Paris Olympics gender scandal

The Paris Olympics women's boxing 66kg competition started on August 1. Italian boxer Angela Carini withdrew from the competition after just 46 seconds and knelt on the ground crying that her opponent's fist was too fierce and she had never suffered such a heavy blow. This incident sparked a heated debate on the Internet, and many people pointed the finger at Carini's opponent, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, accusing her of being a transgender and being unfair to female athletes.

Coincidentally, in the women's boxing 57kg competition held the next day, Lin Yuting, a boxer from the Chinese Taipei team, won. According to media reports, there were some boos at the scene, and many spectators believed that Lin Yuting was also a transgender person and that the match was unfair.

So, what is the truth?

First of all, neither of them is transgender, but has been identified as a girl since childhood and has grown up as a woman. The gender on their passports is also female, there is no doubt about that.

Secondly, both of them have participated in many boxing matches as women before, including the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. But neither of them stood on the podium at that Olympics, so they did not attract much attention.

Third, the gender controversy was caused by the 2023 World Women's Boxing Championships held in New Delhi. Both of them were disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA), which is responsible for this event, on the grounds that they failed the gender test. However, the IBA has not announced the test methods and results. It was only in an interview with TASS that the Russian president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, later revealed that the chromosomes of both of them were XY.

Why were these two allowed to compete in the Olympics? This is because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took back the management of boxing competitions from the IBA in June 2023, citing mismanagement and corruption in the IBA. According to the IOC's gender management regulations, both Khalif and Lin Yuting are considered women, so they are both allowed to compete in women's competitions.

So the question turns to the IOC's gender identification standards.

Let's assume that Kremlev is right. Khalif and Lin Yuting both have XY chromosomes. Isn't this irrefutable evidence that they are male? The answer is not as simple as everyone thinks.

First of all, biological research tells us that all human embryos are neutral before 5 weeks. Only when several genes carried on the Y chromosome become active at the right time, the embryo will develop into a male. If the Y chromosome is not turned on in time for some reason, or a gene located on other chromosomes replaces some functions of the Y chromosome, the XY chromosome will eventually develop into a female, or the XX chromosome will eventually develop into a male. This is why gender identification is a complex subject that requires consultation by experts in gynecology, endocrinology, psychology, and internal medicine to reach a conclusion.

Secondly, gender is not just male and female as most people imagine, but there are many intermediate states, forming a spectrum. On February 18, 2015, Nature magazine published an important paper, in which the author pointed out that male and female genders are controlled by two complex gene networks, each of which involves many genes, and each gene will have a subtle effect on the final result. In other words, as long as any one of the genes has a little variation, the result will not be "pure", and the final result will be a certain intermediate state between absolute male and absolute female.

The article also corrects a misconception that sex does not change from birth. New research shows that human cells that have been "determined" may still change sex during development, and this process does not stop with the birth of a baby. This change can even be partial, that is, some cells in an adult's body will show different sex characteristics from other cells.

If there are too many such cells, gender differences will become blurred. According to statistics, about 1% of people have ambiguous sexual orientation for various reasons. These people's chromosomes, sexual organs, hormones and sexual psychology do not match the gender identification standards, making it difficult to define their gender. Although this proportion is not high, the total number is still quite large. A healthy society must face up to the existence of these people and should not force them to do things that go against their will.

Of course, for most people in this world, their gender is still very obvious and does not cause any trouble in daily life. But in the sports world, it is different. Almost all competitive sports will divide the players into two categories: men and women, and there is no middle ground. If a man pretends to be a woman to participate in the women's competition, it will be considered unfair competition and gender fraud.

This has happened many times in the history of the Olympics. The most famous case is the German high jumper Dora Ratjen, who represented Germany in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but was later proven to be a man and changed her name to Heinrich. The British and American media took this as ironclad evidence that Nazi Germany was willing to falsify gold medals, and even made a movie about this story, "Berlin 1936". However, the investigation results proved that this incident had nothing to do with Hitler, and Ratjen was indeed mistaken for a girl since she was a child.

Another famous case also occurred at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Polish sprinter Stella Walsh lost to American Helen Stephens in the women's 100m final and won the runner-up. 44 years later, Walsh died unexpectedly. During the autopsy, it was found that her body had male characteristics. The Western media immediately seized on this incident and accused the former Eastern European countries of forcing athletes to dress as men for the gold medal. But later it was proved that this accusation was also unfounded. In fact, it was the American athlete Stephens who was suspected of gender fraud. In order to clear her name, Stephens was forced to undergo the first gender identification in Olympic history (by visual estimation). Walsh also underwent the same gender identification that year and passed.

These two cases prompted international sports organizations to start sex identification in the 1940s to determine the eligibility of female athletes. The earliest sex identification mainly relied on visual inspection, which was quite unreliable. There were even cases where female athletes were banned because of poor breast development. In order to solve this problem, the IOC officially launched a new identification method in 1968, which was the "Barr body identification method" invented by American scientist Murray Barr. Simply put, if a person has two X chromosomes, one of them is usually in a closed state. This closed X chromosome, namely "Barr body", can be seen under a microscope. The problem is that Dr. Barr made this discovery in 1949. By 1968, even he himself believed that this method was not reliable in determining sex, but the IOC decided to adopt this method and used it for more than 20 years. This shows that this organization has done a very poor job in respecting science.

Because of the unreliability of the identification method and its negative impact on athletes' psychology and physiology, the IOC finally terminated gender identification in 2000 and handed the decision-making power to the organizers of each individual event, who were allowed to decide the participation standards for female athletes based on the specific circumstances of their respective events.

Soon, a South African female middle-distance runner named Caster Semenya posed a problem to the World Athletics Federation (formerly known as IAAF). Semenya won her first 800-meter championship at the 2009 World Athletics Championships, and was asked to undergo gender identification because she looked like a man. Although the results proved that she was a woman, it also showed that her chromosomes were not XX, but XY. However, she suffered from a relatively rare 5α-reductase 2 deficiency, which caused her to have a disorder of sex development (DSD). She had no ovaries, uterus, or fallopian tubes, but had a pair of testicles. However, the testicles did not fall into the scrotum outside the abdominal cavity like normal men, but remained in the abdominal cavity, which made her testosterone level comparable to that of men.

Statistics show that the testosterone concentration of an average adult male is roughly between 10 and 35 nmol/L (nanomoles/liter), while that of an adult female is between 0.5 and 2.4 nmol/L. In other words, the average value for men is 7 to 8 times higher than that for women. As the most important male hormone, testosterone can indeed increase muscle volume, strength and endurance, and can also stimulate the synthesis of hemoglobin, thereby increasing the blood's ability to carry oxygen. These two factors can undoubtedly improve athletic performance, but because the identification result was female, Semenya was still approved to participate in the women's competition and won the women's 800-meter championship at the London Olympics. After the game, some female athletes publicly expressed their dissatisfaction. They felt that Semenya could certainly consider herself a woman, but her special physiological structure provided her with innate convenience, and it was unfair to other female athletes to participate in the women's competition.

In order to quell disputes among all parties, the IOC introduced a new regulation in 2012, using testosterone levels instead of gender identification, and not allowing athletes with hyperandrogenism to participate in women's events. It should be pointed out that this is a disease unique to women, and only when the testosterone level in women is too high will it be called hyperandrogenism. In other words, this new rule only targets female athletes with DSD characteristics. The IOC no longer cares whether such a person is a man or a woman in the legal sense, but only cares whether the testosterone level in this person's body is more like that of a man, because the IOC firmly believes that testosterone levels are the culprit for unfair competition.

This new regulation seems reasonable, but it still has many unscientific aspects. First, the regulation assumes that testosterone will definitely lead to unfair competition, but in fact, the medical community has always been controversial about whether testosterone will definitely improve athletes' performance, because the effects of testosterone cannot be achieved by testosterone alone, and many other conditions are required to work together to take effect.

For example, everyone's sensitivity to testosterone is different. Some people are born dull and insensitive to testosterone, so they need to secrete more testosterone to achieve the same effect. However, according to the new regulations, such people will lose their qualifications to compete, which is unfair.

In fact, scientists have tracked the testosterone levels of 693 high-level athletes and found that 16.5 % of male athletes have testosterone levels lower than the male average, and even 2% of male athletes have testosterone levels comparable to those of women. Another 14% of female athletes have testosterone levels exceeding the upper limit of 10nmol/L set by the IOC, but because they have not been diagnosed with DSD, they are allowed to participate in women's competitions.

Secondly, there are many genetic traits that can improve a person's athletic ability, which is a reality that competitive sports must face. For events such as swimming and track and field that test absolute athletic ability, the world's top athletes must have talents that ordinary people do not have. As we all know, muscles are divided into two types: fast-twitch fibers and slow-twitch fibers. The former have strong explosive power but are not durable, while the latter are just the opposite. Studies have shown that these two types of muscle fibers are not interchangeable, no matter how you train them. In other words, if a person is born with a lot of fast-twitch fibers, then he will definitely run faster than you at the same training intensity. This is why today's sprint events are almost dominated by athletes whose ancestors came from West Africa, who are born with super fast-twitch fibers.

There are many similar situations. For example, some people's mitochondria have mutated, and their oxygen-carrying capacity is naturally higher than that of ordinary people. Another example is that some people are born with more hemoglobin than ordinary people, which makes them particularly suitable for endurance long-distance running or road cycling. Is it unfair competition to allow such people to participate in the competition?

The above mentioned cases are all congenital genetic characteristics that have been proven to improve performance. In comparison, testosterone is a relatively weak factor. Therefore, after referring to the advice of scientists, the IOC suspended the new regulations in 2015, allowing female athletes with "hyperandrogenism" like Semenya to participate in the Olympics. And Semenya also won the women's 800m championship in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

This championship was called the "Rio Gender Gate Incident" that year, sparking heated discussions among people from all walks of life. Faced with increasing doubts, the IAAF was forced to revise the rules in 2018, requiring DSD athletes like Semenya to reduce their testosterone levels to below 5 nmol/L through medication and other means, and to maintain this level for more than six months (later increased to two years) before being allowed to participate in the women's competition.

Interestingly, this rule only applies to eight events in track and field competitions, including the women's 400m, 800m and 1500m, so some people say that this rule is specifically aimed at Semenya. In order to protest this new rule, Semenya and the IAAF have been in court for many years, but both the International Court of Arbitration for Sport and the Swiss Supreme Court have sided with the IAAF. So Semenya had to switch to the shorter 200m and the longer 5000m, but unfortunately he did not achieve very good results. Some people are very happy to see this result and think that sports competitions are finally fair. But others pointed out that this result just shows that testosterone is not the only factor that determines the results of the competition, and Semenya is a victim of a series of unfair laws and regulations.

There are many people who hold both positions, and they argue with each other endlessly, which leads to a more fundamental question, which is what does fair competition in sports really mean? Let's not talk about the obvious differences in training conditions, funding and national support. Let's take gender, for example. As mentioned above, gender is not binary, but there is a spectrum. For obvious reasons, the vast majority of high-achieving female athletes come from the group on the male side of the gender spectrum. So where should the standard of gender identification be set to be fair?

Perhaps, we should stop dwelling on the scientific issues involved and look at the personal stories of these DSD athletes. Khalif was born in a remote village in Algeria. His family was very poor when he was a child and he had to sell scraps to earn money to take the bus to the neighboring village for training. Lin Yuting was born in a domestic violence family and she started boxing to protect her mother. The good results they have achieved may have something to do with their physical structure, but more of the reason is their unique growth environment and the perseverance they have cultivated.

In other words, they are a group of girls with special experiences. Their success can help us break down the prejudice against sexual minorities. This is the role that competitive sports should play.

References:

www.nature.com/artic...

onlinelibrary.wiley....