised in a country where they could devote their time to training instead of subsistence farming.
posted by Nothing at 4:02 AM on December 23, 2014

Because the events are not specifically segregated by height or by availability of training time.

For example, until recently only "amateur" athletes were allowed to participate in the Olympics. I put the word "amateur" in quotes, because it became increasingly clear over time that it was a word you could say but not define. Eventually that restriction was removed. However, for many years the restriction was enforced, and competitors were barred or stripped of their medals if they were found to have been paid as an athlete.

In the same way, the fact that sporting events are categorized by sex leads logically to a process for enforcing that categorization. Unfortunately it appears that -- just as with amateur status -- the definition is hard to pin down. Hence the problems with things like genetic testing. (I don't think separate events for men and women will go the way of the amateur restriction, though. It's too important for the continued participation of women in many events.)
posted by alms at 6:13 AM on December 23, 2014

I don't think that's quite it, alms. I think the larger point is (as mentioned previously) that, if men and women aren't segregated in some sports, women will essentially be unable to win.

If short people worldwide were really bothered that they couldn't win the Olympic gold in pole vaulting or sprinting, and they self-identified as a "group", there might be pressure to have separate categories in those sports. Likewise, if the fans wanted to see short people sprint competitively, such a game would exist. High school and college wrestling are segregated by weight for that sort of reason, as is pro and amateur boxing. No one wants to watch a 300-lb wrestler simply sit on top of a 150-lb wrestler to win, but bantam-weight and welter-weight competitions are exciting to fans.

If we're talking about injected testosterone, of course, the answer is simpler: it's a performance-enhancing drug with serious, permanent side-effects. Those are banned in almost every sports competition.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:47 AM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

The current women's world record for the 100 meter is 10.49 seconds, set by Florence Griffith Joyner in 1988 (and never approached since). Last July, male high school student Trentavis Friday won the USATF Junior Championships with a time of 10.00.

0.49 seconds in the 100 meters is a huge amount. If Joyner had been in that race with those high school men she'd have been left in the dust. When it comes to these kinds of events, women simply cannot compete with men.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:00 PM on December 25, 2014