The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

The clear advantages testosterone bestows on athletes have also led to a much more controversial form of testing, the testing for an athlete’s sex. It had been suspected in some Olympic Games that gold medals in some women’s events had actually been awarded to men, so the practice began of testing female athletes to see if they were indeed what they claimed to be. At first this seemed a simple case of looking for a Y chromosome. If an athlete tested positive for XY, then he was a male. Simple. As a result of this test a handful of women at both the 1992 Barcelona and the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games were disqualified. Unfortunately, the reasoning behind the tests was questionable. If a person has a Y chromosome then they do in fact produce testosterone, starting at the fetal stage. But what if that person has been born with a genetic disorder that makes them insensitive to testosterone? What if their testosterone receptors do not work? Then the testosterone will have no effect. This is precisely what happens in a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome—people with a Y chromosome produce testosterone, yet it does not masculinize them. Since the default sex of a fetus is female, these people will appear to all the world as women. Are they women? They think so, and who is to tell them otherwise? In the end the issue of establishing sexual identity became intractable and politically fraught. Many women athletes found the tests invasive, far too public and almost medieva...