The controversy and associated testing is of interest as illustrating questions about
- law & identity,
- the nature of gender,
- popular culture (one critic claimed that Semenya must be a man because she has beefy arms, a claim dismissed by her father on the basis that she has a passion for doing push-ups),
- human rights ('bend, spread & be searched for witches' marks' as a condition of competition?),
- media ethics (one tabloid headline reads "Prove You're Not A Boy") and
- athletics as a weakly-regulated business.
The ostensible significance of gender verification in athletics is attributed to the perceived advantage of masculinity, with males having significantly greater testosterone (critical to building muscle bulk for the strength that can determine a competition). In reality verification also reflects anxieties in popular culture about genetic endowments (covert/overt racism), fixity of characteristics in an age of pharmaceutical or other modification - noted for example in Maxwell Mehlman's The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) - and about gender roles.
As Jonathan Reeser notes in 'Gender identity and sport: is the playing field level?' in 39(10) British Journal of Sports Medicine (2005) 695-699, 'verification' is not new. It was systematised by the IAAF during the early 1960s, with female athletes in international sporting events undergoing physical examinations of their private parts, perceived by some people as demeaning (and by others as the price paid for entry to endorsement-land) and problematical in instances of 'ambiguous external genitalia' - characterised by some theorists as signifying an intersex identity and by smutty schoolboys as the sign of hermaphoditism.
The 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games saw introduction of a buccal smear genetic test, ie analysis based on a sample of cells scraped from the test subject's mouth. That 'sex chromatin' aimed to definitively determine gender by ascertaining whether the subject had the XY chromosomes of a male or two XX chromosomes of a female. It proved contentious because of false positive and false negatives, questions about the performance (or merely availability) of laboratories for processing the samples, and disputes about women endowed with the XY chomosomes that from a legal perspective could be seen as constructing 'maleness' but experienced who 'androgen insensitivity syndrome' and were thus in every other respect female. The test has been substantially replaced by more sophisticated analysis centred on the sex-determining SRY gene in the male chromosome.
What of Semenya? Her coach has said that she has "nothing to hide" and reportedly even offered journalists the telephone numbers of room-mates who have seen her naked in the shower. Next stop, a centrefold? After dropping the ball the IAAF has now indicated that gender verification will involve several measures, potentially including a psychological profile that will supposedly determine whether the athlete 'feels' that she is a woman. That profiling has some recognition in treatment or recognition of gender dysphoria, including surgery such as that featured in the Western Australian case featured earlier this week.
Points of entry to the large medical literature include 'Intersex and the Olympic Games' by Robert Ritchie, John Reynard and Tom Lewis in 101(8) Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2008) 395-399; 'Gender verification of female athletes' by Elsas, Ljungqvist, Ferguson-Smith, Simpson, Genel, Carlson, Ferris, de la Chapelle & Ehrhardt in 2(4) Genetic Medicine (2000) 249-54; 'Gender verification testing in sport' by Ferris in 48(3) British Medical Bulletin (1992) 683-697; and 'Gender verification of female Olympic athletes’ by Dickinson, Genel, Robinowitz, Turner & Woods in 34(10) Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (2002) 1539-1542.
Among the legal literature on interse and transgender in sport see 'Defining male and female: Intersexuality and the collision between law and biology' by Julie Greenberg in 41(2) Arizona Law Review (1998) 265-328 and her 'Intersex and Intrasex Debates: Building Alliances to Challenge Sex Discrimination' in 13(2) Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender (2006) 101-118; 'Far from the finishline: Transsexualism and athletic competition' by Pilgrim, Martin & Binder in 13 Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal (2002) 495-550; 'Swallows and Amazons, or the Sporting Exception To the Gender Recognition Act' by David McCardle in 17(1) Social & Legal Studies (2008) 39–57; 'Hacking the gender binary myth: recognizing fundamental rights for the intersexed' by Benson in 12 Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender (2005) 31; 'The Use of Drug Testing to Police Sex and Gender in the Olympic Games' by H Olsen-Acre in 13 Michigan Journal of Gender & Law (2006) 207-248; 'Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games' by Sheila Cavanagh & Heather Sykes in 12(3) Body & Society (2006) 75-102; 'Who will make room for the intersexed' by Kate Haas in 30(1) American Journal of Law & Medicine (2004) 41-68; 'Verifying the myth: olympic sex testing and the category "woman"' by Laura Wackwitz in 26(6) Women's Studies International Forum (2003) 553-560; and 'Gender Verification' by Arne Ljungqvist in Women In Sport (Wiley, 2000) 183-193.
