The Gender Police

Are coming to get you!

Our bodies produce different levels of hormone and all our bodies are different, there is no one indicator to identify what sex and gender we are. There are some women who have XY chromosomes; when the doctor picked them up and swatted their bottoms and pronounced them girls, the doctor only goes by outward appearances, the do not do any other testing. Some girls have XXY or other chromosomes or some girls have over active adrenal glands or some girls have polycystic ovary syndrome, whatever the reason they naturally have high levels of testosterone.

The Trouble With Too Much T
New York Times - The Opinion Pages
By KATRINA KARKAZIS and REBECCA JORDAN-YOUNG
APRIL 10, 2014

From 2011, major sports governing bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association and the International Association of Athletics Federations, instituted new eligibility rules that were intended to quell the outrage over the handling of the Semenya case. Instead, as recent cases attest, they may have made things worse.

Rather than trying to decide whether an athlete is “really” female, as decades of mandatory sex tests did, the current policy targets women whose bodies produce more testosterone than is typical. If a female athlete’s T level is deemed too high, a medical team selected by the sport’s governing bodies develops a “therapeutic proposal.” This involves either surgery or drugs to lower the hormone level. If doctors can lower the athlete’s testosterone to what the governing bodies consider an appropriate level, she may return to competition. If she refuses to cooperate with the investigation or the medical procedures, she is placed under a permanent ban from elite women’s sports.

The first evidence of this new policy in action was published last year in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Four female athletes, ages 18 to 21, all from developing countries, were investigated for high testosterone. Three were identified as having atypically high testosterone after undergoing universal doping tests. (They were not suspected of doping: Tests clearly distinguish between doping and naturally occurring testosterone.)

And that is when the gender police stepped in…

They girls were intersexed and the doctors suggested that removing the women’s gonads and partially removing their clitorises. Now these girls were not taking hormones, they were not taking performance enhancing drugs, it was just that their bodies that they were born with was producing too much testosterone,

The doctors who performed the surgeries and wrote the report acknowledged that there was no medical reason for the procedures. Quite simply, these young female athletes were required to have drastic, unnecessary and irreversible medical interventions if they wished to continue in their sports.

When we try to label people and put them into boxes, Mother Nature has a way of throwing in a monkey wrench. I cannot see a reason to force a person to undergo surgery so that they can meet some arbitrary standard that some committee set.