Sex Testing in Sports

After reading an article on Mokgadi Caster Semenya of South Africa, I looked into the highly controversial problems dealing with gender determination. It is a very sensitive subject when dealing with athletes that fall into these categories, and can end a career upon embarrassment.

Sex testing was introduced at the 1968 Olympics. It came about as the result of Polish men were competing in various women sports. There have been man other cases throughout the year including Mokgadi's. Its came under criticism lately because of the fact that only women have been submitted to the testing. They have officially stopped from testing every athlete at Olympic and World Championships, but the IOC still has the power to test individual athletes if a problem does arrive. The process was stopped because of the humiliation and the unequal treatment between the male and female sex.

The testing is a very long process that goes farther than the slender hips, Adam apple checks, and muscular bodies. It is determined through chromosome testing which has been highly controversial too. Competitors whose test results showed chromosomes other than XX were considered to have failed the test and were consequently barred from competing as women. As the IOC Medical Team stated "I consider that our duty as doctors comes before everything, even Olympics, and that if we find such hybrid beings, we must if possible treat them and at the very least, help them to accept their fate as we ourselves do when we discover a shortcoming of some kind in ourselves. … these people are to be pitied, for throughout their lives they will be inadapted and thanks to sport, they probably tried to achieve a difficult assimilation into an often hostile, and even stupid, society." One of the most popular cases happened at the 1976 US Open where Renée Richards was banned from playing, until further testing was concluded. Richards appealed the ban, and ended up winning in here favor. It was constituted under the right for transsexuals rights.

There are many suspicious cases dealing with the sex testing controversy; there are guidelines set up now that to be constituted under a specific class you have to follow if your considered one of the hybrid athletes. As in the reading on ICON Teetzle-Equality, Equity, and Inclusion: Issues in Women and Transgendered Athletes' Participation at the Olympics, "Classifying individuals as strictly male or female in sport, as well as in the rest of society, and offering only two options for competition, fails to recognize and take into consideration the spectrum of individuals who fall somewhere between male and female, including the 0.1 – 1% of the global population born with ambiguous genitalia, those who have changed or transcended their sex assigned at birth, and those who identify with a sex other than female or male." I personally feel that there need to be a class like this in future Olympics, it would be a huge movement for transsexual athletes.