Sunday, June 17, 2012

On "policing femininity" in sport

In a move critics call “policing femininity,” recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.

If it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring. So far, at least a handful of athletes — the figure is confidential — have been prescribed treatment, but their numbers could increase. Last month, the International Olympic Committee began the approval process to adopt similar rules for the Games.

South Africa is ground zero of the debate. An estimated 1 per cent of the 50 million people here are born “intersex,” meaning they don’t fit typical definitions of male or female.

For female athletes, this may mean they were born with hyperandrogenism, a disorder in which they have hormone levels similar to those of a man.

Sometimes, the distorted levels result from conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes a hormonal imbalance in the body, while other cases are pure hermaphroditism, where women are born with some male reproductive organs.


Many elite athletes have bodies outside the range of what is typical. They might be taller than usual (basketball) or shorter than usual (gymnastics), or have unusual bodily proportions (e.g. Michael Phelps), or have a high ratio of muscle (weight-lifters) or a low ratio of fat (distance runners). I'm sure many athletes also have cardio or lung capacity that is far better than the human norm. If their hormone levels are naturally occurring, they're just another physical atypicality that makes people especially well-suited to their particular sport.

If they're going to police hormone levels and force athletes to artificially alter their hormone levels or withdraw for competition, they should also be policing things like unusual height or proportions or lung capacity. If they insist on hormone levels being within a certain range of the human average, they should insist on that for all physical characteristics.

3 comments:

laura k said...

This reminds me of prohibitions against gay men being blood donors. If you're worried about HIV, then test all donated blood for HIV. If they're worried about performance enhancers, then that's what they should be testing for, in all athletes.

So glad you blogged about this, I would have missed it. It's bad enough when beauty pageants do this. This seems even worse to me.

impudent strumpet said...

In a way, I think the beauty pageant situation is worse in that being less feminine is not a competitive advantage in a beauty pageant. With sports, at least you can see how more testosterony hormone levels could be seen as a competitive advantage, whereas someone more testosterony who wins a women's beauty pageant is actually overcoming an additional obstacle (like the guy who won some Olympic event a while back and then tested positive for marijuana).

I do think it's completely inappropriate to ask people to artificially alter their naturally-occurring hormone levels just so they look good on paper though. I'm going back and forth between whether or not that's worse than saying they just can't compete at all.

(And the irony with the donated blood is they test it all for HIV anyway.)

laura k said...

Re donated blood, that's one reason it's so maddening. Does anyone seriously think a person ticking off a sexual orientaton on a form is adequate screening for a blood supply? So why even ask???