The Olympics

In just a short while the London Olympics being and once again the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is trying to define what is a man or woman. They have been trying to define who is a man or woman for well over fifty years, is it chromosomes, is it hormones and now they are trying to do it at the cellular level.

The Olympic Struggle Over Sex
Even as it hopes to clarify the difference between male and female athletes, a new rule from the International Olympic Committee inadvertently stirs the waters.
The Atlantic
By Alice Dreger
Jul 2 2012

One camp, led by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), believes the line imposed between putative male and putative female athletes must be biological. These folks -- let's call them the Anatomists -- fully admit that sex is really complicated. They acknowledge there's no one magical gene, chromosome, hormone, or body part that can do for us the hard work of sharp division into male and female leagues. Says the IOC in its latest declaration on the problem: "Human biology [...] allows for forms of intermediate levels between the conventional categories of male and female, sometimes referred to as intersex."

But the Anatomists still think we should base our sex division in sports on some sort of biological feature, even if it means we have to just pick one. They point out that sports require us to create all sorts of rules that aren't simply natural and self-evident, so why not do it here, too?

And so, the IOC has just decided that, for the London Olympic Games, the rule of sex will be based on something called "functional androgens" (or "functional testosterone"). This means that an athlete who was raised a girl and identifies as a woman will be allowed to play as a woman so long as the IOC does not discover that her body makes and responds to high levels of androgens. Androgens, of which testosterone is one type, naturally occur in both male and female bodies, but higher production usually means more male-typical development.

Notice that the IOC won't just be looking at how much androgens a woman's body makes, but also how much her cells respond. This is because some women are born with testes that make a lot of testosterone, but they lack androgen-sensitive receptors, so the androgens have little-to-no effect on their cells. This condition is called complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Those who have it -- women like Spanish hurdler Maria Patino -- develop essentially as girls and women.

But nature is really not that simple. As the article points out, the IOC didn’t set any levels of how much testosterone is too much, there is no point where you can say that above this level is a man and below this level is a woman. Also the article points out that,

Third, the policy appears to be out of whack with another IOC policy known as "the Stockholm Consensus," designed for dealing with male-to-female transsexual athletes. That policy requires transgender women -- women who were raised as boys -- to medically squash their androgen levels way down, seemingly well below where the policy on "female hyperandrogenism" would likely allow intersex women raised as girls to still play.

And whereas the female hyperandrogenism policy hints that a women with one of the "problem" intersex conditions might be chucked out if her medical records indicate she's benefitted from a lifetime of male-typical functional androgens, the Stockholm Consensus allows transgender women with those same lifetime androgen histories to play, so long as they have endocrinologically obeyed the IOC's rules for their womanhood for the previous couple of years.

Do you remember a few years back the case of Caster Semenya the runner from South African (I wrote about her here and here) who is intersexed. She has  Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) made her take all types of tests before allowing her to run as a woman athlete and even then many other runners protested the decision.

Trying to determine gender is almost impossible to define, there is no one point where you can say for certainly this person should compete as a man or this person should compete as a woman, it should be handled on a case by case basis.