I thought the only queer angle to the Olympics was the presence - or
more accurately, non-presence - of out queer athletes, but I hadn't
realised there was another, more serious side to it. The long history
of gender testing at the Olympics is a rather tragic aspect of how
queer issues have combined with the games.
How the people affected would describe themselves - gay, lesbian, bi,
straight, intersexed, trans - is perhaps not gone into too closely
since being so clearly boxed seems to have been the problem for them.
Its one of those times when that catch-all label queer seems most
appropriate and queer many of them certainly were - and suffered for
it. But its a complex story, with lots of places for questions - not
all the protests of the athletes who competed with them can be
dismissed as prejudice.
For those who have access to the Financial Times' excellent Weekend
section (not available online without subscription), Simon Kuper,
their very good sports columnist had an excellent and concise piece
on the subject in the July31-August 1st issue. Below is a good,
though considerably longer piece from Outsports by Patricia Nell
Warren on the same subject, and a couple of other pieces below that.
Its very well worth reading as the Olympics are going on.
The Rise and Fall of Gender Testing
How the Cold War and Two "Masculine" Soviet Sisters Led to a
Propaganda Campaign
By Patricia Nell Warren
Special to Outsports.com
In the late `90s, as the Olympic Games finally dropped their long-
hated requirement for women's gender-testing, the Gay Games stumbled
into hot water with its own gender policies. First the 1998
Amsterdam Games required that any competitors who had changed their
birth gender to the opposite gender must provide medical proof
of "completed gender transition." Organizers also decreed that mixed-
sex couples (including transgendered persons who couldn't
prove "transition" on paper) would not be allowed in the ballroom-
dancing event. Then the 2002 Sydney Games tried a different tack, by
dividing competitions into two divisions: "male" or "female."
Everybody, including transgendered and intersex athletes, had to
choose which box they wanted to compete in, based on what their
passport or birth certificate said about their gender.
Writing for Independent Gay Forum, Stephen H. Miller argued: "You'd
think this would be a no-brainer. After all, the reason that men
compete against men, and women against women, is because the male
body is, well, different from the female body and same-sex
competition ensures a level playing field, gender wise." Curiously,
this was almost the same language that the International Olympic
Committee (IOC) had used to defend its gender testing for nearly four
decades. Some GLBT athletes and activists bristled at both Gay
Games' rules.
As the Gay Games wrestles with gender policy, the real reason why
gender became an issue at the Olympic Games, back in the mid-1900s,
is almost forgotten -- along with the two Soviet sisters
whose "masculine" appearance pushed gender testing into place.
War and Peace
After World War II, as the United States and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics struggled to avoid total war on the battlefield,
these two superpowers also sought victories away from the
battlefield. They did this by ruthless use of propaganda. General
Eisenhower was still U.S. President, and Stalin was still Soviet
premier. Which was better, democracy or communism? East or West?
Each nation kept its spin doctors working to prove that it was
better, wealthier, more powerful, with nastier weapons and bigger
harvests and harder-working, more patriotic citizens. The Soviets
extolled their freedom from religion, while many Americans extolled
their belief in God. Naturally that fierce competition extended into
international amateur sport. Each side interpreted the Olympic
motto "citius, altius, fortius" as meaning that its athletes would
go "faster, higher, stronger."
Gender testing was a propaganda by-product of the Cold War. Based on
the discovery of DNA in 1951-53, new gene technology burst into the
sports scene during 40 long years of global jitters, when the world
felt it was teetering on the brink of nuclear war. The era also
spawned new military technology -- the B-52 bomber, the
intercontinental ballistic missile, the nuclear submarine, the space
race. In the U.S., demand for gender testing came out of the same
superheated conservative climate that produced the 1950s McCarthy
hearings, which aimed to root communists and homosexuals out of our
society. In many Americans' minds, there was a link between "not
being a real American" and "not being a real woman or man."
It wasn't till 1952 that the USSR decided to join in post-war Olympic
competition. Still rebuilding out of wartime rubble, the Soviets
patched together their first world-class team for the Helsinki summer
games. Convinced that their athletes must be kept closeted
from "decadent western influences," the USSR -- as well as "satellite
nations" of the Eastern Europe communist bloc -- insisted on drawing
the Iron Curtain right through the Olympic Village, by having their
own separate Village. While many athletes accepted the political
rigors of communist life, partly because they believed in communism,
partly because sports gave them a life of elitist privilege, some
athletes might be looking at international competition as an
opportunity to defect. Communist leaders couldn't risk this -- it
made them look bad. The KGB (secret police) kept a close watch on
their athletes. Over the years, dozens did defect anyway -- runners,
chess players, figure skaters and others, including our own Martina
Navratilova from Czechoslovakia in 1975.
So fierce was that first clash in Helsinki that more than 100 world
records were shattered. The medals race was on. Both Soviet and
U.S. athletes were under agonizing pressure to prove their system's
superiority by piling up medals. Right away the Soviets showed that
they had some exceptional female talent, especially in the throwing
events. While Americans and Western Europeans dominated the sprints,
as they usually did, the USSR's Nina Romashkova took gold in the
discus, while Galina Zybina won gold in the shot put, setting a world
record of 15.28 meters.
But the final score on Helsinki gold was: US - 40, USSR - 22.
Americans rejoiced. Democracy's superiority had been proven! For
now, anyway.
At the next summer Olympics, in Melbourne, the atmosphere was even
uglier. Soviet tanks had rolled into satellite Hungary to crush a
rebellion against communist rule. Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland
protested by pulling out of the Games. Forty percent of the Hungarian
team defected to the West rather than go home to territory occupied
by Soviet troops. Eager to beat the Reds again, the U.S. stayed at
the Games. But this time the Soviets grimly turned the tables.
Final score on golds: USSR - 37, U.S. - 32.
Many American athletes and politicians went into shock. Some made
excuses. After all, they said, U.S. amateur athletes trained
themselves on a shoestring. They couldn't be paid if they wanted to
keep their amateur standing. Yet, they said, communism made a
mockery of amateurism by bankrolling its athletes, giving them state
support and expensive training, making them essentially
professionals. Logically, these complaints should have gotten the
communists blackballed from Olympic competition. But nobody wanted
to push things that far.
At Melbourne, Soviet women continued their takeover of field events
that require sheer strength. How could this be happening?
The communist world had liberated women in a way the West still
declined to do, insisting that the "decadent" West oppressed women.
Under communism, religion-based law banning divorce, adultery and
abortion had vanished. America, where abortion and adultery were
still a crime and divorce still difficult, found this shocking.
Soviet women were legally equal with men. Many women worked side by
side with men in factories, agriculture, medicine, science,
government, even the military. Unencumbered by "decadent western"
notions that femininity meant being beautiful and sexy and soft as a
movie star, a Soviet woman could glory in her physical strength, her
muscles, her sweat, her manual skills, in a way that many American
women were reluctant to do. Most importantly, some Soviet women
were "Stakhanovites," the term for super-achievers among workers.
Like medal-winning athletes, Stakhanovites were held up as Heroes of
the Soviet Union. The young female Soviet athletes now showing up at
the Olympics had been born into that system. Even though they may
secretly have desired more political freedom, their bodies, minds,
emotions and spirits had still been formed by that system.
The average American, however, lived in a system where religious
belief -- that "women are weaker," that "women shouldn't do men's
work" -- still had its own powerful influence. Conservative
Americans dismissed Soviet women as unladylike, ungodly, unglamorous
and unappealing. In their view, what the Soviets called "women's
freedom" was a sham because it wasn't democratic freedom. U.S.
sportswomen were kept painfully on the defensive about proving their
femininity. As late as the 1990s, leading American women athletes
would still feel compelled to make statements like "I don't think
being an athlete is unfeminine, I think of it as a kind of grace."
(Jackie Joyner-Kersee). The word "graceful" became a favorite U.S.
buzzword for the feminine stereotype in American sportswomen, from
1930s figure-skater Sonja Henie to 1960s runner Wilma Rudolph. The
word was even generously applied to the occasional communist female
who met American beauty standards! Soviet gold-medal gymnast Olga
Korbut, for instance, was amazingly "graceful" and became a Western
celebrity.
So, at the dawn of the Cold War, imagine America's dismay when our
women athletes started running up against ungraceful communist women
who put a fierce Stakhanovite spirit into their efforts. Trackside
buzz was loud, about how "masculine" some of these Soviet women
looked, and what an unfair advantage their muscles gave them. The
United States, with its biblical streak, its burr up the butt about
keeping a hard line between masculinity and femininity, was fertile
ground for this buzz.
Over the years, a few Olympic women with "masculine qualities" had
already raised eyebrows. According to SportsJones, one angry fan
wrote the IOC to complain about Stella Walsh, gold- medal sprinter at
the 1932 Los Angeles Games. He fumed: "Her deep bass voice, her
height and 10 1/2 inch shoes surely proclaim her a borderline case if
there ever was one.... Rules should be made to keep the competitive
games for normal feminine girls and not monstrosities." Eyebrows
were also raised at a few early intersex cases – European athletes
who first competed as women, then had reassignment surgery --
including two relay runners and one skiing champion.
For a long time, trackside rumor also insisted that some countries
sent biological men to compete in women's events in disguise, to get
another unfair advantage. So far, according to SportsJones, "There
[had been] been only one documented case…. In 1936, a German athlete
named Hermann Ratjen bound up his genitals and, calling
himself 'Dora,' competed in the high jump. He came in fourth, beaten
by three actual uterus-bearing girls." But during the Cold War,
this paranoia about men in disguise went into overdrive. Many
Americans believed that those super-achieving Soviet women athletes
were really males.
The Notorious Sister Act
Enter Tamara Natanovna Press and her sister Irina Natanovna.
They were Ukrainian Jews born in Kharkov, a region famed for its
rolling prairies rich in wheat and sugar beets. They and their
family were among the few Jews left alive in the Ukrainian SSR after
World War II atrocities by the Nazis. In 1960 the two young women
arrived in Rome with 608 other females for the summer games. As they
marched into the stadium under the red flag, they were the Kremlin's
latest cold-war weapons – as if they were new ballistic missiles
being paraded by the Soviet army in Moscow's Red Square. Tamara had
already won discus gold and shot-put bronze at the 1958 European
Championships. She was 23 years old, looking at all the news cameras
with a shy expression on her freckled face. Irina was 21.
Despite all this propaganda clank at the Games, vast changes loomed
across the world. In the U.S., Eisenhower conservatism was waning,
and a liberal Catholic Democrat named John F. Kennedy was about to be
elected President. The Sixties would shortly explode into freedom-
seeking and authority-flouting on every front, with students and
ethnic minorities rioting in practically every Western country.
Racial freedom, sexual freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to
experiment with drugs, all were demanded. Behind the Iron Curtain,
the Soviet Union's own citizens were beginning to demand more of
these same freedoms, and the country was undergoing a
powerful "thaw". New premier Nikita Krushchev was doing a balance
act – trying to keep peaceful co-existence with the U.S. abroad, and
trying to keep "the thaw" from going too far at home.
In their way, the Press sisters would be part of the changes coming --
human reality arriving to challenge entrenched ideology on both
sides.
They were big muscular plain women, complete with Adam's apples.
SportsJones comments: "To say that [they] looked a little butch
would be like noticing the World Trade Center looked a little tall."
Both had some facial hair. Tamara had thick muscular thighs like a
weightlifter, and a powerful torso with just the barest suggestion of
breasts showing through her singlet. As spectators watched the two
women go into action, waves of buzz ran through the stands.
Instantly the Press sisters were pegged as the
latest "monstrosities." Tamara, the older and bigger of the two,
provoked the most curiosity and outrage. As she walked onto the
field for her first event, she must have felt this scrutiny
intensely -- along with the enormous responsibility riding on her
broad shoulders, to prove that her country was better.
According to HickokSports.com, Rome was a triumph for the USSR: "The
Soviet Union dominated women's track and field, aside from the
sprints. Led by sisters Tamara and Irina Press, they won six of the
other seven events….The 800-meter run, restored to the program for
the first time since 1924, was won by Soviet Lyudmila Shevtsova in
world record time." The two "monstrosities" swept the entire
division. Irina placed in the Top 6 in all events, and won the 80-
meter hurdles. Tamara Press blasted her way to gold in the shot put
and silver in the discus.
Women's throwing events were slowly, reluctantly being accepted into
the Olympic program. Because they involved strength and weapon-like
items, they'd been viewed for a long time as "unladylike"
and "unfeminine." Women's discus was added in 1928, javelin in
1932. In 1948 approval of the shot put was possibly inspired by
women's vigorous contributions in World War II, both in the military
and civilian sectors. But the shot, as a sport started by British
soldiers who threw cannonballs around for fun, demanded greater
explosive strength than either the javelin or discus. Therefore some
people still considered it to be inappropriate for females. The
biggest no-no of all – the women's hammer throw -- would not be
allowed until Sydney 2000.
Adding insult to injury, the Rome Olympics were the first seen on
television. Though there was no global satellite coverage yet,
Eurovision did offer live broadcasts to its customer countries, while
CBS rushed its dailies to New York and aired them from there. TV had
a huge impact on Americans' sensibilities about Olympic athletes.
Patriotic Americans had to sit on their sofas and watch helplessly
as "state-supported atheist unfeminine commies" were beating the
panties off "god-fearing American ladies." Especially those two
amazons, Tamara and Irina Press. What had the world come to?
Final score on Rome medals: USSR - 43, U.S. - 34.
Right away the grumbling and rumors went to orange-alert level. Not
only were the Press sisters trained by millions of Soviet rubles, but
no "normal" women could perform like they did. They must be using
some kind of unfair advantage. There was buzz about drug use.
Though the IOC had not yet outlawed doping, some athletes on both
sides were already pumping their performance with amphetamines,
anabolic steroids, etc. Indeed, many in sports were OK with men
bulking up on steroids -- they looked no different than the popular
over-muscled comic-book heroes of the day, like Superman, Captain
Marvel, the Hulk. Allegations had it that communist women, notably
the Press sisters, were being forced by their governments to use a
lot of steroids. It was NOT OK for women to look and act like
Superman.
But most of the buzz about the Press sisters focused obsessively on
their gender. They couldn't possibly be real women. "Real women"
were what the most popular American athletes looked like. For
instance the "graceful" Wilma Rudolph, whose three gold medals in
track gave Americans one of their few happy moments in Rome. The
Presses had to be men in women's clothes. The IOC should demand to
look inside the sisters' shorts to see if the right sex organs were
there.
Four years later, at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, tensions went even
higher. Yes, the U.S. did recoup on medals. They got 36 golds,
compared to 30 for the USSR. But that awful Tamara Press deprived
the U.S. of another win in the shot put, plus a second gold in
discus. Her awful sister grabbed the gold in the first women's
pentathlon in history.
Tamara's fabled strength and grim expression prompted Western male
athletes to give her a wide berth. Recently, on a Yahoo sports
newsgroup, one correspondent remembered: "A young American shot
putter who had qualified to travel with the U.S. team to Europe and
Russia for some international meets wandered into the assigned
weightlifting gym one day and started lifting weights. Tamara Press
entered the weight room and started lifting weights far, far heavier
than the young American was capable of lifting. So he thought it
best to get the heck out of the gym and go do some throwing from the
ring."
Personal Perspective
During the Sixties, I was in my mid-twenties, still deep in the
closet. I was trying to be a "real American woman" myself ...
meaning I dutifully wore my favorite shade of lipstick and chic
little Chanel suits to the Reader's Digest office where I worked.
In 1957 I had married a Ukrainian emigre writer. My close
association with refugees from communism, especially Ukrainian
writers and artists who survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s,
would move the Digest to put me on some book and article projects
about the Cold War. Naturally I watched the 1960 and 1964 Olympics
on grainy black-and-white TV, and became fascinated with the Press
sisters. There were hair-raising images of Tamara's volcanic
strength, her sweaty face contorting and hair flying as she launched
the iron shot like a human catapault. She became the first woman
ever to hurl it farther than 18 meters.
Though I was staunchly pro-democracy, my heart went out to the Press
sisters. They made me remember my high-school days when I was the
hulking tomboy who picked fist-fights with other students to try and
stop their teasing. I wondered how Tamara, especially, saw herself.
In that firestorm of attention and controversy, with some spectators
cheering her wildly and others booing and hissing, how did she keep
her focus, her confidence? Was that why she looked so inward and
grim on the TV screen?
My Ukrainian emigre friends were fiercely anti-communist, and rooted
for the U.S. team in front of their TV sets, but they also took
fierce partisan pride in the Press sisters' exploits. My friends had
their own hot discussions about the Presses. Were they men, or great
big lesbyanky? Who cared? Ukrainians and Russians were historic
enemies. So every time nasha Tamara ("our Tamara") or nasha Irina
won a medal, they were trampling Russians under their track shoes.
That was chudovo (beautiful).
By now Tamara and Irina had won five golds, one silver, and a fistful
of world records. The grumblers went to red alert. It was time to
remove "monstrosities" from the scene.
Pressures were quietly applied by Western countries, notably the
U.S. Shortly the IOC announced that gender verification would be
required of every woman competitor. The test made its first
appearance in 1966, at the European Championships. In its first and
most primitive form, it was a physical exam. The women had to stand
naked before a panel of doctors and submit to having their bodies and
genitals fingered. There had to be a real vagina, and no penis. Some
women felt horribly degraded by the ritual grope, and said so. Their
countries complained to the IOC.
In 1968, reacting to this criticism, the IOC hastened to substitute a
new, less invasive technique at the Mexico City summer games. The
buccal smear made it possible to examine a woman's sex chromosomes
under a microscope, in cells swabbed from the inside of her mouth.
If female gender was "verified" in the form of two X chromosomes, the
woman got a certificate that let her compete. If anything different
was seen, the ax fell. The IOC allowed her to pretend sudden injury
or illness, and go home quietly. But her future in international
competition was over -- the International Amateur Athletic Federation
(IAAF), the Asian Games, the Commonwealth Games and others were
adopting the test.
However, the truth about gender definition, and how sports
authorities could enforce it, was not so black and white. Gender-
testers would find themselves confronted with real living people, not
ideology.
X's and Y's
"People come in bewildering sexual varieties," says Brown University
professor Anne Fausto-Sterling in a Science World article. Humans
are born with 46 chromosomes, in 23 pairs. The two chromosomes that
determine the child's gender are the X (female) and Y (male). Most
women are XX while most men are XY. In those days, it was assumed
that the mere presence of a Y chromosome absolutely determined male
gender. However, new scientific research was discovering that, in an
estimated few among thousands of births, there can be an amazing
range of variations. Some people are born with a single sex
chromosome -- they are 45X or 45Y. Others are born with a third sex
chromosome -- 47XXY or 47XYY or 47XXX.
These and other variations were now throwing wrenches into the
machinery of Olympic gender-testing. The gender-testers would find
no biological men competing as women. What they found, often, was a
woman with XXY chromosomes whose genetic makeup included a factor for
testosterone resistance -- yet this women had a perfectly "normal"
female appearance, with no extra muscle mass that might give an
unfair advantage. The gender-testers would have to flunk her
anyway. Testers also encountered strongly built masculine-looking
women, like sprinter Maria Matula, who proved to be a standard XX and
passed the test again and again. Plus they encountered women with
intersex genitalia. Some of these had a bit of Y chromosome attached
to an X -- others were "normal" XXs whose genital development may
have affected by hormonal imbalance or even fetal damage. Facial
hair on a woman could be the result of chromosomal variation, or a
simple imbalance between estrogen and testosterone. According to
Fausto-Sterling, "Chromosomes, hormones, the internal sex structures,
the gonads and the external genitalia all vary more than most people
realize."
Later, in 1997, Stanford Today would put it another way, saying, "The
very science that enables sex testing is demonstrating that simple
definitions are no longer biologically sound. ... Try as they might,
researchers are having trouble stuffing human biology into two
distinct boxes labeled 'male' and 'female.'"
But back in 1968, at the Mexico City Olympics, few people were
listening to any scientific caveats. After all, the reason for
gender testing was political: win the Cold War any way you can.
Mexico City went down in history as the Olympics where Mexican troops
fired on demonstrating students, killing 267 and wounding 1000. It
went down in history for black runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos
making the Black Power salute on the victory stand, to protest racism
in the U.S. Women's growing protests of the gender test were drowned
out by the blood and thunder of bigger events.
Everybody buzzed about the Press sisters not being on the Soviet team
this time. Tamara and Irina had quietly retired from international
competition before the 1966 European Championships. The story was,
that they were taking care of their ailing mother back home. Had the
Kremlin kept the two women home because they wouldn't pass the test?
No one knew for sure. But the champions of femininity gloated --
judging by the medals numbers, the mere threat of a test was surely
having a deterrent effect. In 1960, USSR women had won eight golds
in track and field; this time, not a single track-and-field gold went
to Soviet women. The shot put was won by a West German, Margitta
Gummel. When the Games ended, the gold-medal score was U.S. - 45,
USSR - 29. Score one more for democracy. And score a big one
for "real women."
Though some still alleged that the Press sisters had been on
steroids, this – if true -- wouldn't have prevented them from
competing in Mexico City. The IOC wouldn't ban steroids, and start
testing for them, for another nine years.
The Presses may have vanished from the Olympics, but Tamara got one
last laugh. In 1965, at a European meet, she had set one last world
shot record of 18.59 meters. The record stood for three years, until
it was broken by another Soviet woman. Tamara's final achievement
seemed like a sweaty and powerful middle finger raised in defiance at
the West, as she and her sister retreated into proletarian obscurity
in their native country. Whatever their physical or genetic or
gender realities had been, these would remain a mystery.
Despite athletes' growing opposition to gender testing, the IOC
continued to require it. Thirteen women "failed" the test between
1972 and 1984 alone. Was there a clear body of emerging evidence
that being "chromosomally unacceptable" conferred any extra power to
win medals? No. Yet women's careers were destroyed if they failed
the test. Polish sprinter Ewa Klubukowska, who had a "normal" female
phenotype but proved to be an XXY, was barred from international
competition, stripped of all her past medals, and her world record
was scratched off the books. Yet, years later, she was normal woman
enough to have a baby. Spanish hurdler Maria Patino also turned up
with an XY. She was so outraged at being exiled from international
competition that she carried on a fiery legal campaign against the
IOC for three years, until she finally got reinstated. But the rule
stayed in place for everybody else.
In the mid-70s, the buccal/sex-chromatin test was deemed unreliable,
and replaced by an updated DNA test. Yet testing turned up no cases
of men competing as women. Athletes' bodies were more visible to the
public anyway -- they had junked the old-style loose-fitting track
suits in favor of "mod" tight colorful spandex outfits. With drug
testing now in place, they had to give urine samples under direct
observation. So it was laughable to think that a male "ringer" could
slip through so many layers of scrutiny. Through the 80s, as sports
got more enlightened about women's abilities, and women's training
improved, and strenuous events like the marathon were added to the
women's program, it was noted that masculine-type muscle was not
necessarily an advantage. Slender feminine Joan Benoit's winning
marathon time in 1984 was faster than any men's winning marathon
times before 1956 -- a signal achievement, given that women
marathoners were still discovering how fast they could run 26.2 miles.
And what of the male Olympians who might be XXY, or XYY? Male XXYs
often have a slender, more feminine physique, that might give them an
unfair advantage in events like gymnastics and equestrian events.
Some studies suggested that XYY men were more aggressive, which might
confer an unfair advantage as well. But men were not gender tested.
Any variants were allowed to compete unmolested.
Myron Genel, MD, was one expert who became convinced that gender
testing was a joke. In 1990 he and others accepted an IAAF invitation
to get together for a workshop on "femininity verification." Later
Genel wrote in Medscape Women's Health: "Our group concluded that
laboratory-based sex determination should be discontinued…The
purported rationale is to detect male imposters who would have an
unfair competitive advantage. In point-of-fact, genuine imposters
have not been uncovered; however, gender verification procedures have
resulted in substantial harm to a number of unassailable women
athletes born with relatively rare genetic abnormalities that affect
development of the gonads or the expression of secondary sexual
characteristics."
In 1992, as a result of this study, the IAAF defied the IOC and
stopped gender testing. The Commonwealth Games and various sports
federations followed suit, as did the American Medical Association,
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and other
medical bodies. But the testing juggernaut rumbled heedlessly on.
At the 1996 summer games in Atlanta, there was a cumbersome DNA
screening process for 3,387 women athletes, that proved to be vastly
expensive for the Games. Eight women were red-flagged, then further
scrutinized and discussed -- and allowed to compete.
Finally, in 1999, even the IOC's own Athletic Commission went to the
executive board and demanded that testing stop. Testing was
suspended on a trial basis for the Sydney and Salt Lake City Games.
But the IOC hasn't abandoned the old ideology. It reserves the right
to re-apply the much-discredited test in any individual case that is
brought to their attention. Meanwhile, on the U.S. political front,
gender realities continue to be ignored by many conservatives -- as
in Texas, where the 4th Court of Appeals ruled in 1999 that only
couples with standard XY and XX chromosomes could be married.
What Happened to Them?
Today, gender controversy still makes headlines, though the arena of
controversy has shifted to the GLBT sports world. Here, officials
and organizers must repeat the painful Olympic effort to get a handle
on gender policy that athletes are willing to accept.
Meanwhile, it's hard to find any current mention of the Press
sisters, who prompted the launch of testing so long ago. They're in
the record books, of course. Tamara is listed on Track and Field
News' all-time world rankings for the women's shot put. She holds
nine world records in shot put and discus. Olympic historian David
Wallechinsky considers Irina the greater of the two, for her
dominance in a broader range of events and her 16 world records.
But the Press sisters' impact can hardly be measured by the number of
medals they won. For that reason, they are evidently the target of
lingering bias and vindictiveness, and have become strangely
invisible in the media. They may have gotten their due Soviet Hero
honors when they went home with their medals, but outside the USSR
they never made it onto any "great sportswomen" lists that I found.
Most of the scanty current material on them dwells on the old
controversy. In 1998 David Wallechinsky, publishing his encyclopedia
work about the Olympics, felt sure the Presses were men. On that
Yahoo sports newsgroup I mentioned, former U.S. athlete Karen Huff
recalled seeing the two sisters at several joint U.S./USSR meets. She
said, "When our teams would eat together in the cafeteria at
Stanford, Tamara would eat alone. It was sad. Does anyone know what
happened to Tamara and Irena ??"
As yet I've found no information on what the Press sisters did with
their post-Olympics lives.
Whatever they did, they kept a low profile. This is understandable.
Any attention to them would inevitably bring all those old painful
questions back to their front door. The 1995 Russian Jewish
Encyclopedia, which documented 8500 Jews still alive and living in
former Soviet territory, lists the Press sisters along with a few of
their family members. Tamara would be 66 today, and Irina 64.
A final word on their careers is offered by Jews in Sports
online: "Doubts and questions still linger regarding whether the
Press sisters had been injected with male hormones by Soviet
officials, or as some assert, were actually men. Either way, their
records and accomplishments remain on the books…. Combined, Tamara
and Irina set an incredible 23 world records."
Yes, the real agenda of gender testing was definitely NOT to ensure
fair play at the Games. The gender test outlived the Cold War by only
a few years. In 1991 the USSR was finally overwhelmed from within by
political, economic and ethnic problems, and collapsed into an array
of struggling independent republics. Communism fell in the satellite
countries as well. Ironically, though the Cold War is gone today,
some post-Soviet hostility still courses through the Olympic Games,
where controversy now centers more on doping and judging. At Salt
Lake City in 2002, all that brouhaha around the figure-skating gold
medal, with the Russians accusing Western judges of anti-Russian
bias, owed much to the distant past.
Ironically, gender testing never gave the U.S. any hoped-for
advantage in the women's throwing events. Over the years, females
from communist countries consistently grabbed the shot-put golds.
Though these countries are no longer "Red", their women continue to
medal frequently in that event. At the Sydney summer games in 2000,
Yanina Korolchik of Belarus won gold in the shot put, with silver
going to Russia's Larisa Peleshenko. According to Track and Field
News, the USSR remains the highest scoring nation in history in this
event. Do such achievements still happen today because these women
have an unfair genetic advantage? Not likely. Do they happen
because these women use performance-enhancing drugs? Well, many
athletes today, including Americans, use a state-of-the-art array of
performance-enhancers, despite IOC efforts to stamp out doping. More
likely these women have the final edge because they are still less
fettered by "conventional femininity." Indeed, their dominance in
the shot put is now a tradition, in the same way that the U.S.
traditionally excels in sprints.
Meanwhile, a Cold War ideology of "masculine-looking female bad guys"
managed to masquerade as sports science for 32 years. Gender testing
could have come straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, if Clancy had
ever written about sports.
---------------------------
Transgendered Athletes
An early Olympics gender controversy involved Czech runner Zdenka
Koubkowa, who broke the women's world record for the 800-meter dash
at the Commonwealth Games in London in 1934. Chromosomal testing was
far in the future, but a pre-Olympics genital evaluation some years
later failed to establish Koubkowa as unambiguously female.
She was not only stripped of her award and barred from participating
in the Olympics, but also subjected to public humiliation when a
photograph of her hermaphroditic state was published in a medical
book. At about that same time, Koubkowa, who had been raised as a
girl, began living her life as a man.
In Berlin in 1936, another call for clinical examination of an
international athlete arose when United States runner Helen Stephens
won an Olympic gold medal for the 100-meter sprint.
When Stephens beat Stella Walsh, a Polish-American sprinter competing
for Poland, by 1.8 meters, a Polish journalist accused Stephens of
being a man. (Accounts of the controversy emphasize that Stephens had
once been propositioned by Adolph Hitler.) An examination eventually
established that Stephens was female.
But sixty years after losing to Stephens, it was Stella Walsh who was
revealed to be transgendered. Walsh had been the 1932 Olympic 100-
meter sprint champion and the first woman to break the twelve-second
barrier. She had won two gold medals, set eleven world records, and
won forty-one Amateur Athletic Union titles.
In 1980 Walsh was shot dead while witnessing a robbery in Cleveland.
The autopsy revealed that the athlete who had lived her life as a
woman had the genitals of a man.
Prominent athletes who had sex-change surgery after they had competed
include two French track stars, Clair (later Pierre) Bresolles and
Lea (later Léon) Caula. Both won silver medals for a relay race in
the 1946 track and field European Championships; both later underwent
genital surgery and lived as men.
At least one athlete, Erika Schineggar of Australia, has competed in
both men's and women's Olympic events. As a member of the Australian
National Ski Team, Schineggar won the 1966 women's downhill ski
title; but shortly thereafter, when the Barr-body test was
introduced, she was found to be chromosomally male and barred from
further women's competitions.
After undergoing four genital surgeries, she changed her name to
Eric, married a woman, and competed in cycling and skiing as a male.
Sex Testing
Throughout the 1990s, a chorus of geneticists and physicians
challenged the Barr-body test, as well as a new and easier sex-typing
procedure that replaced it at the 1992 Winter Olympics in France.
Although the new test was "easy enough to be done by a technician
using a prepared kit," Christopher Anderson wrote in the scientific
journal Nature, the very ease with which the test can be
conducted "risks widespread sex testing in the absence of a clear
idea of what the results actually mean."
Although challenges to chromosomal testing focused not on
discrimination against transgendered athletes but on the gender
verification tests' inability to distinguish between chromosome
abnormalities and birth defects, such scientific concerns evoke the
dilemma that transgendered and intersexed athletes face.
Although Renee Richards and others might conceivably enjoy some
competitive advantage, "It is also true," notes editor of Harrison's
Principles of Internal Medicine Dr. Jean Wilson, "that people are not
equal in athletic prowess in regard to height, weight, coordination,
or any other parameters, and it follows that this is just another way
in which athletes would not be equal."
In 2000, the International Olympic Committee quietly dropped sex
testing. As our understanding of human genetics advances, and as more
transgendered and intersexed people tell the stories of their
struggles, it becomes increasingly obvious that traditional notions
of gender are inadequate and discriminatory.
"It is important that all society, including sports organizations,
recognize that gender development is not always clear cut," Wilson
writes. "The only appropriate way to assign these people to one or
the other sex is to allow them to choose for themselves."
http://www.eros-lasvegas.com/articles/2004-06-01/transolympics/
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