#  >  > Living And Legal Affairs In Thailand >  >  > Thailand and Asia News >  >  > World News >  >  Olympics tells gender bending athletes to drop 'em

## Texpat

*The gender trap*

*  We're familiar with drug testing for athletes, but officials  at the Beijing Olympics will be taking things one stage further and examining  competitors whose sex is in doubt. And it is far from being a new problem.*

By Emine Saner
The Guardian
July 30, 2008

For more than a year, officials in Beijing have been designing a special  laboratory to determine the sex of any athletes taking part in this year's  Olympic games.

"Suspected athletes will be evaluated from their external  appearances by experts and undergo blood tests to examine their sex hormones,  genes and chromosomes for sex determination," says Professor Tian Qinjie. The  tests will not be conducted on every female athlete, but will be required if  serious doubts have been raised about an individual competitor - invariably one  competing in the women's events.

"The aim is to protect fairness at the games  while also protecting the rights of people with abnormal sexual development," he  says. 

 The International Olympic Committee (IOC) introduced sex testing in 1968 at  the Olympic games in Mexico City, after the masculine appearance of some  competitors, many pumped up by anabolic steroids, had started to raise questions  about the gender of athletes in female events. Unsurprisingly,  gender-determination tests were seen as degrading, with female competitors  having to submit to humiliating and invasive physical examinations by a series  of doctors. Later, the IOC decided to use a supposedly more sophisticated  genetic test, based on chromosomes. Women usually have two X chromosomes; men an  X and a Y chromosome. So, according to the rules of the test, only those  athletes with two X chromosomes could be classed as women. However, many  geneticists criticised the tests, saying that sex is not as simple as X and Y  chromosomes and is not always simple to ascertain.

 It is thought that around one in 1,000 babies are born with an "intersex"  condition, the general term for people with chromosomal abnormalities. It may be  physically obvious from birth - babies may have ambiguous reproductive organs,  for instance - or it may remain unknown to people all their lives. At the  Atlanta games in 1996, eight female athletes failed sex tests but were all  cleared on appeal; seven were found to have an "intersex" condition. As a  result, by the time of the Sydney games in 2000, the IOC had abolished universal  sex testing but, as will happen in Beijing, some women still had to prove they  really were women. 

 Transsexuals, who have had a sex change from male to female, can compete in  women's events in the Olympics, as long they wait two years after the  operation.
 The following are some of the more famous instances when female athletes were  caught in the gender trap.

*Santhi Soundarajan*

 One of the most tragic recent cases is yet to reach a conclusion.  Soundarajan, a 27-year-old Indian athlete, has had to endure public humiliation  after she was stripped of her silver medal for the 800m at the Asian games in  2006. Soundarajan, who has lived her entire life as a woman, failed a gender  test, which usually includes examinations by a gynaecologist, endocrinologist,  psychologist and a genetic expert. The precise results of the test have not been  made public, but it has been reported that the likely cause is a condition  called Androgen insensitivity syndrome, where a person has the physical  characteristics of a woman but whose genetic make-up includes a male chromosome.  

The Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley, who has undergone sex reassignment surgery,  is one of a number of people who are calling for Soundarajan's medal to be  reinstated. "It should never have been handled in such a gross manner, amounting  to public humiliation because of their ignorance of her condition," Worley has  said. "The Olympic movement has been dealing with intersex people since the  1930s. You'd think they would have got the hang of it by now." The humiliation  and prospect that her career may be over has taken its toll on Soundarajan. In  September, Indian newspapers reported that she had survived a suicide attempt.  

*Edinanci Silva*

 Born with both male and female sex organs, the Brazilian judo player had  surgery in the mid-90s so that she could live and compete as a woman. According  to the IOC, this made her eligible to participate in the games and she competed  in Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000 and Athens in 2004. In Sydney, she beat the  Australian judoka Natalie Jenkins, who raised the issue of Silva's gender in a  press conference, constantly referring to her as "he". "I have never fought that  one before. My plan was not to grip with her, she's - he's - very strong," she  said. Silva gave a mouth swab to officials, which proved she was female. 

*Dora Ratjen*

 In the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Adolf Hitler wanted to show the world  the supremacy of the Aryan race - and he needed German athletes to win. Ratjen,  notable for her deep voice and her refusal to share the shower room with the  other female athletes, was Germany's entry for the women's high jump. She came  fourth. Britain's competitor, Dorothy Tyler, who won a silver medal, remembers  her. "I had competed against Dora and I knew she was a man," she says. "You  could tell by the voice and the build. But 'she' was far from the only athlete.  You could tell because they would always go into the toilet to get changed. We'd  go and stand on the seat of the next-door cubicle or look under the door to see  if we could catch them." Tyler held the world record for the high jump, but when  officials wrote to her telling her that Ratjen had broken it, she wrote back. "I  said: 'She's not a woman, she's a man,'" she says. "They did some research and  found 'her' serving as a waiter called Hermann, so I got my world record back  again." Dora, who had been born Hermann Ratjen, had in fact been a member of the  Hitler Youth and said that the Nazis had forced him to enter as a woman. 

*Stella Walsh*

 At one point, Walsh, a Polish-American sprinter, was the fastest woman in the  world. Born Stanislawa Walasiewicz in Poland in 1911, she grew up in the United  States, although she represented her country of birth at the 1932 and 1936  Olympics, winning gold and silver medals respectively for the 100m sprint.  During her long career, she set more than 100 national and world records and was  inducted into the American Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1975. She lived her  entire life as a woman, and even had a short-lived marriage to an American man.  In 1980, Walsh was killed by mistake during an armed robbery at a shopping mall  in Cleveland, Ohio. The postmortem revealed she had male genitalia, although  this did not prove that she was a man as she was also found to have both male  and female chromosomes, a genetic condition known as mosaicism. 

*Heidi Krieger*

 It is believed that as many as 10,000 East German athletes were caught up in  a nightmarish state-sponsored attempt to build a race of superhuman communist  sports heroes and force-fed cocktails of steroids and other  performance-enhancing drugs. One of them was Heidi Krieger, a shot putter. When  she was 16, her coach put her on steroids and contraceptive pills and she gained  weight, built muscle and started to develop body hair. By 1986, aged 20, she was  European champion. Her overdeveloped physique had put a huge amount of pressure  on her frame, causing medical problems, while the drugs had caused mood swings,  depression and resulted in at least one suicide attempt. By the mid-90s, Krieger  underwent gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Andreas. She had  already been confused about her gender, but felt that the drugs had pushed her  over the edge. "I didn't have control," Krieger told the New York Times four  years ago. "I couldn't find out for myself which sex I wanted to be." At the  trial in 2000 of Manfred Ewald, the East German sports official and architect of  the doping regime, Krieger said "They just used me like a machine".

The gender trap | Sport | The Guardian

***

Perhaps the Teak Door Kathoey Crusaders can put together a grassroots effort to petition the IOC for a third category of athlete. I mean, like, how can all these wonderful, bright and marvelously individualistic kathoeys compete? It just isn't fair. Oh, they need their own changing rooms too.  :Roll Eyes (Sarcastic): 




> It is thought that around one in 1,000 babies are born with an "intersex" condition, the general term for people with chromosomal abnormalities.


How many members does TD have now? ~7,000? I could name a few suspects.  :Smile:

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## blackgang

> Transsexuals, who have had a sex change from male to female, can compete in women's events in the Olympics, as long they wait two years after the operation


This will most likely include the whole of the Thai teams fielded from here.

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## The Fresh Prince

fatima whitbread got away with it for years!

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## Happyman

Wonder what she looks like now ?

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## Norton

> The tests will not be conducted on every female athlete, but will be required if serious doubts have been raised about an individual competitor - invariably one competing in the women's events.


I protest.  Men should be subjected to the same scrutiny! :Smile:

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## Norton

> Wonder what she looks like now ?

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## The Fresh Prince

> Wonder what she looks like now ?


I think I saw here on t.v a while back and she'd got a bit less blokie. off the roids now though.

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## Texpat

Celebrate your individuality and DEMAND your own dressing room!

It's nobody's business what dangles or doesn't betwixt your legs (er, stems, sorry ladies).

Mince and twirl your hair and be who you are!

 :SmashfreakB:

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## Propagator



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## Spin

> fatima whitbread got away with it for years!


Thats Daley Thompson isnt it? :Smile:

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## mediamanbkk

I seem to remember that Fatima Whitbread had a British Army soldier as a boyfriend.. dont know what the final outcome was, (ie did they get married)  but I bet he got  hell from his mates...

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## mediamanbkk

Apparently she is married and has a son and they all live in Essex


Triumph and despair: Fatima Whitbread | Sport | The Observer

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