Athletics World Cup-Gender: The ambiguity of the genes

Less than two months before the start of the World Athletics World Cup in Tokyo On September 13, the executive organization World Athletics announced a new prerequisite for participation in women’s sports: Athlete must have a gender test carried out. The non-existence of the Sry-Geng (Sex Determining Region of Y) should be demonstrated, “a reliable proxy to determine the biological gender,” said World Athletics. According to President Sebastian Coe, “protection and promoting the integrity of women’s sports” are part of the organization’s philosophy. Anyone who competes in women’s sports must therefore be “biologically female”.

With its positioning, the association takes up a social discussion about trans and intersex athletes who have repeatedly made headlines in recent years, fed by right-wing and transforming activists and internet mobs.

The difficulty of binary categories

The difficulty of using gender as a binary category is not new in the history of top sports. In 2009, the international sports audience discussed the gender of the South African athlete Caster Semenya, who won several gold medals in the 800-meter run. Due to her gender features such as appearance and deep voice, her a frausin was questioned and Semenya had to undergo a sex test by the athletics association that was still based as an International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF). Semenya was allowed to keep her medals, but in the course of the controversy IAAF and Olympic Committee introduced new admission requirements for women’s sports several times. However, their scientific foundations are extremely questionable.

The leading IAAF doctors Stéphane Bermon and Pierre-Yves Garnier 2017 published a study in which they described a causal connection between certain testosterone values ​​of athletes and their services. It served as the basis for rules, according to which athletes had to artificially lower their testosterone in order to participate in certain disciplines. Caster Semenya was excluded from the 800-meter race, for example, at the Olympics in Tokyo 2021 because she refused hormone treatment. At the beginning of 2019, the study by Bermon and Garnier was questioned and it has now been withdrawn by the publishing journal. The Roger Pielke Jr. team from the University of Colorado had re -analyzed the underlying data and found “sigifi anomalies and errors”.

From hormone levels to genetics

Since hormone levels cannot afford the undoubtedly unable gender, World Athletics has now turned to the supposedly clear genetics. But gender is also not a binary category at this level. Just as the distribution of untreated testosterone levels overlaps, there are also genetically various intermissal deviations. The gene Sry, whose presence in most people triggers the development of testosterone producing testicles, can also appear in people with female sex chromosomes (XX). And in people with XY chromosome set, they can have Sry and produce testosterone, but the hormone has no effect by deviation on the receptors (androgen resistance). Sry can also be available, but can be inactivated by a small deviation.

World Athletics, too, cannot deny this complexity, as the explanations show who can now compete exactly in the female category: a) “biological women”; b) trans men if they no longer take a testosterone at least four years; c) “biological men” with full androgen resistance; as well as d) “Biological men with a different gender development” that have testosterone values ​​below 2.5 NMOL/L blood. This means that even if an Sry Gentest is positive, the data subject could still be considered a woman for World Athletics after a “further assessment”. This does not mean trans women, because there would be no elite sports at the moment. They were already excluded from Women’s Sports by World Athletics in March 2023, provided they have undergone male puberty.

Effect of global attacks

The Association Organization Intersex International (OII), which is committed to the rights of interlectory people, evaluates the previous decision against trans women and the new genetic test rule as the impact of the current global attacks on the human rights of LGBTI personnel, including the decrees signed by US President Trump, to exclude all trans athletes from sport. Oii points out that genetic tests in sports are not a new idea: the IAAF had already introduced it in the 1990s and rejected it after seven years. At the 1992 and 1998 Olympic Games, false positive results had occurred and the gene was found in intersex women. The association also criticizes the statement of Coe that it is about protecting women’s sports: it is shameful that a powerful elite sports association has to use scientific evidence so selectively in order to decide who counts as a “real” woman and who does not.

As early as 2009, on the occasion of Caster Semenya, the sex scientist in Heinz-Jürgen Voss discussed whether the gender differences in best performances were not the causes of the different living and training conditions- and these would dissolve with the end of the discrimination against women and girls. For individual disciplines, other important features for classification could also be used instead of gender, as with wrestling and boxing the body weight, says Voss. Regardless of whether this approach can be a solution for fair and inclusive sporting competition – it does not seem to be an artificial preservation of binary gender categories from genetic tests or hormone analyzes from a scientific point of view.

Dr. Isabelle Bartram is a molecular biologist and employee at Gen-Ethical Network e. V.