I Got Your Message!
The Socio-medical Emergency Monologues
By Sophia Siedlberg, OII-United Kingdom
© 2008
Today the 8th of August 2008 sees the opening of the Beijing Olympics and the one debate that interests me is the one about sex testing. Already some "religious" people have crawled out of the woodwork saying that "sex testing is good because it keeps those who are aberrations in the eyes of G-d out". Hmm yes, I suspect they would have really enjoyed the 1936 Olympics then.
I get very angry when the Olympic Games come around. I have no interest in them. I really find sport to be rather boring. I openly admit that my knowledge of sport is very limited. Having been asked by some involved in the Olympics to argue against sex testing, I find myself wondering why. OK, I am trained in genetics and many of these "sex tests" involve genetics. I am also intersexed. You may have heard that term a lot just lately. According to some (Dr. Patrick Schamasch in particular) I am evil because there are some people with conditions like mine who try to compete in the Olympics.
You see the message I get from the Olympics is a simple one. "Look at us. We were born lebensborn and you are subhuman." (Sorry, I am thinking of 1936 again). While with Beijing we are talking about "sex" rather than "race", which was the case in Nuremberg, we are talking the same underlying principle being upheld by the IOC as it stands.
The thing is I refuse to smile sweetly and watch the Hans and Brunhilde brigade (despite my own physical appearance) running round a track with the onlookers and the IOC saying, "This is the best of humanity". (How about the showcase for a lebensborn stud farm? Can we be honest?).
This is what I have huge issues with, being told by some sporting event that I am not partaking in and have no interest in or even want to aspire to joining, that I am somehow subhuman. It is not athletics as a whole that is guilty of this, including people linked to the Olympics. It is this hard core of petty dictators at the IOC and AOC who are responsible for it. The people who approached me to discuss the unfairness of sex testing, including numerous sporting bodies and officials seem to agree with me in that the Olympic Games are being dragged through the mud, appearing to be little more than a disgusting charade overseen by the IOC with their "Stockholm (Syndrome?) Consensus Statement.
Were I inclined to be an athlete (this is never going to happen) I would be regarded as a "Man Cheat" by people such as Dr. Schamasch. Well, I am not male. I don't have the hormone levels a man would have (I do not have the physical strength of a man) and I really find all the moral panic being whipped up by the likes of Schamasch deeply offensive quite frankly.
The mental flashpoint for me was when in 2006 Santhi Soundarajan an athlete with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome "failed a gender test". She was weeded out by norm born bigots. This was after the IOC had said that they had dropped sex testing, but then this was not the IOC but the AOC overseeing the Asian Games. However, in talking to an athlete who was planning to go to Beijing called Kristen Worley I discovered that the vomit of sex testing was still alive and kicking in Beijing. In fact the Chinese had set up a nice little sex testing laboratory (presumably next door to the Killing Rooms) and they would "only test athletes they suspected of being "Man Cheats", that is Intersexed.
Hopefully as the 2010 Winter Olympics are being held in Canada, this will have changed, given that the Canadians are not exactly comfortable with the prejudiced claptrap coming out of Beijing right now. In 2012 the Olympics will be visiting the UK in London and hopefully by then, this "sex testing" will be a thing of the past.
Why does this concern me so much? Well, it has a lot to do with the “oh so image conscious” IOC running around in little circles going on about sponsorship and public image. After the spectacle of the Olympic Torch being chased around the world by Free Tibet demonstrations and then the Torch being carried to the top of Mount Everest (to drive home the point that China is not giving Tibet back to the Tibetans), I sort of get the feeling that the IOC are a bit red faced right now, not through choking on the Beijing smog, but the embarrassment of being seen to give credence to a nation occupying another.
China does not exactly have the greatest track record when it comes to human rights either. We have all seen the media commentaries about those killing rooms where thanks to the population controls (one child per couple), we have the situation where most couples opt to have boys. If a girl is born, well she is just disposed of. The Chinese setting up "Man cheat detection clinics" next door to the killing rooms only serves to make the IOC look even worse.
In the middle of all this stands Dr. Patrick Schamasch with his mouth going ten to the dozen about "man cheats" and "hunting them down" because "they laugh at the Olympics" . Well fine, I feel almost tempted to stand right in front of him in London and say, "Hello Dr Schamasch. I have 5 alpha reductase deficiency, and while I am female and choose to remain female, you consider me to be a "man cheat" and you "want to hunt me down" and "Look Patrick. The Olympic venue, hahahaha, isn't it hilarious!". I would love to see what he would say to that, because I have had a gut full of people like him telling me I am subhuman and after having seen what happened to Santhi Soundarajan in 2006 and later seen an athlete I know personally, Kristen Worley, as good as mentally tortured, having been told: "No, you cannot go to Beijing. You will play by my rules" by none other than Dr Schamasch, who struts his stuff like he is some Sumerian Sun g-d, I am very un-impressed by the way the Olympics have become some sort of political sham and I am in a very bad mood about it.
I really think the IOC need to regard Beijing as the public relations disaster that it is and consign it to the dustbin of "a bad Olympic event". I also think they need to realize that the Beijing Olympics is to sex as the Nuremberg Olympics were to race. There is little to be gained by pretending otherwise. I as a geneticist will not be told by a foot specialist what genetics is about either. And I am going to make myself heard on this because while I am not an athlete and will never aspire to be, I have found myself shoved out of my own aspirations just because I have "XY chromosomes" and I am female.
