Gender Verification In Sports Essay

In recent years, it has become more and more difficult to leave the issue of gender identification in an athletic setting untouched and unaddressed. Gender verification in sports is the issue of verifying the eligibility of an athlete to compete in a sporting event that is limited to a single gender. The issue has arisen multiple times in the Olympic games and other sporting competitions where it has been suspected that male athletes attempted to compete as women and that women have attempted competition as males, creating the possibility of unfair advantage. It was originally thought unfair for a hormonally enhanced female to compete in a female sporting event given the evident unfair advantage. The word “enhanced” would, in this case, describe the introduction of synthetic androgens into the body of a woman undergoing transition into the male sex. A transgendered female supplementing testosterone propionate, for example, would encounter fast acting muscular development due to propionate’s short ester and low water retention. The compound would not only build a more athletically capable individual, but also allow him/her to outperform other female competitors in most cases. In this case, an athlete considered “enhanced” due to a transgendered …show more content…
Those who identified as female would be allowed to compete said category as long as their testosterone levels were below 10 nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months prior to the competition (IOC November 2015). So long as these conditions were met, there would be no restrictions on transgender athletes identifying themselves as male and competing in that category (IOC November 2015). Additionally, The IOC stated that requiring surgical anatomical changes as a requirement for participation may be considered as a violation of notions of human rights (Zeigler,