After Atalanta

If we thought the international sports community had learned something about gender and sex, biology, identity and athleticism after the debacle caused by the International Association of Athletics Federations in its process of “gender verification” in the case of South African runner Caster Semenya, an April New York Times op-ed about these issues has shocked the naiveté right out of us. I would have liked to believe that the humiliation Semenya underwent when members of the international track and field community questioned her sex thus triggering physical, medical, and psychological examinations would become an anomaly. Based on the information presented by co-authors Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, it was not. The difference: the process of accusing and testing Semenya was very public; the process of testing and “fixing” the bodies of athletes who do not conform to the IAAF’s new hormone level policies (also adopted by the IOC and FIFA) have been quite hidden. Whil...

So in response to the comments of athletes, notably a female runner from Canada, about the recent performances of Caster Semenya, another Canadian, bike racer Kristen Worley, has made some very insightful comments. Worley is is male to female transsexual who competes internationally. She called her fellow Canadian, Diane Cummins, to task for her comments that running against Semenya was the same as running against a man. Worley, who co-founded Coalition of Athletes for Inclusion in Sport, worked behind the scenes on Semena's behalf during the whole ordeal, which she describes like this: “But when a woman does it [excels like Usain Bolt], [a woman] who didn’t actually set a world record (in winning at the Berlin worlds last year), who (more than 10) women have run faster than..., who didn’t set a meet record, we throw her into stirrups and virtually rape her. We did that because of the way her face looks and her voice.” I was a little concerned that Worley revealed Semenya's con...

Dear track and field athletes: Hope you like needles, because we're going to test your testosterone levels before every competition and enter you into the appropriate category the day of your race. Sure this will cost us millions and millions of dollars but since you all want things fair and fair seems to be based on the level of testosterone these days based on responses to Caster Semenya's latest race win, let's just do it. It will be exciting, right? For us: we'll get to watch multiple race finals instead of just one. I mean you'll have no idea who your competition is until the race. You'll have no idea which category you'll be in until that race. This testing system will not only take care of people "on the very fringe of the normal athlete female biological composition" but those who get advantages from being at certain points in their menstrual cycle. And we won't have those silly labels like "fastest woman in the world"; we c...

I thought this story was going to be a little more controversy laden when I read Diane's snippet about the gender verification of professional tennis player Sarah Gronert from Germany. Of course the controversy could be larger than the article is letting on. After all they only say that Gronert was born with male and female genitalia but has been living and certified as a female since birth. Kudos to the writer for not referring to her as a hermaphrodite. But someone should have explained what exactly Gronert's condition is. I think they should have, anyway. I kind of have mixed feelings about this. If it had been explained that Gronert has one of any number of genetic conditions, it might have helped defer some of the controversy and some of the apparently vicious comments she continues to encounter. (Apparently not everyone has seen that Oprah episode .) On the other hand, do we really need to know? Is it a bit voyeuristic of us to demand explanations for every non-conforming...

Not much news about the sex testing labs in Beijing since the initial news broke a few weeks ago. This editorialist , though, notes that as egregious as such testing is, in the US we have our own version of such testing. They're based on appropriate demonstrations of femininity and adherence to hegemonic beauty standards. And many female athletes--she only cites a few--get in line for fear of being deemed a lesbian. Here's an excerpt about both the challenges and potential in sport: Sports programs are a particular challenge when attempting to make schools, playgrounds, and locker rooms safe for our LGBTQ children. And as long as young women will be stigmatized as lesbian, that stigma will control women’s participation. But sports can also provide innumerable opportunities to teach valuable life lessons and can be a powerful influence in addressing myriad social issues. And eliminating lesbian-baiting can be one of them.

I sure do like Jennifer Finney Boylan. So I am glad she weighed in on the recent news that the Beijing organizers are instituting a sex verification center to test "suspect" female athletes. There was a lot of good stuff in her NYT op-ed Sunday . She spent a lot of time giving the history of the testing, which I mostly just skimmed. I thought she could have trimmed that down a bit, but the good stuff did come. Here is some of it: ...gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than afraid of it. and Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women. So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to...

I can't even come up with some snarky to start this post because I am just so astonished by the news that the Beijing Olympics are going to engage in gender verification. Oh yes, it's true. When Ebuz alerted me to the NYT article linked above, I so naively and with the slightest bit of hope said "are they testing the men too?" Yeah, right. In fact, they aren't even testing all female athletes or even just a random sampling. They are testing "suspect" athletes. Has there been a situation of late to which we could so aptly apply the term witch hunt? So many questions...Who decided this? When? Why is it being allowed to happen? Is there any possible way to stop it? And I am so so curious as to the criteria being employed to determine suspect athletes? Do they win too much and too well thus relying on the stereotype that women can't be too good in sports? Are their muscles too big reinforcing some biological essentialism that does not account for a spe...