Word: sex
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...some experts say the inherent ambiguity of DSDs makes the idea of treatment problematic. For instance, one sex development disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, causes females to produce abnormal amounts of male sex hormones and is treated by administering steroids to normalize hormone levels. Panel participant Dr. Eric Vilain, professor of human genetics, pediatrics and urology at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, points out that there is tremendous variation in hormone levels even in typical females, which makes determining a baseline virtually impossible. More important, Vilain says, is the ethical question of whether physicians should artificially alter hormone levels...
...compete. In the 1996 Atlanta Games, the last Olympics with mandatory gender-verification tests, seven females were found to have androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a person is genetically male - that is, her 23rd chromosome pair is XY - but is resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. As a result, the body doesn't hear the signal to develop as a male and so develops externally as a female. All seven athletes were allowed to compete in Atlanta...
Another hurdle to a consensus on how to deal with sex ambiguity is the fact that there is very little scientific data on whether DSDs confer any real advantages to athletes. In the 2008 paper "Intersex and the Olympic Games," Robert Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University, noted, "There is no evidence that female athletes with DSD have displayed any sports-relevant physical attributes which have not been seen in biologically normal female athletes...
...championed case-by-case evaluation of athletes with suspected gender disorders. The IOC, which will meet again after the Vancouver Games, is now wondering if that should change. Poorly handled cases like Semenya's suggest that the system is not working. Many athletes who agree to sex testing only learn of their medical condition from sports officials, which can be a shocking and painful way to face such an intimate revelation. María José Martínez-Patiño, who has AIS, was kicked off the Spanish national team, stripped of her titles and barred from competition...
...truth is, for a small segment of the population, even exhaustive clinical and psychological tests will never guarantee a conclusive answer about their sex. According to Vilain, it's basically impossible to come up with a "universal cutoff" to determine females from males. "That's what we're struggling with," he says. "There is no one biological parameter for sex. It's a complicated combination of parameters...