From Plan to allow transsexuals into Games on back burner:
Should transsexual athletes be sanctioned, I guess we’ll see after a few Olympics whether they’re dominating the women’s competitions or not. If so, I suppose the next step is a transsexual class of competitions?
I vaguely recall some controversy about the (then evil) Russians entering men in the disc and spear throwing events in the past. Some of them were pretty husky, but that alone doesn’t prove much.
Peace,
mangeorge
After sex reassignment surgery (SRS) male-to-female’s muscle mass DOES decrease and their body fat levels rise. The only MtF athlete I can recall well is Renee Richards, who claimed her tennis game suffered after SRS due to lessened strength.
On the flip side, FtM transsexuals would gain strength, and steroid testing may be complicated by the fact that hormones are a necessary part of the SRS. I find it odd that no one thinks they might have an advantage (you know, just up the drugs a bit more than strictly necessary…)
Truthfully, I don’t think there are enough SRS athletes to make a significant difference in competition. And I don’t think there are very many male athletes willing to undergo SRS just to win a few medals (although there are probably a couple out there - there’s always a few)
What this might do is open the Olympics to intersexuals, those who are born with ambiguous gender and later undergo surgery to put them in one camp or the other. Currently, it is possible for such people to enter Olympic competition, but the testing and certification they undergo is a bother. But an athlete with something like testosterone-insensitivity (that’s a genetic XY who has an external female appearance), of which there have been a few in Olympic history, is actually at a disadvantage - being insensitive to testosterone they are also immune to its muscle-building effects. Normal females, however, do produce testosterone (in small quantities) and it does affect their muscle development. I don’t think any of the genetically ambiguous competitors have ever won a medal in the Olympics.
I think this thread might be Great Debate material.
It seems to me that the idea between the division of men and women in the Olympics so far is that we’ve got two seperate groups of abilities. That men have this athletic ability up here and women have this athletic ability down here, reversed in a few sports. And that the difference between the average of them is so great that it is unfair to ask them to compete.
For instance take women in golf, if you have an infinite number of men and women and you train them all their lives for a golf tournament then (I firmly believe) there will be an infinite number of men ahead of the highest placed woman. Simply because women can’t compete with the complete male game due to the basic structures of the two.
Now men and women both have a wide spread of abilities and there is quite a bit of overlap, in the above senario there will of course be an infinite number of men who score below the highest rated woman. So if we’re dealing with this unemotionally you have to ask “How many different types of humans are there and what are the spread of abilities for each one?” If you had an infinite number of men who have had sex changes operations to become women how would they fare against an infinite number of XX women? If, let’s say the shape of their hip bones makes it so that an infinite number of them will be ahead of the highest placed XX woman in the 100m dash, then it seems a bit unfair to force the two disparate groups together. Of course this all seems a nigthmare to figure out. Especially since so much of what is wanted here is the ability to self-identify rather then being told what you are.
Thinking about it emotionally is even more difficult. The urge to toss out all divisions and say “may the fastest human win the gold” is strong. I haven’t thought about, nor heard enough arguements, in this field to make any sort of decision.
Probably why there’s two threads in Great Debates (one from last November, one from last week) discussing it.