I read an interesting op-ed by Jennifer Finney Boylan about classification of Olympic athletes as male or female. Apparently, they’re now checking the sex of athletes based on physical appearance and blood samples. This should be an improvement over the simple chromosome test which can label a woman as a man because she has a Y chromosome, even if she is developmentally and physically female. But then Boylan writes:
Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.
I’m starting to lose the thread here. Nobody is talking about excluding from Olympic competition women who have had hysterctomies or cannot become pregnant, right? And lesbians are allowed to compete too, no? And makeup might be required for Miss America competition but not for athletes. Boylan continues:
So what makes someone female then? . . . The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life . . . The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.
Would this really work? This just seems like a recipe for cheating, for Olympic teams in authoritarian countries to take some of their outstanding-but-not-quite-Olympic-champion caliber male athletes and tell them to live like women. It doesn’t seem so fair to female athletes from the U.S., for example, to have to compete with any guy in the world who happens to be willing to say, for the purposes of the competition, that, in his heart, he feels like a woman.
Why do I mention this in a statistics blog?
I think people are often uncomfortable with ambiguity. Boylan correctly notes that sex tests can have problems and that there is no perfect rule, but then she jumps to the recommendation that there be no rules at all.
It seems to me that the only good answer is to change the rules completely. Why not ignore sex altogether, and do for every sport (or, where it is relevant) what they do in boxing – stratify by weight (or height, or whatever). That way, men can compete against women, and you can remove the advantage that men supposedly have.
I could drone on and on about everything I don't like about this article, but let's just say that, as far as I am aware, athletes aren't classified according to gender, they are classified according to sex, which leaves her "what lies within her, or his, heart" suggestion completely besides the point – quite apart from questions of assessment.
Richard,
if you did that you would see women winning close to nothing in any discipline in which muscle mass plays an important role (i.e., almost each of them). On average, men are more naturally muscular than women even if you control for weight.
Methinks that Boylan extrapolates far too much. I don't think having men and women classifications mean that lesbians cannot play sports. While I agree that lines become blurred in other areas, athletics is one with strongly statistical evidence is that a difference does exist in performance between men and women.
Lastly, its athletics, not mathematics, who cares if a difference exists?
"Would this really work? This just seems like a recipe for cheating, for Olympic teams in authoritarian countries to take some of their outstanding-but-not-quite-Olympic-champion caliber male athletes and tell them to live like women. It doesn't seem so fair to female athletes from the U.S., for example, to have to compete with any guy in the world who happens to be willing to say, for the purposes of the competition, that, in his heart, he feels like a woman."
It seems to me you cherry-picked a cheating example. How do you feel about an authoritarian government (say, Saudi Arabia) telling an athlete/citizen that she can't compete for her country as a woman because she was born with a penis and an XY chromosome pairing.
I think this contrasting example shows the degree that you're cherry picking to make your conclusion salient to the blog audience.