China's Olympic-sized sex and gender problems
Rounding up and testing female 'gender suspects' while disallowing sex talk to foreigners makes Beijing look like a bad place to be a top female athleteIn a couple weeks, the Olympics begin in China. It's a big country. So big that it manufactures most of the world's sex toys, and was recently host to the world's largest sex toy expo, the Fifth China I
International Adult Toys and Reproductive Health Exhibition. In 2007, the expo boasted over 30,000 attendees who gawked, poked, squeezed and generally tingled (or cringed) at all the weird and wonderful and wobbly and mystifyingly gender-bending sex gizmos on display.
Next month, something similar is supposed to happen on a more athletic scale: The 2008 Summer Olympics will attract athletes, press and spectators from all over the world. And China's done some pretty weird things to get ready for the fete. Like Beijing shutting down all building sites and many factories to clear the smog after failing air quality tests. And arresting (or sorta-disappearing) the founder of China's pioneer human rights Web site 64Tianwang — the numbers refer to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There's a lot more, like the pre-Olympic clampdown on sex, after-hours bars and adult lifestyle chat.
Next month, something similar is supposed to happen on a more athletic scale: The 2008 Summer Olympics will attract athletes, press and spectators from all over the world. And China's done some pretty weird things to get ready for the fete. Like Beijing shutting down all building sites and many factories to clear the smog after failing air quality tests. And arresting (or sorta-disappearing) the founder of China's pioneer human rights Web site 64Tianwang — the numbers refer to the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There's a lot more, like the pre-Olympic clampdown on sex, after-hours bars and adult lifestyle chat.
No sex please, we're Chinese. As if. But what's more to the point with China, sexuality, sexual human rights and the Olympics is Beijing's announcement that it will set up a "sex determination lab" for female Olympic athletes "suspected" to be males. You know, because we're sneaky like that. We could, like, totally kick your ass at the pole-vault competition with more experience than a girl should probably have with a pole in China, and no one likes that.
According to Xinhuanet News, "Suspected athletes will be evaluated from their external appearances by experts and undergo blood tests to examine their sex hormones, genes and chromosomes for sex determination, according to Prof. Tian Qinjie of Peking Union Medical College Hospital." In this context, women are being singled out as "suspects," "gender cheats," "getting caught," "being abnormal" and "failing" to be female, and judged by a parade of endocrinologists, gynecologists, a geneticist and a psychologist. Boys will apparently always be boys. Meaning, at the Olympics, men are never gender suspects. Contrast Beijing's female gender profiling to Athens, where at the 2004 Olympics, Durex donated 130,000 free condoms to athletes, and the Sydney 2000 Games, where each athlete got 51 condoms on arrival at the Olympic Village (yet happily, another 20,000 were cargo-dropped in when Olympians were "burning rubber" in earnest).
How are Chinese officials deciding whom to test? You only need to be "suspicious-looking" to be forced into testing. The Olympic Committee's woman-test began in the 1960s when Communist countries were untrustworthy "Reds," Russian and German female athletes made leatherfags lift weights a little more often, and the first method of "testing" was to "ask" suspected women to parade nude before a panel of doctors to verify their sex. Some didn't pass simply because they didn't "look right" down there.
San Francisco's Mikayla Connell is the former chairperson of the Board of Directors at Transgender Law Center and current board president of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee, and also an attorney at the Judicial Council of California. Transgender and intersex issues abound here, but turns out, the Olympics already have policies for such athletes. Connell tells me, "Though the subject of transsexual athletes might come to mind — that's not what this is really about. The Olympics has specific rules regarding transsexual athletes and how they can compete. With the rules about transsexuals in place, the people most directly affected (as I understand it) by 'gender verification' testing are people whose chromosomes, genitalia or genetics don't conform to whatever arbitrary standard the testing agency has created or adopted. People are drawing a line in the sand in a desert without borders — the line is arbitrary, and ultimately unsupportable scientifically. And unfortunately, the results are devastating to those found to be on the 'wrong' side of that arbitrary line. The Olympic Council of Asia should learn from the International Olympic Committee's 31 years of experience and drop this testing — it doesn't work and it's harmful to the athletes."
Connell also thinks — while the rest of us girls practically burst into our own Olympic torches of anger — that the Olympic Council hasn't come a very long way, baby. Not one to miss an exciting moment of misogyny, Connell adds, "You don't see men being tested for 'masculinity,' just women being tested for 'femininity.' There seems to be a perception in certain parts of the sports world that women who are really good at sports must not actually be women, but men in disguise."
But is this even legal? Connell tells me that it depends on whether you look like the current, local, cultural standard of female or not: "The Olympic Council of Asia, the governing body of sports in Asia, sets the rules, and despite other sports sanctioning bodies around the world dropping these kind of tests after decades of failures, they are persisting in the use of said tests. In short, the OCA is in charge, but they are at least a decade behind the times on this subject."
But OK, so then why should gender be tested for, like steroids? Connell tells us, "Gender should NOT be tested, and much of the international sports community already knows this. 'Gender verification' began in the late '60s, and was introduced into the Olympics in the 1968 games in Mexico. For the next 31 years, the International Olympic Committee (and various other sports sanctioning bodies) struggled with various methods to verify gender — they looked at genitalia, chromosomes and various other attributes, and in the end, they gave up. While the majority of people may conform to what is believed to be male (male genitalia, with XY chromosomes) or female (female genitalia with XX chromosomes) there is a sizable portion of the population that simply doesn't. There are women with XY chromosomes; there are people with genitalia not easily classified as male or female. The lines of gender get blurry around the edges — gender is not as binary (male or female) as people are brought up to think. And the international sports community learned this the hard way as it spent more than 30 years trying to nail down a sure-fire test for who is female and who is not. And in the end? They gave up. The International Olympic Committee dropped gender verification in 1999 because there simply is no reliable test for femininity, something that scientists and doctors had been telling the sports world for years. Socially, we can quickly (if inaccurately) divide people into two camps, male and female, but scientifically, human beings are not that simple."
Humans are not simple when it comes to sex and/or gender, but this is about sports. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the male swimmers in those fantastically flimsy Speedos. The competitive environment creates enough hostility, despite the higher love of all for gamesmanship and excitement and beauty that athlete and sport can make us feel, all of us. But when a segment of the population is being singled out and rounded up for invisible crimes of genetics — not talking about steroids here — it sours the fairness of a spectacle that is supposed to be a gathering of nations on equal ground. Something our world needs very badly right now. So I had to ask Connell, does she think this creates a hostile, personally traumatic or dangerous environment for "suspected" athletes?
Connell retorted, "Of course! Especially for those female athletes who are declared not to be 'feminine' enough to compete. One article written on this subject in 1992 quoted John Fox, senior lecturer in obstetrics and gynecology at the Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, as stating, 'Personal experience of several such athletes suggests that the psychological impact of failing the test, interpreted as implying they are male, is so damaging that they seek instant anonymity and disappear without trace.' How many fall into this category? Well, the 1992 article suggested as many as 1 in 400 female athletes fail to pass the tests, and other sources are similar, putting the 'fail' rate at 1 in 500 or 1 in 600 athletes. That's a lot of women being disqualified from competition because they are not 'feminine' enough by pseudo-scientific tests which 30-plus years of experience have shown don't work."
And how would we do things here in the city? Besides with unlimited free condoms, rainbow-flag Speedos, and weeklong Male Verification Beer Bust Nights at The Eagle and Female Verification Lap Dance Contests at Asia SF? While hitting speed-dial for Asia SF to book seats for two, Connell answered, "I believe we would follow the International Olympic Committees rules and there would be no gender-verification testing."
Violet Blue is author and editor of nearly two dozen sexual health books and erotica collections. She is a professional sex educator, lecturer, podcaster, blogger, vlogger, porn/erotica reviewer and machine artist. She has written for outlets ranging from Forbes.com to O, The Oprah Magazine
