Apparently, it takes four physicians to make this decision:
There are no compulsory gender tests during events sanctioned by the International Association of Athletics Federation, but athletes can be asked to take a gender test. The medical evaluation panel usually includes a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, and an internal medicine specialist.
Related posts:
- EKGs are not part of routine athlete screening
- Will the Pap smear soon be replaced by a DNA test to detect cervical cancer?
- Gender differences in reporting pain
- An abortion fails, mother sues doctors for costs to raise her child
- How soon should patients receive their test results?
- Do electronic medical records increase physician communication of critical test results to patients?
- Are doctors skipping the stress test?
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“If the reports are true, then it is very sad and extremely disappointing,” her coach, P. Nagarajan, told the Indian Express.
So who wants to be the messenger when the results are revealed to her husband (if any)?
Liz from I Speak of Dreams. The news reports have been uninformative. I wonder if the results of the test were a surprise to the athlete. It seems unlikely that she could get to that level of competition with visible external male genitalia. NOVA has a good page on the biology of intersexuality.
The story over at Fox has a picture http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,237133,00.html. “She” clearly has a prominent adams apple. Another story that I can’t find now said that an official said the she “has more Y chromosones than are allowed”!! No wonder it took four doctors to make the diagnosis.
As we learn that even defining gender from a biophysical standpoint is less than perfectly clear (psychosocial matters not even considered), perhaps it is time to abolish gender segregation in sport.
Of course then the next frontier will be defining ‘human’. What if someone has just a little too much cro-magnon in them?
Not gender. Sex.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/gendertest/gendertest.html
so is she a case of CAIS and if so then everyone says she competes as a woman anyway, so in the end having a vagina still makes the most differenece although it is not completely definitive. I fail to see the problem.
The great thing about blogs is that any idiot who can point-and-click now thinks that their uneducated opinion is important. Educate yourself about intersexuality, and you won’t be propagating such hateful stupidity. You jerks sit there in your smug little bubble ego-universes not realizing that not only sexual orientation and psychological gender identity/expression, but also biological sex is not necessarily strictly dichotomous. When you begin to define biological sex, you are then only arguing by definition, not reflecting life as it actually exists, in all its spectrum. Of course, in the end this probably all boils down to culturally-ingrained religious stupidity; it’s a fair knock down to your idiotic arguments against homosexuality when you find the “male” and “female” are social constructs, and not based in reality! Meanwhile, let’s make snide jokes at the poor woman who has already had her life shattered, finding that everything she believed about herself for the past 25 years, things she probably never even suspected to be otherwise, was wrong . . .
Wow. Was that ever the rant of someone with some real unresolved issues.
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