by Stephanie Findlay
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.
Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes.
Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was so fast and muscular that many suspected she was a man, exploded onto the front pages three years ago. She was considered an outlier, a one-time anomaly.
But similar cases are emerging all over the world, and Semenya, who was banned from competition for 11 months while authorities investigated her sex, is back, vying for gold.
Semenya and other women like her face a complex question: Does a female athlete whose body naturally produces unusually high levels of male hormones, allowing them to put on more muscle mass and recover faster, have an “unfair” advantage?
In a move critics call “policing femininity,” recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.
If it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring. So far, at least a handful of athletes — the figure is confidential — have been prescribed treatment, but their numbers could increase. Last month, the International Olympic Committee began the approval process to adopt similar rules for the Games.
South Africa is ground zero of the debate. An estimated 1 per cent of the 50 million people here are born “intersex,” meaning they don’t fit typical definitions of male or female.
For female athletes, this may mean they were born with hyperandrogenism, a disorder in which they have hormone levels similar to those of a man.
Sometimes, the distorted levels result from conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes a hormonal imbalance in the body, while other cases are pure hermaphroditism, where women are born with some male reproductive organs.
Nowhere is the issue more taboo than at South Africa’s High Performance Centre, a world-class sport facility located on the pastoral grounds of the University of Pretoria. Few in and around the tight-knit community will talk on the record, although one scientist at the centre, who requested anonymity for fear of losing her job, says multiple players on one female team have had their undescended testes removed.
Lindsay Perry, another scientist, says sometimes whole teams of African women are dead ringers for men. “In football, some of the other girls were on the other end of the spectrum, you’re like, ‘No way that’s a girl,’” he says. Caster Semenya, 21, who lives and trains at the centre as unobtrusively as possible, remains the unwilling poster girl for the issue.
In 2009, she was at the centre of an international controversy after winning the 800-metre world championship with a scorching time of 1:55:45, by an astounding two-second margin. Her competitors were quick to point fingers at the boyish teenager, whose muscular biceps and husky voice inspired snide remarks. “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man,” said Elisa Cusma, an Italian who placed sixth in the race.
The gender investigation began after officials received an anonymous complaint. “I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being,” Semenya said in comments released by her legal advisers at the time. The results were never made public, but Semenya kept her medal and was eventually cleared to race. She continues to prepare here for her first Olympics.
“She’s truly a hero and a leader and a role model in this country. I don’t think we celebrate her enough,” says Elaine Salo, an anthropology professor at the University of Pretoria who has a poster of Semenya on her office door. “What is athletics if not the ability of the biological body to extend itself?”
Today, Semenya is cheering on her teammates at the South African open championships — for many, their last chance to qualify for the Olympics. There is no need for Semenya to race. She easily qualified weeks ago.
Instead, she stands in the stadium aisle, posing for the camera. In the background, Rihanna is on heavy rotation. “It happens all the time, all the time,” she says of the photo requests, laughing. “I’m used to it.” She wears a tight turquoise polo over her fit, feminine body. Relaxed, poised and, it must be said, pretty, the young woman with an irresistible smile is almost unrecognizable from photographs taken during the height of the controversy.
“I know she gets treatment. What the treatment entails, I can’t give the details,” says Danie Cornelius, a track and field manager at the university.
“We all accept . . . and she accepts . . . within sports you have to perform within certain guidelines, or else it will be chaos,” says Cornelius.
“She feels it’s something she has to do.”
When asked about her treatment, Semenya demurred. “I can’t really say anything,” she said, looking at the ground.
Since women began competing in the Olympics in 1900, their femininity, or lack thereof, has inspired the creation of gender verification tests.
In the 1960s, female athletes had to walk nude in front of a panel of experts who assessed their sexual credentials.
The so-called “naked parades” were abandoned and gender verification was eventually done using chromosome tests, until the IOC called for their discontinuation in the late ’90s, saying the tests constituted an invasion of privacy.
For a decade, intersex athletes were dealt with relatively discreetly on a case-by-case basis. Then came Semenya, whose phenomenal win forced an entire bureaucracy on the issue.
Dr. Stéphane Bermon, coordinator of the IAAF working group on Hyperandrogenism and Sex Reassignment in Female Athletics, says the prevalence of women with higher levels of male hormones is greater than most believe.
They have an “unfair advantage,” he says: “more muscle mass, easier recovery and a higher level of blood red cells.”
Dr. Myron Genel, an endocrinologist who serves on the IAAF’s expert medical panel, says the hormone test is complicated.
Some athletes may have excessive levels of hormones, but their bodies do not benefit from them — most are insensitive to the extra hormones circulating in their system — so the expert medical panel must conduct a clinical examination.
The tell-tale signs are illustrated graphically in the IAAF rulebook, a sliding scale on everything from sexual organs to lower back hair and breast shape.
“What’s been going on here, for over 50 years now, has been an attempt to modify and refine the rules so as to be fair but also to be scientifically accurate and appropriate,” says Genel. “We’ll get it right.”
This summer, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport is expected to release a paper on the IAAF’s rules and mandatory treatment.
Top-ranking Canadian sport officials are speaking out about their opposition to what they fear is another chapter in the checkered history of Olympic gender policing.
“We have a longstanding stance against gender testing,” says Paul Melia, the centre’s president.
“At some point we’re faced with the intrusiveness and degradation of privacy — the public outing of someone at a high-profile athletic event — and that doesn’t seem right,” he says.
Bruce Kidd, a prominent Canadian sport policy adviser who has worked with the cross-country expert committee on the advisory paper, says the IAAF’s test is “policing femininity.” He believes it should be abolished.
“It’s still the old patriarchal fear, or doubt, that women can do outstanding athletic performances. If they do, they can’t be real women. It’s that clear, it’s that prejudicial,” he says.
“Personal household and national income is far more relevant to performance than hormonal makeup,” he says. The countries with the highest GDP produce the most gold medals. The richer the athlete, the higher the likelihood of a winner, says Kidd. In other words, the salaries of your parents are a more accurate success indicator than testosterone.
“We don’t require this kind of radical equality for other factors that make a difference, so why should we single out this one?” asks Kidd.
Kristen Worley, a Canadian cyclist who failed to make the 2008 Beijing Olympic team, sits on the expert panel, advocating a more radical solution.
“What we’re trying to do, instead of having sport based on sex, we’re basing it on ability,” says Worley, who is also a transgender activist. “We’re moving away from the idea of sex-based sport.”
To most, dissolving the male and female categories is not a realistic option. “A lot of the discussion is wishing people could come as they are and be involved in sport,” says Karin Lofstrom, executive director of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity.
On the other hand, she added, “it’s easy to say this (testing) isn’t right. But what do you put in place?”
Including more women on decision-making panels might help, says Lofstrom. They might fight what she calls a preoccupation with the “stereotypical feminine athlete” — the Anna Kournikovas of the world.
“If you don’t look like the perfect little tennis player, then you’re less a woman, and there’s potential to find some reason they shouldn’t be involved,” she explains.
“We haven’t conquered all the battles about women playing sport.”
Semenya is one of South Africa’s best hopes for a medal at London’s Olympic Games. Though she won silver at last year’s world championships, she is not clocking her gold medal time of the past. Two weeks ago, she placed eighth at a high-profile race in Rome with a time of 2:00:07.
The country needs a win to provide closure to a particularly traumatic three years for South Africa’s athletic community.
Following her investigation, officials at Athletics South Africa were found to have lied about her case, withholding important medical information from her and international authorities. Top executives were fired, sponsors pulled out and meets were cancelled.
“We’re a sport on the mend and we’re going to go places again; people are excited,” says Frik Vermaak, the new CEO of Athletics South Africa.
Doing right by Semenya is one of Vermaak’s priorities. “The correct message is she is a terrific athlete. That is the correct message. No more than that,” he says.
She is a female athlete, and is preparing to be judged as such, says Vermaak.
“Caster is not something out of the ordinary,” he says. “She’s a normal athlete.”
Source: http://www.thestar.com/sports/london201
This article has made me so angry...WTF is this "She wears a tight turquoise polo over her fit, feminine body. Relaxed, poised and, it must be said, pretty, the young woman with an irresistible smile"? Why must her prettiness enter into it? It's one thing to note that her appearance may have changed in the last three years but to announce that she's "pretty" now? Ugh. As for the notion that female athletes with high levels of testosterone have an 'unfair advantage'...do they test every male athlete to make sure they don't have more testerone than the average man or even than the average male athlete? Isn't that an unfair advantage? If you're naturally bigger or taller should you be disqualified from wrestling or basketball because you have an 'unfair advantage'? What if your parents are rich and can afford to send you to the best athletic training academy in the world? Unfair advantage?!
Cross posted to ontd_feminism
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.
Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes.
Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was so fast and muscular that many suspected she was a man, exploded onto the front pages three years ago. She was considered an outlier, a one-time anomaly.
But similar cases are emerging all over the world, and Semenya, who was banned from competition for 11 months while authorities investigated her sex, is back, vying for gold.
Semenya and other women like her face a complex question: Does a female athlete whose body naturally produces unusually high levels of male hormones, allowing them to put on more muscle mass and recover faster, have an “unfair” advantage?
In a move critics call “policing femininity,” recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.
If it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring. So far, at least a handful of athletes — the figure is confidential — have been prescribed treatment, but their numbers could increase. Last month, the International Olympic Committee began the approval process to adopt similar rules for the Games.
South Africa is ground zero of the debate. An estimated 1 per cent of the 50 million people here are born “intersex,” meaning they don’t fit typical definitions of male or female.
For female athletes, this may mean they were born with hyperandrogenism, a disorder in which they have hormone levels similar to those of a man.
Sometimes, the distorted levels result from conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes a hormonal imbalance in the body, while other cases are pure hermaphroditism, where women are born with some male reproductive organs.
Nowhere is the issue more taboo than at South Africa’s High Performance Centre, a world-class sport facility located on the pastoral grounds of the University of Pretoria. Few in and around the tight-knit community will talk on the record, although one scientist at the centre, who requested anonymity for fear of losing her job, says multiple players on one female team have had their undescended testes removed.
Lindsay Perry, another scientist, says sometimes whole teams of African women are dead ringers for men. “In football, some of the other girls were on the other end of the spectrum, you’re like, ‘No way that’s a girl,’” he says. Caster Semenya, 21, who lives and trains at the centre as unobtrusively as possible, remains the unwilling poster girl for the issue.
In 2009, she was at the centre of an international controversy after winning the 800-metre world championship with a scorching time of 1:55:45, by an astounding two-second margin. Her competitors were quick to point fingers at the boyish teenager, whose muscular biceps and husky voice inspired snide remarks. “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man,” said Elisa Cusma, an Italian who placed sixth in the race.
The gender investigation began after officials received an anonymous complaint. “I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being,” Semenya said in comments released by her legal advisers at the time. The results were never made public, but Semenya kept her medal and was eventually cleared to race. She continues to prepare here for her first Olympics.
“She’s truly a hero and a leader and a role model in this country. I don’t think we celebrate her enough,” says Elaine Salo, an anthropology professor at the University of Pretoria who has a poster of Semenya on her office door. “What is athletics if not the ability of the biological body to extend itself?”
Today, Semenya is cheering on her teammates at the South African open championships — for many, their last chance to qualify for the Olympics. There is no need for Semenya to race. She easily qualified weeks ago.
Instead, she stands in the stadium aisle, posing for the camera. In the background, Rihanna is on heavy rotation. “It happens all the time, all the time,” she says of the photo requests, laughing. “I’m used to it.” She wears a tight turquoise polo over her fit, feminine body. Relaxed, poised and, it must be said, pretty, the young woman with an irresistible smile is almost unrecognizable from photographs taken during the height of the controversy.
“I know she gets treatment. What the treatment entails, I can’t give the details,” says Danie Cornelius, a track and field manager at the university.
“We all accept . . . and she accepts . . . within sports you have to perform within certain guidelines, or else it will be chaos,” says Cornelius.
“She feels it’s something she has to do.”
When asked about her treatment, Semenya demurred. “I can’t really say anything,” she said, looking at the ground.
Since women began competing in the Olympics in 1900, their femininity, or lack thereof, has inspired the creation of gender verification tests.
In the 1960s, female athletes had to walk nude in front of a panel of experts who assessed their sexual credentials.
The so-called “naked parades” were abandoned and gender verification was eventually done using chromosome tests, until the IOC called for their discontinuation in the late ’90s, saying the tests constituted an invasion of privacy.
For a decade, intersex athletes were dealt with relatively discreetly on a case-by-case basis. Then came Semenya, whose phenomenal win forced an entire bureaucracy on the issue.
Dr. Stéphane Bermon, coordinator of the IAAF working group on Hyperandrogenism and Sex Reassignment in Female Athletics, says the prevalence of women with higher levels of male hormones is greater than most believe.
They have an “unfair advantage,” he says: “more muscle mass, easier recovery and a higher level of blood red cells.”
Dr. Myron Genel, an endocrinologist who serves on the IAAF’s expert medical panel, says the hormone test is complicated.
Some athletes may have excessive levels of hormones, but their bodies do not benefit from them — most are insensitive to the extra hormones circulating in their system — so the expert medical panel must conduct a clinical examination.
The tell-tale signs are illustrated graphically in the IAAF rulebook, a sliding scale on everything from sexual organs to lower back hair and breast shape.
“What’s been going on here, for over 50 years now, has been an attempt to modify and refine the rules so as to be fair but also to be scientifically accurate and appropriate,” says Genel. “We’ll get it right.”
This summer, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport is expected to release a paper on the IAAF’s rules and mandatory treatment.
Top-ranking Canadian sport officials are speaking out about their opposition to what they fear is another chapter in the checkered history of Olympic gender policing.
“We have a longstanding stance against gender testing,” says Paul Melia, the centre’s president.
“At some point we’re faced with the intrusiveness and degradation of privacy — the public outing of someone at a high-profile athletic event — and that doesn’t seem right,” he says.
Bruce Kidd, a prominent Canadian sport policy adviser who has worked with the cross-country expert committee on the advisory paper, says the IAAF’s test is “policing femininity.” He believes it should be abolished.
“It’s still the old patriarchal fear, or doubt, that women can do outstanding athletic performances. If they do, they can’t be real women. It’s that clear, it’s that prejudicial,” he says.
“Personal household and national income is far more relevant to performance than hormonal makeup,” he says. The countries with the highest GDP produce the most gold medals. The richer the athlete, the higher the likelihood of a winner, says Kidd. In other words, the salaries of your parents are a more accurate success indicator than testosterone.
“We don’t require this kind of radical equality for other factors that make a difference, so why should we single out this one?” asks Kidd.
Kristen Worley, a Canadian cyclist who failed to make the 2008 Beijing Olympic team, sits on the expert panel, advocating a more radical solution.
“What we’re trying to do, instead of having sport based on sex, we’re basing it on ability,” says Worley, who is also a transgender activist. “We’re moving away from the idea of sex-based sport.”
To most, dissolving the male and female categories is not a realistic option. “A lot of the discussion is wishing people could come as they are and be involved in sport,” says Karin Lofstrom, executive director of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women and Sport and Physical Activity.
On the other hand, she added, “it’s easy to say this (testing) isn’t right. But what do you put in place?”
Including more women on decision-making panels might help, says Lofstrom. They might fight what she calls a preoccupation with the “stereotypical feminine athlete” — the Anna Kournikovas of the world.
“If you don’t look like the perfect little tennis player, then you’re less a woman, and there’s potential to find some reason they shouldn’t be involved,” she explains.
“We haven’t conquered all the battles about women playing sport.”
Semenya is one of South Africa’s best hopes for a medal at London’s Olympic Games. Though she won silver at last year’s world championships, she is not clocking her gold medal time of the past. Two weeks ago, she placed eighth at a high-profile race in Rome with a time of 2:00:07.
The country needs a win to provide closure to a particularly traumatic three years for South Africa’s athletic community.
Following her investigation, officials at Athletics South Africa were found to have lied about her case, withholding important medical information from her and international authorities. Top executives were fired, sponsors pulled out and meets were cancelled.
“We’re a sport on the mend and we’re going to go places again; people are excited,” says Frik Vermaak, the new CEO of Athletics South Africa.
Doing right by Semenya is one of Vermaak’s priorities. “The correct message is she is a terrific athlete. That is the correct message. No more than that,” he says.
She is a female athlete, and is preparing to be judged as such, says Vermaak.
“Caster is not something out of the ordinary,” he says. “She’s a normal athlete.”
Source: http://www.thestar.com/sports/london201
This article has made me so angry...WTF is this "She wears a tight turquoise polo over her fit, feminine body. Relaxed, poised and, it must be said, pretty, the young woman with an irresistible smile"? Why must her prettiness enter into it? It's one thing to note that her appearance may have changed in the last three years but to announce that she's "pretty" now? Ugh. As for the notion that female athletes with high levels of testosterone have an 'unfair advantage'...do they test every male athlete to make sure they don't have more testerone than the average man or even than the average male athlete? Isn't that an unfair advantage? If you're naturally bigger or taller should you be disqualified from wrestling or basketball because you have an 'unfair advantage'? What if your parents are rich and can afford to send you to the best athletic training academy in the world? Unfair advantage?!
Cross posted to ontd_feminism
I mean, no matter how much I work out, no matter how much I train, being a short man with short legs means I'll never run as fast as someone who tops me by a foot or more with long legs. No matter how much I train, I can't make my arms longer to increase my reach for a natural advantage in boxing. There are innumerable genetic propensities that make one more talented at certain sports
But this one is the one we police? Uh-huh, that's not ulterior motives at all.
"Why must her prettiness enter into it?"
Because real women have to be *~pretty~*! DIDN'T YOU GET THE MEMO?!? D:
Agree with your comment. By the nature of the Olympics there will always be those athletes competing against each other who have a genetic or other "unfair" advantage over average athletes. Sure there are sports where you can level the field with enough training but the idea that it's all solely hard work (BOOTSTRAPS anyone?) and nothing else is a myth.
That of course doesn't negate the effort most athletes invest in training their skills and that's exactly why monitoring femininity is just so infuriating. It tells female athletes that it doesn't matter how hard they're training. If they're too good their femininity will be called into question like they were cheating liars.
That said, I get the frustration of athletes who trained very hard and then get beaten by someone who -in their eyes- just won the genetics lottery. But I don't think that this justifies treating those "lucky ones" like second class people.
It's a difficult line, because on the one hand you do want women competing against other women, and on the other hand, policing gender/sex is one of those impossible to win situations.
testosterone is not a "male" hormone! Women have testosterone, too, just as men have estrogen, for example.
her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.
there is no such thing
f it does, she must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an expert IAAF medical panel and submit to regular monitoring. So far, at least a handful of athletes — the figure is confidential — have been prescribed treatment, but their numbers could increase.
treatment?!?! This is not medical treatment; recommending that someone undertake (or coercing someone into undertaking) a very risky and unnecessary (for any medical reason i.e. for health) drug (hormones are steroids by definition, btw) intervention is UNETHICAL. Whatever happened to the hippocratic oath? How can sporting bodies even require or recommend medical procedures or interventions?? This is like allowing kindergarten teachers to recommend psychiatric diagnoses and interventions for kids in their classes. Not qualified. Inappropriate. And, conflicts of interest much?!
The gender investigation began after officials received an anonymous complaint.
how many times is this article going to say "gender" when it means "sex"?
as to the issue of "what should be done," I think we should de-segregate men's sports and keep women's (i.e. women can compete with men if they want to, which many undoubtedly will, but those women who don't want to won't have to. men who don't want to compete with women will have no choice.)
If a woman does naturally produce testosterone, than it is woman's trait too. It is no more a "male" attribute than hair, skin color, sweat, etc.
UGH. The binaries, people. Let them go.
A questionnaire asking if you identify as male or female, then move the fuck on. Shit, if I had it my way, I'd have the Games based off ability too.
Maybe it's just because I've been forced or frightened out of athletic spaces by the treatment I got from men, but this does not sound like such a great idea. And if the Games were based off of ability, presumably there would be tiers of competition, except that the Olympics are by definition only top tier. So we'd have a situation where there would be NO women in many events except perhaps for extreme outliers.
Not because we aren't as strong, or fast, or good as men, but because our bodies are often smaller and weaker.
In ski jumping, women have the advantage because they tend to be lighter, and Olympic ski jumping is male-only, right down to some IOC official saying that women might "jostle their reproductive organs." And in skeleton/luge/bobsledding, they keep the women's start line lower than the men's so they can't be compared and so that women don't get as much speed.
It's just so full of double standards---if we're not as good, it's proof we're inferior; if we're better, it's an abomination to be locked away from the light of day. If we're just as good, well, pull out those blood tests 'cause we're probably No True Woman.
Also, fuck your gender binary. Fuck this idea that hormones and chromosomes and genitalia exist in only two flavours. Fuck the idea that any of that has any bearing on anything past basic, physical characteristics that don't translate into gender or identity or anything. Fuck the gendering of those characteristics.
Well done, natural biological diversity, well done. Gender isn't binary, neener neener NEENER.
I hate the current system, it's unfair to women who fall outside the 'norm' as they're the only ones who get this invasive scrutiny and completely erases trans* or intersex athletes. Notice how men are never investigated- there's this innate presumption that 'being a man' is innately superior, even when that doesn't hold true for certain sports like roller derby (might be coming to the 2020 olympics) where a lower centre of gravity helps.
I'm not sure what we'd replace it with, but taking the huge amounts of money out of the olympics so it returns to what it's meant to be about, which is amateurism would probably help.
It's just that for women, they have a category ("male") into which they can chop off the outliers and shove them into to neaten up the competition. And, being assholes about gender and gender roles and acceptable gender presentation, that's what they do.
Of course there have been. What Caster Semanya did in that race, winning by a big margin and shattering a record, plenty of men have done in their fields. The only difference is for men, there's no gender held to be better than them at sports, so there's nothing else for him to BE but a man.
But because women DO share the planet with a gender perceived to be better athletes than them, there's the suspicion that an astonishingly outperforming female athlete has to be a member of the more prestigious gender, slumming.
Nobody asks if Usain Bolt is a robot or a member of a gender with better performance abilities than male, because there are no such things as such another gender or a robot that passes for human. Male athletes get a pass because there's nothing else for them to be but human, male, outlying-percentile athletes. Women, because of being stuck with another gender that is credited with better athletic performance, are denied that plausible deniability that comes from having the highest average baseline athletic performance of a gender.
But they shouldn't be, because the odds and likelihoods of a female athlete existing who is a high-performance outlier are the same as they are for male athletes. It would be ridiculous to say that male athletes include a few that outrun the pack, but female athletes can't because their outliers have to be men.
That woman who complained about Semanya's victory and called her a man should wander over to the men's track competitors, or the swimming teams, and ask what they think of competing against Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. Welcome to top-tier athletics, madam.
Though it won't detract from my enjoyment of the games as frankly I could care less and I won't be watching them.
I mean, this sounds like saltiness from athletes who don't place, really. You gonna be in sixth place and the best thing you can come up with is "Well, her testosterone levels are higher"? Train moar.
Look, I can't be a model. I'm 5'2" and 130 lbs. My body is simply not built for the standards of the modeling world. Basketball players typically are extremely tall, and even an extremely good b-baller who was 5'2" would have a hard time getting into the NBA. Conversely, gymnasts tend to be short, small, and compact. Many a ballet dancer has lamented getting too tall to dance, and may get cut by dance companies because of her height. Some people's bodies are better built for some sports, and it's partially training and partially a natural thing. Life simply is not fair.
I thought it would be obvious from the topic of the article that I was talking about natural levels of androgens because we weren't even discussing anabolic steroids. Men are tested when they are suspected of doping, not when people think their body is too freakish to participate. Women are tested for BOTH, and it's a disparity.
the Olympics(oh excuse me, LORD VOLDESPORT)* simply represent all that's fucked up in society and its oppressive practices.*forgot to add, edited for strikethrough and (censor), of course!
Edited at 2012-07-17 07:19 pm (UTC)