Real women do have muscles
The large pink blister on gymnast Michelle Telfer's wrist is testament to the gruelling regime of athletes in training for the Olympics. Its painful presence in the foreground of a photograph on the front cover of the Sydney Morning Herald's July 4 Good Weekend also makes an interesting contrast to the carry-me-over-that-puddle look required of most magazine cover girls.
Of course, many of the models with "perfect" bodies are actually athletes themselves: it can take a lot of hard physical training every week to stay as skinny as bulimic Princess Di. But any possible outrage to femininity is obscured by more hours of work in make-up and clothes to create the illusion of physical frailty.
The physical strength of female athletes is up front and unabashed. They might make some concessions to femininity (track and field competitors have become noticeably glitzier), but there's no hiding the bulging muscles and contorted facial expressions of total exertion and concentration. And for this, they have long been the subject of speculation about their sex.
The conviction that female athletes are somehow biological "borderline" cases goes all the way up to the International Olympic Committee. An article in the July 4 New Scientist explains that the sex testing of female athletes, while under challenge from international sports policy makers, will probably go ahead at Barcelona.
The mass sex testing of female Olympians began in earnest in 1968, when they were lined up to display their genitals to the IOC's medical commission.
The New Scientist quoted pentathlon gold medallist Mary Peters, who described her experiences at the 1972 Munich Olympics. She says she was "ordered to lie on the couch and pull my knees up. The doctors then proceeded to undertake an examination which, in modern parlance, amounted to a grope. Presumably they were searching for hidden testes. They found none and I left."
From 1974, the IOC switched to what was considered a more sophisticated approach: genetic testing. Surely, everyone could accept that the bottom line in determining an individual's sex is the presence of XX (female) or XY (male) chromosomes. A swab of cells taken from inside a woman's cheek was seen as a simple, less humiliating way to determine whether, underneath all those muscles, lurked a "real woman" or a strange being with a genetic advantage.
But the New Scientist points out that finding a "bottom line" in determining a person's sex is actually poor science, and hardly an improvement on the "grope" system. Women with all the "normal" female characteristics, who have grown up without ever thinking twice about their sex, have suddenly found their very . These women have been urged to fake an injury and quietly retire from sport.
How could a "real" woman fail the genes test? New Scientist explains: "Molecular geneticists have long pointed out that gender is not a simple matter of X and Y chromosomes. Genes can swap from one chromosome to another, or can be turned on or off in unpredictable ways. The upshot is that a woman can have an XY complement and be physically just like a 'normal' woman."
Androgen insensitivity syndrome is not particularly rare: About 1 in 500 women athletes tested have it, and many of these have been excluded from the Olympic games. "The discrimination rarely hits the headlines because few women whose femininity is in question stay for the medical exam and chat." It is estimated that between 1972 and 1984, about 1 in 400 female athletes were excluded from competition.
Fortunately, pressure to abandon the tests is growing. But it will have to overcome what Alison Carlson, US biologist and opponent of sex testing, calls an "ugly message": If you're really good, you can't really be a woman.
By Tracy Sorensen