Remember this?
This past week, the International Olympic Committee finally stepped up and made a decision as to how to define the eligibility of transgender athletes in sport.
After the IOC dropped chromosome testing of female athletes in 1999, leaving eligiblity of athletes up to governing bodies, the IOC came up with a policy, which, according to the IOC, is based on the goal of “protecting fairness, safety, and integrity in the female category.”
Genetic testing will begin in the leadup to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. A cheek swab will be administered to women athletes to test for the presence of the SRY gene, which stands for “Sex-determining Region Y” and is associated with sexual development typical of males.
The problem is that the test may be one of the worst ones to determine fairness of the presence of a female athlete in a sporting venue. The scientist who discovered the SRY gene, Andrew Sinclair, has been one of the test’s critics in intervening years.
“All it tells you is whether or not the gene is present,” he wrote in an article published in The Conversation. “It does not tell you how SRY is functioning, whether a testis has formed, whether testosterone is produced and, if so, whether it can be used by the body.”
And worse yet, it doesn’t show whether the SRY is providing an unfair advantage.
As humanity evolves over the next several thousand years, with genetic mutations and the eventual possibility of genderless bipeds in our midst, this problem is certainly not going to go away.
As we’ve said in this space, it’s up to the governing bodies of sport, and not governments, to make the decision as to who can play. The more people remember that, the better off we’ll all be.