The ‘right’ women for the Olympics

By: Zoe Vedova

The Olympics are a dazzling feat of globalization, one which inadvertently highlights global inequalities and discrimination. Though the host country’s tax dollars may funnel into dazzling spectacles of opening ceremonies and torch relays, the fanfare of Olympic prestige and glory appears to be a façade. A façade that cannot disguise the Olympic-sized obstacles faced by athletes whom the International Olympic Committee (IOC) deem to be of the incorrect gender. The IOC has kept up the practice of testing female athletes who have a muscular, masculine physique in the name of leveling the playing field, to make sure no woman unwittingly cheats with their unnatural levels of testosterone.

At least this is the rhetoric the IOC promotes.

This gender testing is often invasive and humiliatingly publicized. It does not achieve the altruistic goal of enforcing fairness in a sacred competition; instead it works to further police women and the female body. Every four years, the Olympics act as a highly televised microcosm of global sexism. Accrediting female-identified athlete’s accomplishments to their ‘manly’ attributes discredits the years of dedication and perseverance they spent perfecting a sport. The concept is also hinged on the largely contested notion of a binary gender spectrum, in which a person can only be male or female. However, the more athletes the IOC investigates and tests for female gender validity, the more the IOC runs up against the issue that not all human bodies — their chromosomes, organs, and hormones — conform to our criteria of what constitutes a man and a woman.

The medical diagnosis that sparks the largest ordeal around the gender of an athlete is known as hyperandrogenism. This is the result of a female body producing excessive amount of the male sex hormone testosterone. Both men and women produce testosterone, but when testosterone levels exceed the average level for women to have (10 nanomoles per litre of blood), that person becomes categorized as intersex.

 And thus the problems begin.

In 2009, the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) investigation of Caster Semenya’s gender highlighted each problematic step of enforcing fairness through hormone levels. Semenya was 18 in 2009, a track and field star from South Africa, who brought home gold in the 800-metre race in Berlin. She ran the race in 1:56:72, a whole two seconds ahead of her next competitor. She was such a powerful athlete, with a masculine facial structure and muscular legs, competitors and critics openly questioned if she was even a woman at all. Semenya has been declared as an intersex athlete, though this declaration comes from the assumption that women, even at the height of physical human power, must conform to an acceptable level of femininity.

After the testing, Semenya was allowed to keep her medal. The result of the testing, however, was the creation of the Hyperandrogenism Regulation in 2011. This regulation essentially meant that women could not have androgen levels within the male range. There was never confirmation on whether drugs or surgery were undergone, but it is widely presumed Semenya agreed to the IAAF’s terms, as she appeared at the London 2012 games, where she won silver. However, in an ironic twist it was discovered the gold medal winner, Mariya Savinova-Farnosava from Russia, was cheating through doping, and so the gold medal was retrospectively awarded to Semenya.

The history of Olympic gender testing is long, but its presence was kept a secret as to mitigate the social backlash. Accusing athletes as masquerading as female dates back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Testing for gender validity required Olympic candidates to provide a ‘femininity certificate’ in the 1940s. By 1966, anxiety around physically powerful women had escalated to the point of instigating “nude parades” where it became mandatory to receive a genital examination before a panel of doctors, further stigmatizing cases of intersexuality. When complaints around the humiliating practice emerged, the IOC moved over to testing chromosomes as a black-and-white ground for outing cheaters. However, this test proved as fallible as the rest and was dropped in 1999, when it was deemed to be inconclusive.

As far as the Olympics has been attempting to defend fair play, they’ve been utilizing flawed, biased tests for a long time.

The insensitivity shown towards athletes with hyperandrogenism has led to no leaps forward in protecting other competitors from cheaters. In fact, the Court of Arbitration for Sports could not conclusively say whether the excess testosterone benefitted them significantly enough to bar them from the female category. To that end, a positive decision was made by the IAAF in 2011 and a consensus statement was released and verified in 2015. This statement concluded that there will be no sex or gender testing in the upcoming 2018 Olympics in Korea, and no regulations barring female athletes with hyperandrogenism for two years.

As for Semenya, she broke the national record for the 800-metre race at the Rio Olympics in 2016, coming in at one minute 55.28 seconds. She brought home gold.

The 2018 Winter Olympics will be held in PyeongChang, Korea, commencing on February 9. While the opening ceremony will be judged as hard as any competition and the usual drama will unfold over the environmental and economic toll, perhaps this year, with intersex athletes welcome to compete, we will see less debate around gender. Though there is still far to go as far as destigmatizing intersexuality, and accepting women’s athletic ability without sexist speculation, Semenya commented, “People should learn how to unite. Sport is all about uniting people and not discriminating.”