If you were afraid these Beijing Olympics may be taking a step back in time 40 years, they’ve given another reason for concern. Chinese officials say they have created a system for checking the sex and gender of athletes who participate as females but whose gender is in question. From The Guardian:
“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. The tests will not be conducted on every female athlete, but will be required if serious doubts have been raised about an individual competitor – invariably one competing in the women’s events. “The aim is to protect fairness at the games while also protecting the rights of people with abnormal sexual development,” he says.
If you were afraid these Beijing Olympics may be taking a step back in time 40 years, they’ve given another reason for concern. Chinese officials say they have created a system for checking the sex and gender of athletes who participate as females but whose gender is in question. From The Guardian:
“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. The tests will not be conducted on every female athlete, but will be required if serious doubts have been raised about an individual competitor – invariably one competing in the women’s events. “The aim is to protect fairness at the games while also protecting the rights of people with abnormal sexual development,” he says.
I’m all for fairness in competition, absolutely. And people have certainly been caught in the past skirting the rules. But, more often than that, people who had never known they may be XXY or some other gender-genetic combination are caught off guard by tests that view sex and gender is binary.
The tests get into even grayer area when you take transgender athletes into consideration. IOC rules have allowed post-op male-to-female trannies to participate in the Olympics as female for years. How would they show up on these gender tests? You can only imagine. One victim of these tests is Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan (pic above), who was stripped of a silver medal at the Asian Games for looking female but, unbeknownst to her, having male chromosomes.
The Chinese say they have a fair system in place. We'll see. I hope it's better than the system they had in place to get rid of the pollution.
