Maya Rupert

Federal Policy Director, National Center for Lesbian Rights

What Are Little Girls Made Of: The Dangers of the New Olympics Gender Tests

Posted: 08/06/2012 6:54 pm

One of the most problematic aspects of the International Olympic
Committee's (IOC) new gender testing policy was relegated to a single
sentence in the Los Angeles Times' article
<http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-olympics-gender-20120730,0...>
on this controversial issue.

According to the new IOC rules, the test won't be administered to all
female athletes and instead will be given only when "the chief medical
officer of a national Olympic committee or a member of the IOC's
medical commission requests it." While this may have been designed to
make the process less onerous, it creates an entirely new problem that
will disadvantage any woman who is perceived as not being sufficiently
feminine.

The test itself will disqualify women from competing if they have
testosterone levels in the range of 7 to 30 nanomoles per liter of
blood, which is the range typically seen in males. However, the
decision to test an athlete will be entirely subjective. There are no
"objective" indicators of which women may have heightened levels of
testosterone. Under the new policy, only women who raise a specter of
doubt in the minds of members of the IOC will be asked to prove their
gender. In practice, this means that whether a woman will have her
eligibility called into account and be forced to undergo testing will
be based on stereotypes about gender. If past history is any
indication, this will have a devastating impact on
gender-nonconforming women and will disproportionately affect women of
color.

History is replete with examples of talented female athletes facing
accusations about the authenticity of their gender based on
stereotypical notions of femininity. South African middle-distance
runner Caster Semenya was famously forced to undergo gender testing
after winning in the 2009 World Championships in Athletics when
competitors complained that her "masculine" features indicated that
she wasn't really female.

This issue is further complicated by racial bias that also seeps into
these perceptions. There is a widely held standard of beauty and
femininity that is based on white racial characteristics. Because an
assumption of whiteness has permeated gender norms, many features
typically associated with white women are popularly mischaracterized
as features of all women. Thus, women of color are often perceived as
being less feminine. In a system where perception determines whether
an athlete's gender will be tested, the inevitable result will be that
women of color are more likely to be challenged.

The new policy creates a curious system that is both overly and
underly broad. Because the test will be administered only to those who
appear "suspicious," it will miss women whose testosterone levels are
outside the "approved" range but whose outward appearance conforms to
mainstream gender norms. At the same time, it will result in countless
false positives, disproportionately targeting women for testing only
because they do not match stereotypical expectations about gender, not
because their testosterone levels are atypically high. These gross
disparities are troubling, and they raise a fundamental question: If a
test doesn't have to be administered to everyone, and if there is no
objective way to determine ahead of time who is likely to fail the
test, then why does it need to be administered at all?

To be sure, the challenge of how to allow people to gender-identify
for themselves and maintain a fair and competitive sports system is a
difficult one, and the IOC is working in earnest to try to strike a
workable and respectful balance. As the Times' article notes, it may
not be realistic to simply allow any person who identifies as a woman
to compete as a woman.

However, while it may be insufficient to end the inquiry at how a
person identifies, it is equally insufficient to ignore the way a
person identifies. It would be easier to talk about these issues if
they were merely thought experiments about gender theory, but they're
not. They are real-world policies that challenge the identities of
real people. It is impossible to disregard the psychological impact on
these young women, who are in effect being "tested" to determine
whether they can call themselves female. That consideration must
inform the way we deal with this issue and demands sensitivity. A
system that by design singles out only those who do not conform to
stereotypical notions of femininity -- especially when those notions
are inherently based on gender and racial bias -- is simply not an
acceptable solution.

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