The gender trap (China Reintroduces Gender Tests for Olympics)

The gender trap (China Reintroduces Gender Tests for Olympics)

www.guardian.co.uk

For more than a year, officials in Beijing have been designing a special laboratory to determine the sex of any athletes taking part in this year's Olympic games. "Suspected athletes will be evaluated from their external appearances by experts and undergo blood tests to examine their sex hormones, genes and chromosomes for sex determination," says Professor Tian Qinjie.

Women usually have two X chromosomes; men an X and a Y chromosome.

(visit the link for the full news article)

A intresting topic...

These tests were used before, but stopped for several Olympics...


Some of the stories in the last part of the Article are pretty intresting...

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

You mean they can't tell the difference between a man and a woman so they have to do a test to figure it out?

The following are some of the more famous instances when female athletes were caught in the gender trap.

Santhi Soundarajan

One of the most tragic recent cases is yet to reach a conclusion. Soundarajan, a 27-year-old Indian athlete, has had to endure public humiliation after she was stripped of her silver medal for the 800m at the Asian games in 2006. Soundarajan, who has lived her entire life as a woman, failed a gender test, which usually includes examinations by a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and a genetic expert. The precise results of the test have not been made public, but it has been reported that the likely cause is a condition called Androgen insensitivity syndrome, where a person has the physical characteristics of a woman but whose genetic make-up includes a male chromosome. The Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley, who has undergone sex reassignment surgery, is one of a number of people who are calling for Soundarajan's medal to be reinstated. "It should never have been handled in such a gross manner, amounting to public humiliation because of their ignorance of her condition," Worley has said. "The Olympic movement has been dealing with intersex people since the 1930s. You'd think they would have got the hang of it by now." The humiliation and prospect that her career may be over has taken its toll on Soundarajan. In September, Indian newspapers reported that she had survived a suicide attempt.

Edinanci Silva

Born with both male and female sex organs, the Brazilian judo player had surgery in the mid-90s so that she could live and compete as a woman. According to the IOC, this made her eligible to participate in the games and she competed in Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000 and Athens in 2004. In Sydney, she beat the Australian judoka Natalie Jenkins, who raised the issue of Silva's gender in a press conference, constantly referring to her as "he". "I have never fought that one before. My plan was not to grip with her, she's - he's - very strong," she said. Silva gave a mouth swab to officials, which proved she was female.

Dora Ratjen

In the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to show the world the supremacy of the Aryan race - and he needed German athletes to win. Ratjen, notable for her deep voice and her refusal to share the shower room with the other female athletes, was Germany's entry for the women's high jump. She came fourth. Britain's competitor, Dorothy Tyler, who won a silver medal, remembers her. "I had competed against Dora and I knew she was a man," she says. "You could tell by the voice and the build. But 'she' was far from the only athlete. You could tell because they would always go into the toilet to get changed. We'd go and stand on the seat of the next-door cubicle or look under the door to see if we could catch them." Tyler held the world record for the high jump, but when officials wrote to her telling her that Ratjen had broken it, she wrote back. "I said: 'She's not a woman, she's a man,'" she says. "They did some research and found 'her' serving as a waiter called Hermann, so I got my world record back again." Dora, who had been born Hermann Ratjen, had in fact been a member of the Hitler Youth and said that the Nazis had forced him to enter as a woman.

Stella Walsh

At one point, Walsh, a Polish-American sprinter, was the fastest woman in the world. Born Stanislawa Walasiewicz in Poland in 1911, she grew up in the United States, although she represented her country of birth at the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, winning gold and silver medals respectively for the 100m sprint. During her long career, she set more than 100 national and world records and was inducted into the American Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975. She lived her entire life as a woman, and even had a short-lived marriage to an American man. In 1980, Walsh was killed by mistake during an armed robbery at a shopping mall in Cleveland, Ohio. The postmortem revealed she had male genitalia, although this did not prove that she was a man as she was also found to have both male and female chromosomes, a genetic condition known as mosaicism.

Heidi Krieger

It is believed that as many as 10,000 East German athletes were caught up in a nightmarish state-sponsored attempt to build a race of superhuman communist sports heroes and force-fed cocktails of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. One of them was Heidi Krieger, a shot putter. When she was 16, her coach put her on steroids and contraceptive pills and she gained weight, built muscle and started to develop body hair. By 1986, aged 20, she was European champion. Her overdeveloped physique had put a huge amount of pressure on her frame, causing medical problems, while the drugs had caused mood swings, depression and resulted in at least one suicide attempt. By the mid-90s, Krieger underwent gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Andreas. She had already been confused about her gender, but felt that the drugs had pushed her over the edge. "I didn't have control," Krieger told the New York Times four years ago. "I couldn't find out for myself which sex I wanted to be." At the trial in 2000 of Manfred Ewald, the East German sports official and architect of the doping regime, Krieger said "They just used me like a machine".

Here is some of the Most famours cases, as they say...

Pretty strange...

while i understand that the olympic officials need to make sure men are competing as men, and women competing as women they also need to understand that its not as clear cut as that.

most men are 46xy, but there are various conditions such as 47xxy (klinefelters syndrome which affects 1 in every 500 males) aswell as pituitary or hypothalamus problems, and a whole bunch of other similar conditions can easily blur the tests they are doing and give a wrong reading on say hormones or chromosomes