Making Sure Olympic Girls Are Girls

Jessica Leigh Lebos

When Jessica Leigh graduated with a degree in creative writing, she figured she'd be slinging lattes for the rest of her life, so she shaved her head, moved into a VW bus and set off for Alaska. Good thing the van broke down just north of San Francisco, because she just hates cold weather. Her baris...

Wednesday, July, 30, 2008

The New York Times reports today that Beijing Olympics officials have labs up and ready to make sure that “suspicious-looking” female athletes are indeed women.

Experts at the lab will evaluate cases based on their external appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes. Gender verification tests emerged in the 1960s when Communist countries in Eastern Europe were thought to be using male athletes in women’s competitions.

External appearance? Outrageous. What, if a woman’s too muscular, strong or has a facial hair, she’s a man? I had a grandmother with a wicked moustache but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t as feminine as a flower. If racial profiling at the airport is considered undiplomatic, what is pulling a buff Russian shotputter out of line going to do for global relations?

The sad part is that some women fail these tests not because they’re dudes, but because of ambigous chromosomal abnormalties: Santhi Soundarajan, a runner from India, was stripped of the silver medal she won at the 2006 Asian Games after a gender verification test came up negative. Though subsequent tests showed Santhi to have androgen insensitivity syndrome (a condition where a person develops as a woman but possesses a Y chromosome), her athletic career was ruined.

The International Olympic Committee supposedly stopped gender testing on ethical grounds in 1999, but has obviously taken a GIANT slide backwards in the integrity department. So if a athlete doesn’t fit it into some arbitrary idea of what a woman is supposed to look like, she’s subject to pain and humiliation? Does it GET more sexist?

And how come the Olympics doesn’t test suspiciously effiminate “male” athletes to make sure the junk in their spandex is real?