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ABSTRACT
In many settings, decision makers look to science as the basis for making decisions that are made difficult by their social or political context. Sport is no different. For more than a half century, sports officials have looked to science to provide a clear distinction between men and women for purposes of determining who is eligible to participate in women’s athletic competitions. However, the science of sex provides overwhelming evidence that there is no such clear biological demarcation that differentiates men and women. Despite this evidence, the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations in 2011 implemented a form of ‘sex testing’ based on androgens, and specifically, testosterone levels in females. This paper evaluates this policy, finding it contradictory to scientific understandings of sex and counter to widely held social norms about gender. The paper recommends an alternative approach to determining eligibility for participation in women’s sports events, one more consistent with the stated values of sports organisations, and more generally, with principles of human dignity.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
This paper has benefitted from many conversations with many athletes, academics and journalists. Numerous colleagues have read earlier drafts of this paper. The writings of Alice Dreger, Katrina Karkazis and Bruce Kidd (and their colleagues) have been extremely enlightening. I declare no conflicts of interest and this work was not funded, beyond sabbatical time provided by the University of Colorado Boulder.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) in Denver, CO. A shorter and less academic derivation of this paper appears as Chapter 8 in my book, The Edge: the War Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports (Roaring Forties, Citation2016).
2. This paper does not attempt a comprehensive literature review, but important recent critiques include Pieper (Citation2016), Adair et al. (Citation2014), Crincoli (Citation2011), Davis and Edwards (Citation2014), Dreger (Citation2012), Karkazis et al. (Citation2012), Karkazis and Jordan-Young (Citation2013) and Schulz (Citation2012).
3. The IAAF and IOC policies are substantially similar. See Karkazis et al. (Citation2012) for a side-by-side comparison of the text of the two policies. I evaluate them as a single policy in this paper.
4. Semenya’s winning time in Berlin was 2 s off of a world record time (Cooky et al. Citation2013.).
5. In late 2014, Savinova was accused of participating in systematic doping (the taking of prohibited performance-enhancing substances) in a German television documentary, prompting a major investigation: http://www.presseportal.de/meldung/2896900/t (accessed 13 August 2017) In 2017, she was stripped of her 2012 gold medal won at London, which was then awarded to Semenya, who had won Silver.
6. https://www.iaaf.org/athletes/south-africa/caster-semenya-242560 (accessed 13 August 2017).
7. http://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/award_internet.pdf (accessed 13 August 2017).
8. I review the paper here: http://leastthing.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-review-of-bermon-and-garnier-2017-new.html (accessed 13 August 2017).
9. https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/hyperandrogenism-research (accessed 13 August 2017).
10. There are however examples of women posing as men in order to participate in sport. For instance, Kathrine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon by using her initials on the application form. She ran the race and was physically attacked on the course by one of the race organisers (Switzer Citation2007). In another example, Rusty Kanokogi entered a judo competition in 1959 as a man, winning a gold medal, which was stripped from her upon revelation that she was a woman. The medal was awarded to her in 2009, shortly before her death (Robinson Citation2009).
11. In 2014, the University of Baylor basketball star player Isiah Austin withdrew from the NBA draft and retired from basketball upon learning that he had Marfan syndrome (ESPN Citation2014).
12. See also Adair et al. (Citation2014).
13. Compare: Schultz (Citation2012) and Davis and Edwards (Citation2014).
14. There are several more nuanced approaches to the approach characterised as ‘anything goes’ including self-determination of gender and the following of legal status. See Jordan-Young and Karkazis (Citation2012) for discussion.
15. IOC guidelines on nationality (International Olympic Committee (IOC) Citation2013) and IAAF guidelines (IAAF Citation2012).
16. Under FIFA’s rules, Januzaj could have chosen between England, Belgium, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and Turkey. He ultimately chose to play for Belgium (Gibson Citation2013).
17. For comparison, the online social networking site Facebook offers its users a choice of at least 58 different genders (Goldman Citation2014). Germany and France allow parents to legally identify their child as neither male nor female. (Reuters Citation2016).
18. Many sports organisations already have such policies and procedures in place. See IAAF (Citation2011d), for instance. Policies governing changing gender categories are important and deserve their own detailed analysis, which goes beyond the scope of this paper.
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Roger Pielke
Roger Pielke has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder since 2001. He has written widely on the role of science in policy and politics.