The Challenges of Gender-Verification in Sports

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The Challenges of Gender-Verification in Sports
The biggest difficult faced by sex verification in sports is that it sometimes comes into conflict with what the individuals being tested believe to be their sex. When an athlete states that she is female, any test that shows or declares her as being male comes under scrutiny because it defies what society and the individual thinks or believes to be the sex of the individual. The sex of an individual is first and foremost what can be seen about the person’s body. In the absence of science, society has traditionally relied on sex organs to determine the gender of a person. Before the advent of modern medicine and hospitals, pregnant women delivered at home with the assistance of a midwife, whose only expertise in delivering babies was her experience in assisting village women to give birth. Once the baby was born, she only looked between the legs, and depending on whether she saw a penis or a vagina, declared the child a boy or a girl respectively. A gender appropriate name was given, and the child grew up as a male or female, no question asked. The point I’m raising here is that if sex organs were the yardstick for verifying a person’s sex, everything will be straightforward. But this is not the case in sports.
Take the example of Maria Patino. Since her childhood she had known herself to be female. She has a vagina, breasts, and a uterus. The doctor who delivered her must have seen her genitalia before declaring her a girl. However, the International Olympic Committee banned her from competing as a female because it was found that she had Y chromosomes and her labia hid testes (Sterling 1). The challenge presented by this discovery is that she cannot be declared as a male or female per se. This situation makes the whole idea of sex-verification ridiculous. For all practical reasons, they IOC cannot declare Maria a man even after claiming that she is not a woman. So what is she? If they say she is a man, she can point out that she has a vagina, and therefore cannot be a man. The fact that she has hidden testes does not verify her sex because the committee’s decision implies that genitalia alone are not the yardstick, otherwise having a vagina could have settled the matter. In this regard, sex-verification is complicated by the fact that the results are not sufficient to declare a person male or female in cases where the person has male and female sex organs. What verification does is challenge a person’s claim about his or her gender. This is because before the testing, we start with the assumption that the person’s sex is what he or she claims to be. The testing will either refute that claim or “concede” to the fact that what the person claims is true. In this case, calling the testing a “sex-verification” procedure is misleading since it does not verify anything - it only confirms what the person claims. If it were a verification procedure, it should be able to verify the sex of a person shoes sexuality is contested by either declaring that person a male or female. However, the issue of sex-verification comes up when the testing conflicts with the person’s stated sex. In such cases, the results do not verify anything, but merely refutes a person’s stated sex without telling that person what her sex is. Maria Patino was not told whether she is a man or a woman: the results only indicated that she possessed male characteristics. But because she also possessed female characteristics, the IOC cannot “verify” her sex and tell her that she is man without contradicting itself. She has a vagina, which makes her a woman, but for the same reasons it denies her femaleness on account of a vagina alone, IOC cannot say she is a man on account that she has testes. As author Alice Dreger (2009) puts it, “sex is messy” because we cannot truly determine the sex of a person simply by looking at his or her sex organs.
The second factor used to determine a person’s sex is hormonal levels, specifically, the amount of testosterone that one’s body produces. Biologically, “normal” women produce less testosterone than men (Dreger 2011). Accordingly, sports authorities prevent women with high testosterone levels from competing because their bodies behave, physiologically, like those of men. The weakness of this approach is that it does not rely on objective criteria to refute a person’s claim to a given sex. When does one’s sex on the basis of testosterone become an issue? It is when a female athlete performs exceptionally well that the authorities, and sometimes rivals, begin to look for alternative explanations other than the person’s physical fitness. When did Caster Semenya’s sexuality become an issue? It was after she had won gold medals. Would have the authorities started an investigation if she had not won in the races she participated in? One may argue that the authorities were initially interested in testing for doping, and in the process discovered that her testosterone levels were unnaturally high compared to the average female. However, athletes are tested before competing, so if this was an issue she could have been disqualified from participating. In any case, testosterone is not conclusive because it faces the same challenges of using sex organs. What if a female athlete fulfills all the biological/physical characteristics of a female; functional female reproductive organs, body physique, but only happened to produce more testosterone than the average female? Alternatively, would a man be declared female if he has a penis, testes, the physique of a male body, but produced less testosterone than the normal male average? In this regard, testosterone is not conclusive because it cannot determine the sex of a person in cases where its results conflict the person’s sex sexuality on the basis of sex organs.
On the issue of human sexuality, the male/female dichotomy is misguided. This is because sexuality is not all about what a person’s genitalia says, but also, and importantly so, what the individual feels about their sexuality. Under normal circumstances, having testes and a penis are enough to make a person male. However, there are cases where having a penis is not sufficient to make one act or behave like a male. There are several cases where men have come out to claim that they are female trapped in a male body. This claim suggests that sex organs are part of the story, and much...