IOC & Intersex, Ctd.

Andrea James has an outstanding essay on the gender binary and sports over at Boing Boing:

Unless you’ve been affected by it, understanding how social realities like a sex binary get reified and justified through technology can be hard to see. It all gets framed as “natural” and “normal,” while anything that disrupts social realities gets labeled “unnatural” and “abnormal.” The words created by “sex science” reinforce the binary and uphold the primacy of procreation: homosexual, bisexual, transsexual (across to the “opposite” sex), intersexual (between two). There’s an inherent danger with looking to the body for absolute truths, but that’s in fashion right now. Famed sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld believed in “justice through science,” meaning that findings would eliminate prejudice against sex and gender minorities. That has not come to pass. We know of several genes that affect skin and hair pigment, and that hasn’t stopped racism. We know of several genes and environmental factors that affect characteristics associated with sex, but that hasn’t stopped sexism. Researchers have recently found genetic repetitions implicated in gender identity and expression, but that hasn’t stopped transphobia. In fact, science, as we see in the Caster case, it often misused to reinforce prejudice and prevailing ideology.

It’s supremely well written and makes points far better than those I was grasping towards in the last post. James calls out techno-progressives and cites Martine Rothblatt. Read the whole thing.

IOC to “Diagnose and Treat” Intersex Competitors

Dvorsky points out the slippery slope in their logic:

While this clearly solves a problem for the IOC, the decision to “treat” athletes with genetic abnormalities will likely have far reaching repercussions for those with other types of genetic endowments. The IOC is in danger of opening a pandora’s box in which virtually every athlete with a biological advantage will be questioned.

Immediate examples include swimmer Michael Phelps with his many advantageous traits (including the possibility of Marfan Syndrome) and those athletes with higher levels of hemoglobin which gives them superior oxygen-carrying capability.

Dvorsky has a point, but it seems he misses the larger problem with the IOC’s recommendation: the assumption that there is anything wrong with the intersex at all. Because of the hysteria and ignorance surrounding intersex individuals, athletic competitions have ignored and mishandled the complexities of the issue instead of addressing them.

As it stands, many sports do benefit from a male/female split due to the general strength and size advantages of males. Gymnastics is my favorite example, where the events themselves are male/female only, tuned to the unique advantages of the sex of the body competing. Intersex individuals become problematic for the regulation of sport because they defeat the purpose of the gender divide. The problem is real, but not because the intersex are “diseased,” but because most sports’ rules are not designed to account for them.