[lbo-talk] Boylan: You can't test for gender

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Aug 2 20:29:50 PDT 2008


[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.



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