Word: intersexed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...press conference came after an Australian newspaper reported that a gender test revealed that Semenya has an intersex condition. In a story published on Friday, the Daily Telegraph said that the test shows the 18-year-old has no ovaries, but rather internal male testes. Semenya came to the world's attention after winning the African Junior Championships in Mauritius in August and then the 800 meters at last month's World Championships in Berlin by an amazing 2 seconds. Her extraordinary times and masculine appearance led the IAAF to request gender verification tests. (Read: "Is a Female Track Star...
...story, The Daily Telegraph did not say which intersex condition the test has revealed Semenya has. But if the paper's report is accurate, it is possible that she has partial androgen-insensitivity syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a genetic male is partially resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. In many cases of partial AIS, the testes never descend from the abdomen, the genitalia may resemble female genitalia, and the individual will display both female and male characteristics. People with AIS often have high levels of testosterone as the body produces more...
...Athletes with AIS and similar intersex conditions are often allowed to compete in international athletics. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, seven genetically male athletes with AIS were allowed to compete as women. On Friday, the IAAF emphasized that Semenya's gender verification tests were a medical issue, not a doping one, and there were no insinuations that the athlete - whose family in South Africa insist she is female - cheated...
...Gender disputes in athletics can be very complicated, however. In his paper "Intersex and the Olympic Games," Rob Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University, notes that in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta - the last Games in which all female athletes were subjected to gender testing - eight female athletes were found to be genetically male. Seven of them had androgen-insensitivity syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a genetic male is resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. In such cases, the testes never descend from the abdomen and the genitalia may resemble female genitalia...
...Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University and the author of "Intersex and the Olympic Games," a recent article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, says that determining someone's sex is not so simple, and that external genitalia can be misleading. A post-mortem on Stephens' body in 1980 revealed that she had "ambiguous genitalia." The post-mortem didn't go into specifics, but those genitalia could have been a small penis that was mistaken for an enlarged clitoris, or a small scrotum that resembled labia. (Read "Feeling Betrayed by Marion Jones...