Just days before the Milan Winter Olympics open on February 6, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Kirsty Coventry will surely make her first big decision by launching a genetic test using a PCR test to determine the biological sex of all women qualified to participate in future Olympics. The IOC will follow the path traced last July by World Athletics (WA), the international athletics federation, which forced 1,015 participants in the last Tokyo World Cup to take an SRY PCR identifying the Y chromosome gene, which marks masculinity. Those who cannot overcome it will be eliminated from international sporting competitions in the female category of all sports, including transgender athletes, athletes with variations in sex characteristics (DSD), women who were assigned female at birth but have male chromosomes, women like Caster Semenya, the South African Olympic champion, Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won gold at the Paris Games.
Precisely, the great repercussion that I had during the last Juegos of the victory of the Algerian boxer was one of the reasons why Coventry created a study committee whose members are secret and chaired by the new medical advisor of the IOC, the Canadian Olympic athlete Jane Thornton. His sporting experience and that of Coventry, Olympic swimming champion in 2004, also influence his regulatory determination.
“No transgender woman has achieved international success in athletics,” says Joana Harper, a Canadian transgender athlete, doctor of sports science and researcher at the University of Ontario. “I believe the reason for WA’s policy and the possible expansion of the IOC is more political than scientific. In many parts of the world, such as the UK or the USA, where Donald Trump announced that he would not grant entry visas to the Angel Games for trans athletes, there has been a significant political movement against transgender women and WA has also used this political environment which owes a debt to this to justify the elimination of trans women and women with DSD from their sports.
One of the main points of the Coventry program, which won the elections for the Olympic presidency in March, was the “protection of the female category”, and decided to put an end to the usual open policy of the IOC, which it never imposed, but which left the freedom to the different federations to impose their rules, and the most accepted standard was a threshold of natural testosterone, the male hormone: which would overcome the excluded drop. Transgender women and DSD women must take estrogen medications to avoid overcoming estrogen. While trans women did not have greater problems due to their desire to be as much women as possible, DSD, like Semenya, suffered serious physical and psychological disorders, and eventually dropped out of competition. Despite this, WA has unified the two categories in normative terms, and the IOC seems to want to follow the same policy. At present, only other international federations, skiing and boxing, have announced their intention to impose gender control, a practice that Olympic sport abandoned in the early 1990s.
The reasons for abandoning sex testing were summarized by the Finnish geneticist Albert de la Chapelle in a private letter sent in 1988 to the Spanish athlete María José Martínez Patiño, who was prohibited from competing because he possessed a chromosome, despite the fact that his body is insensitive to testosterone, which does not provide him with any anabolic effects or muscular superiority, speed or power. “This case among many others is a tragic example of the inadequacy of the sexual detection procedure. For many years, we and other scientists have tried to convince sports organizations to abandon the detection of sexual chromatin to prevent errors of this type from happening again,” he writes from De La Chapelle to Patiño, who uses this letter to obtain his rehabilitation by the athletics federation.
“Unfortunately, sports organizations, particularly the IOC and IAAF (former acronyms for international athletics), have not yet decided to abandon sex chromatin detection. They have been refused to do so, even after facing strong protests from scientific organizations, which have approved resolutions asking them to reconsider their procedures to avoid human suffering.” He responded like De la Chapelle to the athlete Gallega’s request for help, written a few days earlier.
“A doctor from the Spanish expedition told a journalist that he had obtained a positive result in a sexual test,” reports Martínez Patiño. “The journalist published the information in periodicals and magazines, on television, etc. And, as a result, the whole world came in. My federation did not support me and they kicked me out of the sports residence (the place where I lived). I left the university and had to start working because I had no money to live. I lost my friends and my boyfriend left me when I was supposed to. It happened. Sweet years of hard work for nothing. I think I’m going to die. I lost my license and my deeds. It seemed as if I was a man instead of a woman… I understand that it is very difficult to get a change from the IAAF, but I think it is not impossible to deal with these particular cases. cell, JAMA, Lancet. I sent a letter to Mr. Samaranch and I have the gratitude of the King of Spain. I would like this case to be known to specialists in genetics and sports medicine. The doctors gave me the impetus to continue fighting and they said that my disqualification was not fair; The results confirm it: I am indeed a woman, but my federation does not authorize me to participate in competitions with women. Please, señor, I need your help… I wonder what the greatest possibilities are and if it is possible, before I die, to compete… I continue to fight and I hope to find someone in the world who will help me… You are my best and most important help. I have nothing to hide. I didn’t cheat on Nadie; and I felt ashamed and humiliated… I lost everything and I need your help.
Both letters were published in an article in the scientific journal Borders led by the scientist Silvia Camporesi, from the University of Louvain, and in which the researcher from the University of Valladolid Jonathan Ospina collaborated. If they oppose genetic testing, they explain their reasons: “First, when referring to female tests specifically and exclusively as tests for women, it is understood that the organization prioritizes biological sex, not gender, when considering eligibility. Second, it merges the standards for women with variations in sex characteristics and their transgender women into a single set of standards, ignoring the differences between these groups of female athletes, myriad medical and scientific bodies, as well as athletes who have valiantly shared their experiences.
If the IOC decides to implement controls at the Milan session in view of the Angels 28 Games, the problems that will arise, if it overcomes the ideological problems, will be of a practical nature, and with them it has shocked WA, which after its success with the test of senior athletes in Tokyo will have to postpone until the end of March the carrying out of the tests for the athletes who will be able to participate this summer in the Under-20 World Cup in Oregon. Some of them have not reached the age of 18, so the federation will need a protocol for the informed consent of their family and the creation, at a minimum, of a psychological counseling team to help young people who discover, as painfully happened to Martínez Patiño in 1988, that they have stopped playing sport. They are not women like the others.
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