2010 Volume 18 Issue 2 Pages 23-38
This study analyzes the proliferation in women’s competitive sports through two separate areas of change.
The first change examined concerns the number of participants in the Olympics, as well as the individual sports and events recognized as capable of being implemented at those tournaments. The second area of change regards shifts in the interpretation of gender category and the treatment of gender itself. In this study, the focus is placed on two debates as examples of investigations by the IOC into what physical gender actually consists of, and in what forms it is possible for boundaries to be established pertaining to gender. These two debates consist of discussions regarding the introduction of gender verification testing from the latter half of the 1960s, and those concerning participation by sex-reassigned athletes. The goal of the research is to illustrate that the popularization and expansion of women’s competitive sports has been mutually related to changes in the interpretation of gender category.
The expansion and popularization of women’s competitive sports in the Olympics from the latter half of 1960s to 2000s overlapped with the period that decisions were made to introduce and abolish gender verification testing and to approve participation by sex-reassigned .Those decisions have further complicated the conditions surrounding sports and “gender.” Medical testing, meanwhile, continues to steadily furnish hints with regard to the realities of where to draw the lines for secretion amounts of testosterone and other sex hormones, bone structure and several other elements that generate advantages in competitive performance and which, in actual practice, are important for persons engaging in competitive sports. In that sense, competitive sports drawing sharp distinctions between gender categories may in fact already have been relegated to the domain of little more than fiction.
