This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (6)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Joe Leigh Simpson, MD

JAMA. 1986;256(14):1938.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Since 1968 the International Olympics Committee (IOC) has required that individuals taking part in women's sporting events present evidence of "their femininity or female gender." Competitors must report to the "Gender Verification Office," where "determination of X and Y chromatin will be conducted on a smear of buccal mucosa membrane." "If the test is inconclusive, the competitor must undergo further tests as determined by the IOC Medical Commission." Because results are not made public, the efficacy of this policy is unknown.

"Gender" testing superficially strikes one as intuitively logical. That men might masquerade as women is not unthinkable in a luminous event like the Olympics. Moreover, genetic males raised as females may indeed have unfair athletic advantages as a result of increased muscle mass. An example is 5a-reductase deficiency, an autosomal recessive disorder in which 46,XY individuals are often raised as females only to virilize at puberty.

As de la . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
University of Tennessee Memphis

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?