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Sports culture binds us to gender binaries

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https://aeon.co/essays/sports-culture-bi...-is-unfair

EXCERPT: [...] The unfolding story of gender in sport is best understood against the backdrop of the past. Sex verification of female athletes began as a means to deter gender fraud in the 1930s and ’40s. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) created a Medical Commission in 1961 to check sex according to chromosomes – females generally have two X chromosomes, and males an X and Y. The committee even granted ‘certificates of femininity’ on the basis its genetic results.

But this binary code hasn’t held up. Not all females have two X chromosomes. And there are individuals with an X and Y chromosome who look and live like females because of androgen insensitivity syndrome, which inhibits the impact of testosterone on the cells. The Spanish athlete María José Martínez-Patiño, who had just launched her career as a promising 100-metre hurdler in the early 1980s, was one of these individuals. In 1986, the Spanish Athletics Federation disqualified her from competing after learning that her chromosomal constitution was XY. She fought the decision and refused to stop competing as a female. The European Athletics Association declared her eligible to compete two years later, however she never recovered her former standing. Martínez-Patiño suffered shame, stigma and the premature cut-off of a promising career. In 1991, the IAAF appeared willing, finally, to view gender along a spectrum, abandoning all testing; the IOC followed suit in 1999.

Hence, by the time Semenya’s case came along in 2009, the only policy regarding gender testing in sport was an unofficial ‘I know when I see it.’ The high-profile Semenya case convinced the IAAF that it needed new guidelines and a policy with teeth. By 2011, the association had implemented new regulations targeting not chromosomes, but hyperandrogenism, to weed out those with too much testosterone to compete in the female category in track and field. Anyone over the limit (100 nanograms/decilitre) had to take medication to reduce their levels of testosterone to the so-called norm. The underlying assumption: testosterone was a ‘male’ molecule conferring ‘masculine’ traits, and increased levels had to be reduced so that no women would have an unfair advantage during a race.

In so many ways, this assumption is wrong. No testosterone ceiling exists for male competition. And testosterone, which is found naturally in women’s bodies, is not a male molecule. Language is never neutral here, as the American philosopher Judith Butler points out. The language of biology creates ‘cultural sedimentation in the objects it purports to discover and neutrally describe’, as she so eloquently wrote. To suggest that too much testosterone negates one’s womanhood is to burden physiology with assumptions embedded in culture, layering words such as ‘female’ and ‘hormone’ with meanings outside of biology itself.

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault wrote that...
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