Olympic Athletes Subject to Gender Testing

It's pretty well established that every Olympic athlete is required to submit to urine testing for recreational and performance-enhancing drugs. But I don't think most Olympic viewers realize that some athletes will also be subjected to gender tests.

The Guardian reports that if the International Olympic Committee suspects that a competitor in a women's event is not actually a woman, that athlete can be subjected both to blood testing to determine if they have two X chromosomes and to a physical examination by a gynecologist.

But the blood test and gynecological test are not the absolute arbiter: Men who have become women through sex reassignment surgery are permitted to compete as women, as long as they wait at least two years after the surgery. There are also millions of people around the world with chromosomal abnormalities -- they have neither two X chromosomes nor one X and one Y chromosome -- and the international sports community still hasn't determined exactly how to deal with such athletes, other than to take them on a case-by-case basis.

One such person is Santhi Soundarajan, the Indian runner pictured above. Soundarajan lived her entire life as a woman and became an elite runner, winning a silver medal in the 800 meters at the 2006 Asian Games. But she was later stripped of that medal when a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and a genetic expert examined her and ruled that although she has the physical characteristics of a woman, she has the chromosomes of a man.

Soundarajan was humiliated by the result of that test and reportedly attempted suicide in 2007.