All’s fair in love and war. Or so they say. For decades, the same could not be said of Olympic competition-but things are about to change. At this summer’s Athens Games, every qualified athlete will be allowed to compete free of discrimination. Female athletes will not be subjected to mandatory sex-testing, and for the first time, the Olympics will accomodate athletes who identify as transgendered or transsexual.
The term sex-testing may be confusing. What is there to test? In sport, there is women’s competition and there is men’s competition. Two simple, straightforward, distinct categories…right? Very, very wrong.
Transgender is a term that describes a broad category of people who either feel uncomfortable in or do not identify with the gender of their birth. Transsexuals are those individuals who have made the transition from male to female, or female to male, with the help of surgery or hormones. Both groups call into question the rigid two-gender system of the athletic community. Should men who have undergone a sex-reassignment surgery and now live as a woman be allowed to compete against other women? And vice versa for women-to-men transsexuals?
“We think the minute the law of the land says that a person has made the sex change, they should be eligible for athletic competition as a person of that sex,” says Dean Bruce Kidd of U of T’s department of Physical Education and Health. “When a person has gone through the legal and medical procedures and has established himself or herself as a member of the opposite sex-has changed sex for legal purposes-that should be accepted by athletic organizations.”
Such is now the adopted stance of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, the aussie Games bylaws banned discrimination based on sexual orientation, defining “a person’s gender or sexual orientation…as heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender or transsexual.” Things weren’t always so hunky dory in amateur sporting land, however, and the sudden abundance of tolerance demonstrated by the Australian delegation could not erase decades of questionable IOC testing practices.
The IOC’s official policy bans “any form of discrimination…on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise.” Easy enough to follow in theory, however since the 1960s, female athletes have been obligated to prove their sex in a battery of physical and genetic tests-all stemming from the fear that there could be a little bit of man hidden inside a strong woman.
In the middle of the 20th Century, as female athletes began engaging in vigorous training programs and developing muscular bodies, the gap between male and female Olympic performances began to close. This raised some eyebrows, and pretty soon women who excelled at sport were pressured to prove that they were in fact women, and not men masquerading as women. The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) thus introduced “femininity testing,” and an era of mistrust was ushered into the world of amateur sport.
The first “sex test” was held at the European track and field championships in Budapest in 1966. All athletes entered in women’s events were made to parade naked, shirts lifted and pants dropped, in front of a panel of female physicians. At the Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica that same year, a gynecologist carried out a manual examination of the external genitalia of all female competitors.
Concerns of impropriety proliferated, and soon the nudity tests were replaced by a less intrusive chromosomal-test. Cells scraped from the inside of the athletes cheek were examined to reveal the presence or absence of the Barr Body, which is caused by the inactivation of one of the two X chromosomes in genetic female cells. Genetic males do not show this Barr Body, as they only have one X chromosome that remains active.
Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska was the first woman to fail the Barr test, after having passed a visual inspection of her body the previous year. It was declared that she had “ambiguous genitalia,” and she was stripped of her Olympic and other medals and removed from the competition. Klobukowska later gave birth to a child. She, like six women in a thousand, had XXY chromosomes.
According to the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine (CASM), this kind of chromosomal testing is completely bogus. “Leading geneticists do not support the use of sex chromatin testing,” reads the CASM position statement on sex testing in sport, “because 1) some women who have genetic abnormalities that offer no conceivable strength advantage are disqualified unfairly, 2) some men with genetic disorders would pass the sex chromatin test, and 3) it fails to detect the vast majority of female athletes who may have an unfair strength advantage…through steroid use or other performance enhancing drugs.”
The IOC and the IAAF, having recently abandoned sex-testing for women, will now abide by the law and recognize the legal gender status of individuals. They will also continue using a standardized urine drug-test to ensure that athletes who claim to be male or female are, in fact, male or female. The urine test, administered to every athlete, involves peeing in a cup under direct supervision-a hard test to fake for a man pretending to be a woman.
Those who would fake have been warned. Previous to the implementation of sex-testing, there was the occasional documented account of men competing as women. In 1980, an autopsy revealed that Polish sprinter Stella Walsh, who won silver at the 1932 Olympics in the 100m race, won another two gold medals, set 11 world records, and won 41 amateur athletic union titles, actually had the genitals of a man. German high jumper Dora Ratjen, who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was later examined and discovered to have ambiguous genitalia. She was disqualified from further competition. After the war, Ratjen-then living as Hermann-acknowledged that the Nazi Youth Movement had forced him to compete as a woman.
So far, there are no openly transsexual athletes gearing up to compete in the Athens Games. For Michelle Dumaresq, a member of Canada’s mountain biking team and the first publicly transsexual athlete on any national team worldwide, there is still a long way to go before trans people are completely tolerated and included in sport. “As a trans person,” she writes on her website, “it’s acceptable to compete, but don’t you dare win.”
The fear and misconception is that trans athletes, particularly the male to female individuals, have a decided advantage over the competition: larger bones, more testosterone, larger lung capacity and greater muscle mass. Dumaresq, who underwent surgery to change from male to female in 1996, argues otherwise. Her before and after shots wage a compelling argument: when Michelle was Michael, she stood at six feet and weighed 210 pounds. Now, her post-operative body measures 5’9 and weighs 180 pounds. That, says Dumaresq, is what eight years of hormone therapy will do.
“People would say, well, she started off as a male,” says Kidd over the male to female controversy, “but we just simply said that there are just so many other inner qualities in sports, let’s not single out this one.” The psychological and sociological effects of living as a woman have a significant impact on an athlete’s mentality and performance. In fact, while Dumaresq often clobbers the competition on her home turf, at the 2002 world mountain biking championships in Austria she placed 24th in the field-hardly a decisive win for somebody with a presumably “decisive” advantage.
With sex-testing banned and the self-determination of gender now a legal right, the next step in the process is acceptance from a wide range of athletic and non-athletic bodies-including the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community. As David Rayside, a professor in the department of Political Science points out, “even if groups have added the ‘T’ to the names of their organizations, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve fully taken up those issues.” The “T” refers to transgendered, and the organizations Rayside speaks of are the LBGTQ-lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgendered, queer-groups. What Rayside and others contend is that the riskier gender politics that come with the trans territory have often been ignored or sloughed off by larger, umbrella groups that campaign for gay and lesbian visibility.
Although transsexual and transgendered people make up a small minority of openly LBGTQ athletes, Dumaresq is convinced that things are beginning to change and that Athens may yet see some openly trans competitors lining up at the starting blocks. She’s been contacted by trans athletes from all around the world asking for guidance and advice-including the U.S. track and field association because, apparently, they have several trans athletes and are trying to figure out just what it all means. “I never set out to change the world of sport,” Dumaresq writes, “I just wanted to race a bike. If what I have done opens the door for other trans athletes then that will be wonderful.”
