Every now and then I pick up a bloomberg headline that grabs my attention...

quote:

Transsexuals Push Sports to Think Anew: Who Is Male, Female? 2006-11-09 00:08 (New York) By Curtis Eichelberger Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- John Harper was his high school valedictorian and Male Athlete of the Year. In college, he became an All-Canadian cross-country runner and earned advanced degrees in physics. Yet he carried a gnawing secret. While he had male physical characteristics and sex organs, his brain had developed female, leaving him feeling from a very young age that he was a girl locked in a boy's body. He would eventually lose two marriages -- the second after he told his wife he wanted to correct his sex organs and live as a woman. ``It's a genetic mistake that makes me the way I am,'' Harper says. ``But this is the life I have. And I'm happier now than I've ever been.'' In January, at age 49, Harper underwent gender reassignment surgery after taking the name Joanna. A top over-40 runner in Portland, Oregon, she is one of a growing number of transsexuals whose love of sport, determination to compete and willingness to speak out are forcing sports leagues and governing bodies to redefine who is female and who is male. ``We are delving into the investigation of what is sex, and we are learning it is a far more complex question than we ever imagined,'' says Arne Ljungqvist, 75, a Swedish pathologist on the International Olympic Committee's medical panel. The Lausanne, Switzerland-based IOC drew up a policy in 2004 that allows ``transitioned'' athletes to compete once they have changed their legal status, had surgery and waited two years to lose the advantages of the sex hormones testosterone or estrogen. Golf's Exception Other governing bodies, including USA Track & Field and the United States Golf Association, have adopted similar policies. The only major U.S. sports league that bans transsexuals is the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which requires a competitor to be at least 18 and female at birth. The National Collegiate Athletic Association is reviewing its current policy, which requires athletes to participate in the gender listed on state documents such as a driver's license or birth certificate, says spokeswoman Jennifer Kearns. Athletes who have already addressed their transsexuality publicly include Danish-born golfer Mianne Bagger, who plays in Europe; Canadian cyclists Michelle Dumaresq and Kristen Worley; and Australian women's soccer player Martine Delaney. Keelin Godsey, 22, a two-time national women's collegiate champion in the hammer throw at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, says she now wants to be identified as male, though she has no immediate plans for reassignment surgery. Question of Fairness The issue these athletes and others who follow them are being confronted with is one of fairness: Is it fair for former men to compete against women, and vice versa? Doctors say testosterone gives men greater muscle mass and creates more of the oxygen-carrying red blood cells that give them greater endurance in sports like track and field. Females have higher levels of estrogen, which give them increased fat deposits just below the skin. This has an advantage in sports like swimming, where the fat makes women more buoyant. For competition to be fair, the transitioned athlete must not retain an advantage from the hormones they generated in their previous gender, according to the policy created by the IOC and adopted by other sports. The IOC says it takes about two years for transitioned women to lose their male muscle mass and reach a point where they get winded faster. Some transsexuals dispute this conclusion. Harper and Bagger, the golfer, say that while they are glad governing bodies have created inclusive policies, the two-year waiting period after surgery is misguided. Hormone treatments, which start months before surgery, are what really create a gender transition, not an operation altering genitalia. Endurance Lost Harper no longer has aspirations to Olympic fame. A medical physicist at a hospital in Portland, she has received special permission to run road races as a female for the better part of a year. She says she lost strength and endurance three months after beginning hormone therapy -- 16 months before her surgery -- and says her slower race times back her claims. In 2003, Harper ran the Helvetia Half Marathon, one of the largest races in Portland, as a 46-year-old man. He finished 11th among men, in 1:23:11. In 2005, Harper ran as a 48-year-old female. She was taking estrogen and living as a woman, though still had male sex organs. The race director gave her permission to run with women, and she finished ninth, in 1:34:01. ``Most people were uncomfortable with the idea at first, but the fact that I became substantially slower, and they could see me getting slower, helped them accept me,'' Harper says. `Doping Themselves' Bagger, 39, says the two-year period for golfers -- and a debate over whether a transitioned woman benefits from residual testosterone -- are hypocritical and silly. ``They are worried about women with no testosterone -- and no means of its production -- while any other competitor could be out there doping themselves to the eyeballs!'' Bagger said in an e-mail. There is tremendous physical variation among women on the golf tour, Bagger says. If she has an advantage over her female competitors, why can't she out-drive them? ``Nobody questions a 16-year-old girl hitting 300-yard drives and competing with men,'' Bagger says, referring to up-and-coming players like Michelle Wie. ``Have a transitioned woman playing women's golf, hitting 240-yard drives, and there's a problem.'' When Dumaresq won her third Canadian downhill title this year at Whistler, British Columbia, second-place finisher Danika Schroeter wore a T-shirt during the award ceremony that read: ``100% Pure Woman CHAMP 2006.'' The Canadian Cycling Association suspended Schroeter three months for her conduct. Childhood Thoughts In spite of the taunts, athletes like Harper say they will continue to push for acceptance and respect. Being in the wrong body is something they've been aware of since childhood, certainly nothing they chose. Harper was 6 years old when he learned he was ``different.'' He was walking home from school with a classmate when he innocently turned to him, and asked, ``Do you ever think about being a girl? Not forever, but for a while, just for fun?'' The neighbor was aghast. ``The way he looked at me immediately made me realize I had said something very, very wrong,'' Harper said during an interview at her home. ``He said, `No, I don't want to be a girl. Why would I want to be a girl?''' Harper, sitting on her living room couch in a pink sweater and jeans, says she always knew she was a girl. Early Diagnosis ``It's like asking you, `When did you know you were left-handed?'' she says. ``You just always did, right?'' Young people are being diagnosed earlier with a range of genetic and hormonal abnormalities, and reassignment surgery -- changing the physical attributes of gender -- is becoming more accepted, doctors say. One in 11,900 males and 1 in 30,400 females are transsexuals, according to estimates collected by Indianapolis-based USA Track & Field. Jill Pilgrim, general counsel and director of business affairs at the track governing body, says she started getting inquiries from transsexuals on entry requirements in about 2004 and has received about half a dozen in the past two years. To provide sports associations with the facts they'd need to develop policies for transsexual athletes, Pilgrim and a collaborator, health-sciences professor David Martin of Georgia State University in Atlanta, produced a 50-page white paper in 2003. Pilgrim says she expects the number of transsexual athletes to increase gradually. Corporate Policies ``Gays and lesbians took a long time to come into the mainstream, and transsexualism is clearly not in the mainstream,'' she said. `Therefore, I can see the great reluctance to step forward.'' The movement in sports has parallels in the workplace. In 1997, Lucent Technologies Inc. became the first major U.S. company to ban discrimination and harassment based on a person's gender identity or appearance. Today, 167 Fortune 500 companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., International Business Machines Corp., AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, Yahoo! Inc. and Boeing Co. extend similar protections, according to the Washington-based Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, which provides training on gender policies. Boeing, which has about 25 transsexuals among its roughly 150,000 employees, provides a ``gender transition leader'' to help workers come out, says Joyce E. Tucker, Boeing's vice president of global diversity and employee rights. Biological Variations ``This gives us a great edge,'' she says. ``People want to work someplace where they feel they'll be appreciated and respected.'' No one really knows why sexual ambiguities occur. High school biology teachers used to tell students there are two pairings of chromosomes: XX for females and XY for males. Researchers have since learned there are at least 18 variations of sexual development, creating a more diverse population than many people know about. That's one reason gender testing in sports has changed often. Athletes were required to undergo sex verification for the first time at the 1966 European Track and Field championship in Budapest. Women had to walk naked past a panel of doctors, who would look at their genitals and issue a ``femininity card'' good for life. Humiliated women pushed the IOC for a less invasive method. Tests for chromatin masses in women and chromosomes in men were introduced, then phased out, and governing bodies returned to suspicion-based medical exams. Renee Richards Courts have also become involved. Renee Richards was a standout on the amateur men's tennis circuit who underwent sex reassignment in 1975. When the U.S. Tennis Association barred her from competing in the 1976 U.S. Open because she couldn't pass the IOC-style chromosome test, she sued and won a 1977 Supreme Court case. She lost in the Open's first round that year. Suspicion-based exams were dropped when the IOC agreed to accept transsexual athletes in its 2004 policy shift. ``Our society has a very polarized view of male and female based on stereotypes of speech and dress,'' says Sara Becker, 55, a physician at Northwest Primary Care Group PC in Portland who has had more than 600 transsexual patients. ``But people are born with a great deal of variety.'' Syndromes In males, sometime between the 32nd and 65th day of fetal development, a gene called SRY typically stimulates the formation of a testis that can produce the male hormone testosterone. Testosterone initiates the development of genitals, secondary characteristics like facial hair and the masculinization of parts of the brain responsible for sexual behavior. If the process goes awry, the baby might develop both male and female features. One variation causes Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, an inherited condition that occurs in about 1 in 13,000 births, according to the Rohnert Park, California-based Intersex Society of North America. People with AIS are chromosomally male, yet their bodies don't respond to male hormones. Although their brains develop female, they have no womb or ovaries and may need surgery to correct partially developed female genitalia. Another condition, adrenogenital syndrome, gives a female fully developed ovaries and a uterus along with a high level of testosterone and ambiguous genitals. Hormones' Role A transsexual's transition usually takes five years. It includes psychotherapy, hormone treatments, a year living as a member of the new gender, reassignment surgery and psychiatric follow-up. Hormone therapy is the most life-changing part. The surgery costs $10,000 to $25,000 for a male-to-female transition, according to a report on the American Medical Student Association Web site. The penis and testicles are removed and an artificial vagina created, Becker says. Female-to-male surgery can cost as much as $100,000 and is more difficult. The sex organ is usually formed from the clitoris and can't function without a pump or implant. ``People need to understand that we are actually females with a physical problem, and not males with a psychological problem,'' Bagger says. ``We were born this way.'' She considers the word ``transsexual'' offensive. ``Transitioned people have corrected their sex, not changed it,'' she says. Cheering the `Girls' That's hard for some people to grasp, as Harper learned when she told her mother of her plan for surgery. ``My mother was so proud of me, all the things I'd accomplished in my life. And now, I am the shame of her life,'' Harper says. Harper's mother suggested shock-therapy but later relented. ``She finally let me go home this past summer, but she didn't want anyone to know I was coming, and anytime I stepped out of the house, she'd say, `Did anyone you know see you?''' Harper is still friends with both her ex-wives and has had dinner with both former mothers-in-law since her transition. And she was supported by co-workers, and embraced by the Portland running community. It was a huge thrill to be introduced at her niece's wedding this summer as Auntie Joanna, she says. Her greatest enjoyment these days, apart from running, comes from just being able to live in her own skin. ``I was running in a road race and there was a pack of women all together,'' Harper says. ``And someone on the sidewalk yelled out, `Way to go, girls.' ``I can't tell you how great that made me feel. I was just one of the gals.'' --Editor: Horvitz (scc)

Last edited by Shakka on Nov-09-2006 at 18:24