Sport’s gender trouble
Dr Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University, Canada, believes sport’s governing bodies have created unnecessary problems for themselves by trying to impose “arbitrary” gender rules. Many people assume it’s simple to determine male/female based on appearance and physical characteristics. Why are they wrong? The biology is far too complex to allow that. There is no true male or true female; the criteria don’t exist. The male/female binary is socially constructed, an idea that over time we’ve come to accept. It’s more reasonable to think of the biology as like a kaleidoscope: each of us is a unique, complex pattern of biology determined by chance.
What’s wrong with regarding those with XX chromosomes as female and those with XY as male? Chromosomes do not give us the full picture. Scientists know that there is no definitive marker for sex difference because sex isn’t really real, it’s a construct. That’s the most difficult concept for people to understand. It’s not about chromosomes, it’s not about genes, and it’s not about hormones.
Isn’t an objective distinction necessary to maintain as level as possible a playing field for sportswomen so as to protect the majority? That’s a false idea. The assumption behind it is that there are pseudo-females and real females competing in the female event. There also exists a fear that men are masquerading as women, even though there has never been a documented example of that happening. It’s absurd to think that a man would choose to compete in the female category when you think of all the moral and the social fears surrounding masculinity.
There is a massive range of biological differences. Let’s face it, Olympic athletes are exceptional almost by definition; someone like Usain Bolt is the exception among the exceptional. Why do we get so concerned about fairness in women’s sport and the exceptionalities among women while remaining entirely unconcerned about exceptionalities among men? Some scientists have argued that the IOC’S upper limit for endogenous testosterone — a rule currently suspended — was the best possible compromise. What’s the basis of your disagreement with this position? Testosterone is not the performanceenhancer many people think; it all depends on how it gets taken up in the body. In simple terms, you could have little testosterone but very good receptors and benefit more than someone with lots of testosterone but poor receptors. This calls into question the upper limit still in place for male-to-female transitioned athletes.
Any one of us could have a characteristic that predisposes an advantage in a particular sport, but no one’s concerned about that. This is really about the regulation of female bodies, stemming from cultural assumptions.
The counter-argument is that the testosterone limit, though imperfect, protected far more women than it held back or excluded. That is to argue for the tyranny of the majority. The rule is not supported by the biology. If you have to impose suffering and exclude the minority to make allowances for the fears of the majority, it’s a human rights issue. It’s not fair to discriminate against the scrutinised few.
If you remove all gender-qualifying physiological parameters, isn’t it necessary to remove male/female categories? Sure, we could philosophise about it, but I don’t think we need to annihilate these categories. Other institutions don’t have a problem with the binary. Why is it that nowadays we get so frantic about sex and gender in sport; what else is going on that’s made us more concerned?
Could we create differently defined, fairer categories as scientific knowledge extends our ability to do so? Perhaps. As science reveals more about the body, it would be interesting to see the IOC adapt to that. Maybe there are other ways of organising sport that aren’t completely wrapped around sex and gender; for example, around [performance] times, dividing people into time categories, like in the World Masters Games, but could these categories be made socially meaningful?