Scrutable

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

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.

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.

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).

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