About Sex Testing and The Olympics

There's been a whole lot of fuss made over a couple of athletes in the Olympics who don't appear female enough to satisfy some people that they are in fact women.  I'm not going to link to the various stories on the specific incidents in part because I do not wish to contribute further (or in the future) to their harassment.  

A large number of people are running around going "If your chromosomes are XY, you are a man".  This is false - a wide range of variations can result in people having atypical chromosomes and their bodies still being female, or predominantly feminized.  

The chart above highlights all of the major variations that can occur, and the way the body is affected.  It's here to make one fundamental point:  You cannot simply look at someone's chromosomes and determine "male" or "female" as some kind of absolute binary.  Chromosome testing is not in any way a scientifically sound way to assess sex. 

The simple fact is that while chromosomes are somewhat predictive, there is a whole complex series of biological interactions that take place which can vary considerably from individual to individual.  It took 30+ years to get the IOC and other bodies to drop this approach.  In that time, how many women found out that they weren't XX is unknown, but it certainly happened.  

More philosophically, the fact that sex testing is exclusively aimed at women strikes me as fundamentally misogynistic - rooted in the old notion that women are not to be trusted.  Note that men are not scrutinized like this at all.  Women on the other hand are being scrutinized for everything from height to musculature to the apparent size of their skeletons - all in the name of "keeping men out" ... supposedly.  The blunt reality is that this has far more to do with policing women's bodies and lives than it does ensuring safety in sport. 

Followed to its logical conclusions, the degree of scrutiny that female athletes are subjected to will not result in the best rising to the top, but rather a subset of women who happen to fit into a narrowly conceptualized notion of "female enough" will be the only women allowed to compete.  Women who are "too muscular" or whatever will be hounded out for one reason or another. 

What does this tell us?  Primarily that sports in general has a long history of misogyny, and the current models for classifying athletes are in many ways fundamentally flawed - and the victims of those flaws are typically women.  

I think paths forward include demanding that the various sport governing bodies start funding some serious scientific inquiry into how the human body, in all its variations, interacts with their sport - with a specific eye towards identifying a new set of criteria for "who competes with whom".  

Whatever categorization might arise from that is certainly going to be much more complex than the current models - although some sports already have classification systems around various physical traits that might provide some useful guidance for where to start.  

Further, as I wrote about back here, sports is also very much a matter of public policy as well, and the goals of public policy aren't just about "who brings home the medals".  I would argue that far too much energy is being expended here on elite level competition in ways that will ultimately be very destructive to  the public good that sports policy is really about.