Male or Female?
In the rush and excitement of leaving for the 1988 Olympics, Maria Patino, Spain’s top woman hurdler, forgot the requisite doctor’s certificate stating, for the benefit of Olympic officials, what seemed patently obvious to anyone who looked at her: she was female. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had anticipated the possibility that some competitors would forget their certificates of femininity Patino had only to report to the ‘‘femininity control head office,’’1 scrape some cells off the side of her cheek, and all would be in order—or so she thought.
A few hours after the cheek scraping she got a call. Something was wrong. She went for a second examination, but the doctors were mum. Then, as she rode to the Olympic stadium to start her first race, track officials broke the news: she had failed the sex test. She may have looked like a woman, had a woman’s strength, and never had reason to suspect that she wasn’t a woman, but the examinations revealed that Patino’s cells sported a Y chromosome, and that her labia hid testes within. Furthermore, she had neither ovaries nor a uterus.2 According to the IOC’s definition, Patino was not a woman. She was barred from competing on Spain’s Olympic team.
Spanish athletic officials told Patino to fake an injury and withdraw without publicizing the embarrassing facts. When she refused, the European press heard about it and the secret was out. Within months after returning to Spain, Patino’s life fell apart. Spanish officials stripped her of past titles and barred her from further competition. Her boyfriend deserted her. She was evicted from the national athletic residence, her scholarship was revoked, and suddenly she had to struggle to make a living. The national press had a field day at her expense. As she later said, ‘‘I was erased from the map, as if I had never existed. I gave twelve years to sports.’’3
Down but not out, Patino spent thousands of dollars consulting doctors about her situation. They explained that she had been born with a condition called androgen insensitivity. This meant that, although she had a Y chromosome and her testes made plenty of testosterone, her cells couldn’t detect this masculinizing hormone. As a result, her body had never developed male characteristics. But at puberty her testes produced estrogen (as do the testes of all men), which, because of her body’s inability to respond to its testosterone, caused her breasts to grow, her waist to narrow, and her hips to widen. Despite a Y chromosome and testes, she had grown up as a female and developed a female form.
Patino resolved to fight the IOC ruling. ‘‘I knew I was a woman,’’ she insisted to one reporter, ‘‘in the eyes of medicine, God and most of all, in my own eyes.’’4 She enlisted the help of Alison Carlson, a former Stanford University tennis player and biologist opposed to sex testing, and together they began to build a case. Patino underwent examinations in which doctors ‘‘checked out her pelvic structures and shoulders to decide if she was feminine enough to compete.’’5 After two and a half years the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) reinstated her, and by 1992 Patino had rejoined the Spanish Olympic squad, going down in history as the first woman ever to challenge sex testing for female athletes. Despite the IAAF’s flexibility, however, the IOC has remained adamant: even if looking for a Y chromosome wasn’t the most scientific approach to sex testing, testing must be done.
The members of the International Olympic Committee remain convinced that a more scientifically advanced method of testing will be able to reveal the true sex of each athlete. But why is the IOC so worried about sex testing? In part, IOC rules reflect cold war political anxieties: during the 1968 Olympics, for instance, the IOC instituted ‘‘scientific’’ sex testing in response to rumors that some Eastern European competitors were trying to win glory for the Communist cause by cheating—having men masquerade as women to gain unfair advantage. The only known case of a man infiltrating women’s competition occurred back in 1936 when Hermann Ratjen, a member of the Nazi Youth, entered the women’s high-jump competition as ‘‘Dora.’’ His maleness didn’t translate into much of an advantage: he made it to the finals, but came in fourth, behind three women.
Although the IOC didn’t require modern chromosome screening in the interest of international politics until 1968, it had long policed the sex of Olympic competitors in an effort to mollify those who feared that women’s participation in sports threatened to turn them into manly creatures. In 1912, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics (from which women were originally banned), argued that ‘‘women’s sports are all against the law of nature.’’6 If women were by nature not athletic competitors, then what was one to make of the sportswomen who pushed their way onto the Olympic scene? Olympic officials rushed to certify the femininity of the women they let through the door, because the very act of competing seemed to imply that they could not be true women.7 In the context of gender politics, employing sex police made a great deal of sense.8