Dan's Papers - August 15, 2008

One of the little-known stories about the 2008 Summer Olympics is the continuing attempts in Beijing to tell the men from the women. You don't want men competing as women. And the honor of entire countries is at stake. So it is very important.

But would it surprise you to know that nobody has ever accurately been able to do this? Well, they keep trying. And in Beijing, just as in Sydney and in Athens before, there is a big lab set up to test the female athletes. It is staffed by endocrinologists, gynecologists, geneticists and even psychologists. Yet even with all that, even with what we now know, even with our going to the moon and back, nobody knows for sure if they are getting it right.

The Olympics, as you know, are nearly 3,000 years old. And up until 1956, nobody thought it was an issue. The men competed in the men's events. The women competed in the women's events. And that was that.

But in 1955, a German named Hermann Ratjen announced that in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where Hitler was anticipating so much success, he was enlisted by the Nazis to enter the women's high jump as Dora Ratjen. He didn't win. But he finished fourth.

The Olympic committee was astonished when Hermann Ratjen made his confession. They scrambled to the archives to look at the pictures and films of the Berlin Olympics. And there he was, Dora Ratjen. And there was no doubt about it when they put the pictures of Dora and Hermann side by side. She was him.

In the 1960s, with the Cold War raging between the Soviet Empire and the United States, a determined effort was made by the Olympic Committee in Rome to see that this would never happen again. Soviet women looked much too muscular for that committee. And so they studied the matter the old-fashioned way. The committee had all the female athletes strip naked and pass before a panel of doctors to prove they were women. And they did. And they all passed.

This practice continued in 1964 at Tokyo. But in the late 1960s, when the Women's Movement flourished in democracies around the world, it was decided to replace the nude walk with something else.

For 1968 in Mexico City, the doctors and the Olympic Committee announced they could tell a man from a woman by examining an individual's chromosomes. Scrapings were made from the forearms of all the entrants. And doctors studied the scrapings under microscopes, looking for women with the male Y chromosome. Five flunked the test. But after the doctors looked at the evidence of these five individuals, they were allowed to compete anyway. The doctors said that each of these five had a genetic defect, but it would not affect performance.

As if this were not confusing enough, earlier that year, a sprinter from Poland, Ewa Klobukowska, in anticipation of the Olympics, was accused of being a man by a European sports committee studying her chromosomes, even though she had passed the nude test the year before before the same committee, and she was stripped of her eligibility.

The chromosome test continued on, required of every woman Olympian, for the next 20 years. In 1985, a Spanish hurdler named Maria Jose Martinez Patino was disqualified after a test revealed that she had a Y chromosome. In 1988, her eligibility was reinstated.

In 1996 at Atlanta, eight female athletes failed the chromosome test but again were allowed to compete anyway because the doctors said they were just birth defects. Indeed, all of them expressed great surprise at being told they had Y chromosomes.

In 2003, a physician named Arne Ljungqvist became chairman of the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission. An outspoken critic of all the tests that the committee was putting the female athletes through, he persuaded the committee to abandon the practice and replace it with a system where women would be tested only if suspicions were raised by other competitors.

"We must be ready to take on such cases should they arise," he said. "Sometimes, fingers are pointed at particular female athletes, and in order to protect them, we have to be able to investigate it and clarify."

And so it has been that in the last three Olympics, when questions have been asked, the testing has been done, and not only the chromosome testing but also physical examinations, genetic studies and then questioning by psychologists. So far, they've turned up nothing.

The games continue. In spite of all efforts since 1956, when a man admitted to competing in a woman's event, no woman has ever been disqualified in an Olympic event for being a man.

But the suspicion remains. Could a man pull it off?

Christine McGinn, a New York plastic surgeon, had this to say. "It's very difficult to define what is a man and what is a woman at this point. People who look like women may have a Y chromosome and people who look like a man may not have one. It's really very complicated."