Gender Games

This is where the IOC?s task starts to seem harder than pulling off a triple twisting Yurchenko. You can see the temptation to rely on the legal classification of an athlete?s sex in her home country rather than going with a universal test. Yet in the knock-down, cheat-prone world of elite sports, some biologically based criteria are surely needed. Here are some distinctions we could fairly draw: People who are chromosomally XX and living as legal women should compete as female Olympic athletics, no matter what their bodies look like and no matter their testosterone levels. Under the current policy, XX-ers with naturally high testosterone could be ineligible to compete as women, and that seems wrong. Some XY-ers should also be deemed women for the purposes of sport, like those with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome and many with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, too. Yes, this last category would entail some hard judgment calls, but at least it?s a smaller group. And rather than a narrow focus on testosterone, a more encompassing algorithm that takes into account chromosomes, genitals, gonads, and hormones seems like the only plausible approach. It?s nice to imagine that a simple test could also be a fair test. But in sports as in life, that?s often just not true.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=0d8196cbead62b613b305240ee2d1ce9

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