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August 3, 2008
Classifying Olympic athletes as male or female, leading to a comment about the recognition of uncertainty in life
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.
Posted by Andrew at August 3, 2008 1:24 PM
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