Genetic testing in sport

[bob sterman]

Well this is a bit daft and takes us back about 30 years...

World Athletics introduces gene test for female category

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/a ... 84gp55153o

We had SRY testing at the Olympics 1992 - 1996. It was abolished for Sydney in 2000.

The problem is - XY individuals with androgen insensitivity will get picked up as "male" even though they have a body which is phenotypically female. With complete androgen insensitivity the body will be essentially completely female in appearance. It's not super rare among athletes - about 0.25% at Barcelona and Atlanta.

For anyone not familiar with AIS - here's someone who has it talking about it...and Seb Coe would say she needs to compete against men...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vDVUPjBJiM

[Tristan]

Not an issue. World Athletic Eligibility Criteria for the category includes 3.5.c:

"Biological males who have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and therefore have not gone through male sexual development including any type of male puberty."

The test will pick up the Y chromosome which will then allow for more detailed review and determination of whether they have CAIS or not. If they do, they can still compete in the women's category.

[bob sterman]

Ok - sorry - only read the news coverage which said athlete would need to be SRY negative to compete in the female category.

Good to see CAIS is covered - but I guess there will be some complex cases when it comes to determining what is "complete" vs "partial". Receptor sensitivity to steriod ligands is not binary - so they will need to have some sort of sensitivity cut-off to define CAIS vs PAIS.

But I see they've made a mess of some terminology in their FAQ...

https://assets.aws.worldathletics.org/d ... 97f90a.pdf

They refer to some 46XY DSD individuals (e.g. CAIS) as perhaps having been "assigned a female gender at birth". Nobody assigns "gender" at birth. Their birth certificate will record their "sex" based on visual inspection.

[Imrael]

I've always thought this should be an issue for sporting regulators not governements (or the press). The main concern is regulation designed for olympic-level competition might prevent extremely low level participants from booking a squash court at the local leisure centre in a mixed social league (as a random example).

[Lew Dolby]

What a joy it must be to be involved in sports where sex/gender is an irrelevance.