The Confusing Nature of Gender

Assigning sex was hardly as easy as sizing someone up visually…. “For 99 percent of the population it’s easy to determine…. But one percent of the population have conditions that make it not so straightforward” [The New York Times]. In the 1960s, athletic federations began testing athletes by scraping cells from their mouths and testing them for a pair of X chromosomes, which typically establishes a person’s sex as female (as opposed to the XY chromosomes typically carried by males). But the tests were halted in the 1990s as critics pointed out that there are medical conditions that lead individuals with two X chromosomes to develop masculine characteristics, and others that mean individuals with one X and one Y chromosome never develop masculine characteristics. Some other individuals also exist outside the usual sexes of XX females and XY males; these may include males who are XXY, further confusing the tests [Nature News].

Whether an athlete has an unfair advantage isn’t necessarily determined by their sex chromosomes. Genes are only a blueprint, and sometimes nature doesn’t follow the blueprint precisely. Take the examples of XY athletes who appear to be women. At least five enzymes are required to synthesize testosterone, the hormone that produces most male characteristics, and occasionally one of those enzymes is defective.

Link: blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/