Tuesday 14 August 2012

The more complex gender gets, the more we need male superiority

I first thought about gender testing in sport while reading Mariah Burton Nelson's phenomenal feminist love prose to women's athleticism.  As her target audience - sporty, able-bodied, playing serious representative sports and oh yeah, feminist - her analyis of sports providing a counter-discourse to it being all about the pretty rang true for me.  Sports have given me a sense of my body as functional, useful, strong, competent, all part of an embodiedment that feels privileged rather than typical for women.

Ms Burton Nelson described deliberate gender segregation of sports which had previously been gender mixed, like shooting, as functioning to promote and maintain gender differences, and as importantly, promote and maintain male superiority.  She pointed to sports like gymnastics, in which events were introduced or altered when men started competing, because some of the things women gymnasts could do with their bodies were more difficult for men - and then segregated.  Hence all the upper body strength tests for male gymnasts - complete inventions to make sure men could be good at it.

Women who are athletic and strong are often accused of not being real women.  We break gender rules.  Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova were both called "shemales" repeatedly because of their beautiful muscular tennis; out lesbian Amelie Mauresmo was famously described as "half a man" by fellow player Martina Hingis.  Most recently, weightlifter Zoe Smith had no trouble with being a woman stronger than the majority of men, despite being told her muscles are "unfeminine".  When "throwing like a girl" means seventy metres, is gender inequality just a little destabilised?

I was in the first group of women cricketers allowed access to the elite High Performance Centre in Christchurch in the early 1990s.  We were tested for strength and speed, learnt how to run faster, and got to play with machines that made this sci-fi geek smile.  After the first few of us - all batswomen - had gone through reflex testing, they stopped the tests to make sure the machine was working properly.  Our results, as fast as male cricketers, were pointing to reflexes being a function of the role a sportsperson has in the team, not the gender of the sportsperson.

In 1994 Brian Lara was one of the best batsmen in the world.  Yet he was comprehensively dismissed by star Australian Zoe Goss in a charity match.  If even the best men aren't always better than a woman, what does that mean for other men?


I don't want to over-estimate the importance of sport, but culturally it is perhaps one of the last bastions where completely different treatment of women and men is frequently justified on the basis of biological difference.  And where, to be honest, we don't even know how much biological difference actually exists, because we segregate sports, treat athletes completely differently on the basis of a binary gender assumption, and punish women who are "too good" in all kinds of ways.

The sexist assumption that all men are better than all women at all sports was the reason gender testing was introduced in the 1960s to the Olympics.  The fear was, men were pretending to be women to win medals their country was not entitled to receive.  The early gender tests involved female athletes having to parade naked for judges to decide whether their bodies met the grade.  South African runner Caster Semenya has had to endure this as recently as the last couple of years.

Yet testing every female athlete at the Olympics between 1968 and 1998 revealed the fact that gender and sex are complex.
Three decades of unsuccessfully attempting to develop a definitive test for female sex has given the IOC Medical Commission an intimate scientific knowledge about variations in chromosomal, hormonal and morphological sex.  This elaborate knowledge about sex produced an anxious realisation about the myth of dimorphic sex within sport within the Medical Commission.
The gender verification tests have never discovered a male athlete pretending to be a female athlete.  They have identified some people for whom the gender binary does not fit - intersex people - and in some cases, stopped those people competing as women, even when that was the gender they had been assigned at birth.  The process has also involved rewriting stories of gender variance to create gender certainty.

Now the Olympics have decided on a new strategy - test for testosterone, and if female athletes have "too much", they might be allowed to reduce it medically, but if not they won't be allowed to compete.  Again, we assume that having "male" levels of testosterone will make you a better athlete, even though clearly all the people with "male" levels of testosterone are not male.

This assumption turns out to not be that hot, because 25% of male Olympians have lower testosterone levels than "average" for men.  Maybe testosterone inhibits athletic performance sometimes? 

Gender verification has emphatically shown us that many of our assumptions about gender are incorrect.  This would be amusingly ironic, given it's purpose was the opposite, if it wasn't playing out in real people's bodies, and constraining our ability to embrace our gender identity whatever it runs like, swims like, lies around and reads like.  The fact is, there is more gender overlap than gender difference in most physical skills, and when we pretend otherwise not only are we invisibilising gender variance, we are shoring up a false gender certainty and enscouncing ideas that men are inevitably stronger, faster, more athletic than women.

8 comments:

T said...

I'm sorry LJ, but you're showing your lack of endocrinological credentials in writing this article.

Testosterone makes a vast difference; I know this first hand as a trans person who went from high levels of T to almost zero T.

An average cis male will give a test result of around 25 whereas an average cis female will test result of around 3 during peak (ovulation).
The differences in the levels are vast. A woman who tested in the low male range (about 16) would be SEVERELY abnormal (someone with PCOS might test around 6).

As I mentioned before, I'm a trans person. Pre transition I could lift around 60kg without too many problems. Post transition, I struggle to lift 15kg. Ironically, I do MORE exercise and lifting now than I did pre transition - which simply goes to show that people with low testosterone levels need to work much, much harder than those with 'male' levels of testosterone.

Trans men will tell you the same thing in reverse - that they pack on muscle and strength while on T. Not only that, but the muscle gain is easy - far easier than before they started taking T.
They gain so much muscle just from T that they will gain a whole extra pint of blood in the first 12 months of transition (if on a normal-high dose).

There is no uncertainty here; the science is there - testosterone vastly improves performance - in speed, stamina and muscle. Testosterones are also reputed to increase lung capacity, visual acuity and reaction time.

The differences aren't just socialisation. They aren't just the result of gender stereotyping and segregation.
I do agree that there are some sports where all genders should be allowed to compete, since the gender differences give negligible advantages. But if women were to compete in the men’s 100m sprint, the top female athletes would always get wiped out by the top male athletes.

LudditeJourno said...

Hey T,
that's cool - but what about sports where flexibility is the most important characteristic? And what about the fact that testosterone varies from person to person anyway? And why, if it's only biological, do women runners, cyclists, swimmers now all do times that compare with male runners, cyclists, swimmers of just a few decades ago? Including sprinting. I'm not seeking to say testosterone is irrelevant, just problematising the ways we think about gender differences now. If 25% of male athletes at the Olympics have less testosterone than "average" for men, what does that mean for testosterone and performance?
You are very right about my lack of endocrinological credentials though :-) and also I have not changed hormonal levels deliberately, so can't speak to that experience at all. Thanks for sharing your experience, LJ

T said...

but what about sports where flexibility is the most important characteristic?

The most flexible people will win, clearly. As I stated, there are some sports where sexual dimorphism is largely irrelevant - 10 pin bowling, for example (though it's not an olympic sport, to my knowledge).

And what about the fact that testosterone varies from person to person anyway?

What about it? Of course it varies from person to person. The body can only process so much of it, which is why guys who inject too much grow breasts - since their body converts the excess to estrogens.

And why, if it's only biological, do women runners, cyclists, swimmers now all do times that compare with male runners, cyclists, swimmers of just a few decades ago?

This is a red herring. Male runners, cyclist and swimmers are much faster than they were a few decades ago. Everyone has gotten faster than their (same gendered) peers from a few decades ago.
This suggests that it's due to better training techniques, better sports medicine and better understanding of diet and recovery.

If 25% of male athletes at the Olympics have less testosterone than "average" for men, what does that mean for testosterone and performance?

At a guess, their bodies are more efficient at processing testosterone (due to being so fit) so their bodies do not produce as much. Diet may also have something to do with this. Similarly, very fit women produce less estrogen - even to the point where they stop ovulation.

My own question is this:

If testosterone is irelevant, should non-op, pre-estrogen trans women be allowed to compete against cis women?

Or do you think they will have an unfair advantage?

ChundaMars said...

LJ, it's not really clear from your post, but what changes would you propose? The removal of the gender split entirely?

Andrei said...

If testosterone is irelevant, should non-op, pre-estrogen trans women be allowed to compete against cis women?

The IOC has a ruling on this and that is two years of the drugs, gender reassignment surgery and legal recognition of the new gender and you can compete as the new gender.

It has never come up at the Olympics and as far as I know has only come up once and that was in the Canadian Mountain biking championships aa few years ago, and the women competitors rightfully kick up a racket. The problem was solved when the competitor in question was unable to compete, from injury as I recall.

Men have competed at the Olympics as women the most famous being Dora Ratjen, aka Heinrich Ratjen who took fourth place in the 1936 Olympic woman's high jump competing for Germany and was only found out much later.

A woman who wants to be a man takes testosterone of course, a banned substance for athletes as you know - so a real can of worms when that comes up which it might possibly in something like equestrian or shooting but probably not the decathlon.

T said...

nd the women competitors rightfully kick up a racket.

Rightfully?

LudditeJourno said...

Hi all, sorry for lack of responses, been living the rest of my life.
T - I feel like you're reducing a very complex situation to "but are you transphobic?" with your question. My answer is that in some situations undoubtedly the average pre-op trans woman will have physiological and social advantages over the average cis woman for some kinds of physical competitions, but that, as my post is all about how complex this is, personally I'm much less interested in this, and would support trans women to compete in this way, than I am in how we imagine gender.
ChundaMars - thankfully sometimes I can just sit in the not knowing :-) There's certainly some merit in de-gendering competition - but with the enormous social advantages men have enjoyed in embodiment, it's hard to imagine how long it would take for such a change to work well. And I know, for me as a cis woman, that playing women's sport has been a marvellous feminist place. So I have no definitive answer, just more questions, sorry :-)
Andrei - check out the link above, about rewriting gender variance. Dora Ratjen was assigned female at birth, and, it sounds like from this article, clearly intersex rather than male. And I agree with T, I'm not sure what is "right" here. I can't see why a trans woman shouldn't be allowed to compete. Thanks all and apologies again for late replies, LJ

Anonymous said...

"T - I feel like you're reducing a very complex situation to "but are you transphobic?" with your question."

You intuition is wrong here.
I'm 100% against pre-op, pre-hormone trans women competing as women. If you want to enter into a women's competitive activity and you were born male, you should first take every step available to you to ensure you're phenotypically a woman before you compete.
"Transphobia" is also a stupid word to use here. I'd only accuse you of being "transphobic" if you beat trans people to death on sight.

"And I agree with T, I'm not sure what is "right" here. I can't see why a trans woman shouldn't be allowed to compete."

I'm not uncertain what is right. I know what is right.
If you want to compete as a woman, you should have taken all step available to be one.
Thankfully the current IOC policy is reflective of this and the trans women who would be vetted to compete will have no advantage over cis competitors.

If there are trans women who want to keep their testicles and compete, they should either do so as men or they should lobby for a third sex category (i.e. an intersex category or a trans category).
Because the olympics sex segregation isn't about airy-fairy gender concepts, it's about sexual dimorphism.