Testing athletes' gender: Headache in search of justice

The year 2025 marks a major milestone in elite sports history as World Athletics conducts gender testing for all athletes worldwide.

All track and field athletes are tested for SRY - Photo: REUTERS

That could be the solution to a problem that has plagued elite sports administrators for decades: fairness in the women's game.

The Tragedies

Since the 1960s, World Athletics (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have adopted various forms of testing to ensure fairness, preventing men or those with superior biological characteristics from competing in women's competitions.

It was the right thing to do, to move towards a truly fair game for women. But when it came to testing, the sports science community realized it was not that simple.

One of the most famous cases is Ewa Kłobukowska - the Polish "speed queen" who won gold in the 4x100m relay and bronze in the 100m at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In 1967, she was banned from competing after tests showed "chromosomal abnormalities".

Although scientists later discovered that she had a genetic syndrome that gave her no obvious athletic advantage, Kłobukowska still lost her career. She became almost a recluse to avoid controversy. “I felt like my life was being taken away from me,” she later said in a rare interview.

Previously, in the 1950s, Foekje Dillema (Netherlands) was expelled from the athletics world just because she refused to take a gender test. For a long time, the sports world considered this "woman with a male face" as "avoiding, not daring to face the truth". Only after her death in 2007, DNA testing showed that Dillema had intersex characteristics, with the 46XX/46XY chromosome phenotype.

Scientists today believe that although people with such chromosomes do benefit from playing in the female arena, they are still female. And Dillema is not at fault for possessing such unusual natural features.

Heinrich Ratjen, a German athlete who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics under the name Dora Ratjen in the women's high jump, was disqualified by World Athletics from the women's competition because of her male characteristics. Ratjen was forced to end her career and return to living as a normal man under the name Heinrich.

Decades later, the sports world still debates the “humanity” of Ratjen’s story. No one complains about his exclusion from women’s sport. But most feel sympathy for a man’s ruined fate.

"I just want to live peacefully, no one calls me a fraud" - he once said briefly in a rare phone interview. Ratjen also chose a reclusive lifestyle, living day by day by working as a waiter in a remote countryside.

When will there be an answer?

There are also some rosy stories, such as the case of Austrian skiing champion Erik Schinegger. He won the world championship in 1966 under the name Erika Schinegger.

He was later discovered to have an XY chromosome just before the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Schinegger accepted his "rebirth", openly lived as a man, and changed his name to Erik. He later got married, had adopted children, opened a ski school, and became a fairly successful businessman. "I was lucky to find peace in my true identity," Erik shared in his autobiography.

The controversy has persisted for decades. As time has gone on, athletes have become more conscious of fighting back against allegations of gender-based violence. Spanish athlete Maria José Martínez-Patiño is a prime example.

In 1985, she was disqualified from athletics because she had an XY chromosome pair. But Patino continued to fight to prove her female identity. But after many years of fighting, scientists determined that she had androgen insensitivity syndrome - meaning her body cannot use testosterone, so she has no advantage over other women.

Patino was eventually reinstated as a woman, but her sporting career was over. With a good academic background, Patino pursued a career in sports science and became a well-known researcher at the University of Vigo.

Patino became a typical example of the huge shortcomings and loopholes in the gender testing process in the 1980s. Also from the case of Patino, World Athletics as well as the IOC, other sports federations for many decades have been "indifferent" to gender testing because it is such a complicated world.

It’s not as simple as exposing the “male athletes” in women’s sports. Most of the controversies revolve around girls who have lived half their lives as women, with some unusual biological characteristics.

They are not like other girls. But what criteria can be used to eliminate them from the female playground in a transparent and convincing way is a headache for scientists.

After all, there are still standards of humanity. An athlete today is introduced to the path of sports training from the age of 6-7. 15-20 years later, they are eliminated from the playing field, which seems to be their destiny.

Not everyone is as resilient as Patino, and not everyone is as lucky as Schinegger. The former Austrian athlete has one advantage over similar cases. That is, when he "returned his true gender", he was just over 19 years old. There is still time to start over. Meanwhile, Foekje Dillema was eliminated from the sports scene at the age of 24.

The existence of "boys" in the female playground is clearly unfair. But in the journey to find fairness, injustice also appears, causing headaches for sports managers when faced with the above reality.

Results are confidential

In September 2025, World Athletics officially applied the SRY testing method for all athletes. Unlike the old methods which focused on the hormone testosterone, the new method shifted to determining genetic nature: whether the athlete possessed the SRY gene or not, as a more definitive indicator of biological sex. The SRY test method is considered less invasive, like a COVID antigen test. It is only performed once in a lifetime with the results encrypted securely on the World Athletics system.

Overall, the sports community is relatively in agreement with this method, especially when World Athletics deploys it to all athletes. It does not hurt anyone by being suspected. This method is also considered to be inexpensive (under 100 USD/test).

HUY DANG

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/kiem-tra-gioi-tinh-vdv-dau-dau-tim-le-cong-bang-20250920103055524.htm