Why would a female athlete fail a gender test?
In this day in age, most of us understand that gender identity can be pretty complicated from a social, cultural and psychological perspective. But the idea that gender can be complicated from a physical perspective — that a female athlete can be deemed non-female for the purposes of competition — seems a bit bizarre. As it turns out, gender is as much a physical puzzle as it is a social one. There is no one test that can determine with scientific certainty whether someone is male or female. There is only a battery of tests that can evaluate the various aspects of physical gender distinction, and there are various opinions about which of those tests should count the most. In a recent case of an athlete failing a gender test, in December 2006, 25-year-old Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of her silver medal for the 800-meter race in the Asian Games. The first gender tests in the 1960s, which were mandatory for all female athletes competing at the international level to make sure they w
