A student was doing research today on a 2 year old news story about the case of Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian athlete stripped of the silver medal she won in the 2006 Asian games when she “failed a gender test”. It’s one of those reference requests where I’ve never heard of the subject but remain fascinated by it after the student has departed.
I cannot find any definitive answer as to how she failed it, though the rumor is that she is essentially a hermaphrodite. (For those not familiar, most hermaphrodites have only one visible set of sex organs [almost always female] but the opposite gender’s organs internally [usually testicles and an inverted penis], much like the main character in the novel Middlesex.)
Does anybody have more current information on this athlete? I am curious as to why it would even occur to do a gender verification test, or exactly what gender she should have been identified as if she is indeed chromosomally male but outwardly female. (I use the term she because she clearly identifies as female.)
There was rampant speculation that she was a hermaphrodite, which of course led to public humiliation. The likelihood was that she simply had an otherwise innocuous genetic disorder which had no relevance to her ability to compete. In my opinion, the way this case was handled was not only extraordinarily insensitive, but it demonstrated a stunning level of scientific ignorance.
Gender tests were introduced to international sports in 1966 because of concerns about men who were posing as women for competitive purposes. The following year, a polish runner named Ewa Klobukowska failed a gender test at the 1967 European Championships. Genetic testing concluded that she had the male XY chromosome.
Gender testing continued for 30 more years, but it was extremely controversial. Subsequent technological advances revealed hat Kloukowska was not XY, but rather had an XXY mutation. There was considerable debate about how to define gender and how to test for it. The problem came to a head when nine athletes failed their gender tests at the 1996 Olympics. All of the failures were appealed and overturned. In each case, the women who were branded in fact
A google search (or the wiki article) will turn up some good articles on why the practice of gender testing is considered obsolete.
There have been a few cases of individuals who were unquestionably men who simply posed as women. The most well known case is probably Stella Walsh, who won medals at the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. After she died in 1980, an autopsy revealed that she in fact was a male.
Hmm- thanks for that. That’s fascinating. I’m not being cruel but just truthful when I say that nothing in any of her pics would have made me think she was a woman.
Well, I dunno, I’d have to see her in a lineup with the rest of the 1936 Eastern European shot put teams. (No offense to any large, hairy female shot putters who may read this.)
The whole thing just seems so tragic for so many of those people who probably never knew they had an odd chromosome thing that didn’t affect their lives in any way, and then suddenly somebody calls them a cheater and a man!
Please! Use “intersex” rather than “hermaphrodite”–I don’t want to go all Politically Correct here, but hermaphrodite does have a bad association for most people and we’re trying to get people to think rather than react.
Two of my daughters are intersex kids. It’s amazing that the Asian games are so mired in the past.
As I remember–and it’s vague–there was an incident at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona where one of the female competitors failed the XX test. The officials investigated and found that she had been raised female since birth, got female hormones at puberty, etc. and they overturned the test. I don’t remember the rest…she was allowed to compete, or got to keep her medal, or some such. My google-foo has failed and if anyone can find the details I’d be grateful.
Not trying to be insensitive here, but aren’t these issues generaly murky and poorly understood? How do we know that (any one of a number of genetic/developmental conditions that lead to gender ambiguity) does not result in muscle/physique development that is not somewhere between male and female, resulting in someone who would have at least some of the advantage over a female competitor that a male would have?
As long as we are going to have gender-segregated competition for large amounts of money and fame we’ll need to have really precise answers as to who is and is not female, and it certainly can’t be the same criteria that we use in everyday life…
Well, for AIS people who appear biologically female (short of examining the internal organs) but have an XY genotype the problem is that they simply don’t react to the chemical signals that drive development towards the male - in fact if you loaded them up with additional male hormones it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. If anything, they are more feminine than the average woman who does, in fact, react to the small amounts of male hormones produced by her ovaries and adrenal glands. If anything, they’re at a disadvantage when measured against normal, XX women, particularly those who may generate slightly more androgens than average naturally.
There probably ARE conditions that would lend an advantage to a female athlete, such as one of the ones that results in bearded XX women, but such a woman would have easily passed the gender tests based on chromosomes.
So actually medical people probably do have some idea of at least a few conditions that would work for or against an athlete, but it’s people like XY AIS women who were penalized, not some woman who due to an endocrine disorder has a bristly chin and larger than average muscle mass for a woman.
One trait which is positively correlated to AIS is tallness, which would probably be considered advantageous in a number of athletic or sporting events. Basketball comes to mind.
This is not to say that I believe people who suffer from this specific condition are not women, or should in any way be excluded from womens’ sporting events on the basis of their condition. Any reasonable determination of a person’s gender must take into consideration the person’s own opinion on the matter.
You’re right. I was using that term because that’s what’s been in the Indian press, along with all the misperceptions that the word carries. This could have been an opportunity to educate, but sadly, it’s just perpetuated and spread ignorance.
