Intersex and the Olympic Games

http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/full/101/8/395
8/8/2008

The assignment of sex at birth determines the manner in which a child is raised. It determines their appearance and governs their development.1 Sexual ambiguity – intersex – may result in a broad spectrum of physical problems. Certain anomalies may be detectable only by the astute clinician and would otherwise go unnoticed, whereas more profound anomalies may result in considerable developmental and psychological difficulties for both the child and his or her parents and family. Sex determination in individuals with sexual ambiguity has created difficulties in the arena of international sports for many years. While Hitler's Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 generated much controversy around the issue of racial and religious discrimination, it also brought the complexities of gender verification to the forefront of competitive sport for the first time.

At the risk of being unpopular, something I've never worried about....

Intersex cases should be handled on a case by case basis.

TG jocks should compete based on their birth gender.  Its unfair to women to have people with male DNA, and hence, male muscle mass, compete as if that is a fair race. 

Plenty of females have male muscle mass due to high sensitivity to androgens or/and
producing more androgens than average. That's in the genes, but not in the sex genes.

After awhile, the male muscle mass goes away and your left with not more muscles
than your average world class female athlete, which in no way ressembles
a normal woman by her muscle mass. There is a class of events where
a TS would have a huge advantage, this is the possible exception
to allowing participation. I'll talk about it more later in this response.


The most funny thing of all is a woman with AIS (male DNA with a complete female phenotype)
which gains nothing from being "a man", since her body doesn't react at all to androgens, yet
should she be banned?


The sport where there is a the biggest difference between male and female performance
is ironically, the sport I used to compete in. High Jumping. This is a sport where a male athlete
with local college level performance could transition and if kept in shape easily become a
top world athlete. My personnal record is higher than the female world record right now, and I've jumped on 30 occasion higher than that record. I could qualify for the female high jump olympics in Canada, jumping on one leg with no run-up, that's how ridiculously different the male and female records are.

The main difference between male and female athletes is not muscle size but muscle fibre.
That' means the real issue would be in power sports (100-200 meters, long jump, high jump,
weight lifting). In fact, field events and short track events are power sports. That's why
there has been so much steroid problems on the track. The energy is expended in
a very short period of time, high jump needs the most power and short twitch fibers.

Most olympic sports are not power sports but endurance/resistance and technical sports.
In those sports, after a few years, there is no marked advantage for a TS woman.
Michelle Dumaresq didn't even qualify for the olympics, she's not even on our national team,
let alone winning an event at the olympics.

Quote from: tekla on August 09, 2008, 06:53:17 PMTG jocks should compete based on their birth gender.  Its unfair to women to have people with male DNA, and hence, male muscle mass, compete as if that is a fair race. 

I hear this opinion quite often and yet there is NO scientific study to show that at transitioned athlete has any advantage in any sport. I am sure the I.O.C. looked at this before changing their policy a few years ago. I would LOVE to know what research they had before making their decision. With the amount of money involved in the Olympics, you can be sure that they didn't just pull their decision out of thin air!

I'm sure they looked and saw that the trend was one way.  More 'born men' were seeking to compete as women (which had been the problem in the past, in the bad old days of the USSR, East Germany vs. the US) then 'born women' were seeking to compete as men, so the decision was based on protecting women's sport.

Look, why is it 3 outs in baseball, not 4 or 2?  Why is it 10 yards in football, not 9 or 11?  All rules in sports are pretty much arbitrary.  As long as everyone agrees to them, then its all cool.  And this was the international decision, at least for now.