[Interesting. Takes the argument to its endpoint in the last few paragraphs.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03boylan.html
The New York Times
August 3, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The XY Games
By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Belgrade Lakes, Me.
IN the 1936 Olympic Games, the sprinter Stella Walsh -- running for
Poland and known as the fastest woman in the world -- was beaten by
Helen Stephens of St. Louis, who set a world record by running 100
meters in 11.4 seconds. After the race, a Polish journalist protested
that Stephens must be a man. After all, no woman in the world could run
that fast.
Olympic officials performed a "sex test" on Stephens, who was found, in
fact, to be female, proving once and for all that a person could be
incredibly fast and female at the same time.
Forty-four years later, Walsh, who had become an American citizen, was
shot to death in the parking lot of a discount store in Cleveland. Her
autopsy revealed a surprise: It was Stella Walsh, and not Helen
Stephens, who turned out to have been male all along, at least
according to the Cuyahoga County Coroner's office.
Last week, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics announced that they
had set up a "gender determination lab" to test female athletes
suspected of being male. "Experts" at the lab will evaluate athletes
based on their physical appearance and take blood samples to test
hormones, genes and chromosomes.
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.)
The test, which began as a crude physical inspection, has become more
sophisticated over the years. In the 1970s and '80s, the test was
performed by a buccal smear -- the scraping of cells from the inside of
the mouth -- and the sample studied for chromosomal material.
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.
Ten years later, however, Santhi Soundarajan, a runner from India, was
stripped of her silver medal in the 800 meters at the Asian Games for
"failing" a sex test. An Indian athletics official told The Associated
Press that Soundarajan had "abnormal chromosomes." She was ridiculed in
the press, and her career was destroyed. In the wake of her global
humiliation, she attempted suicide.
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.
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.
Which brings us back to Stella Walsh. 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.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College, is the
author of Shes Not There: A Life in Two Genders and Im Looking Through
You: Growing Up Haunted.