By Georgina Gustin

Transgender athletes should no longer have to undergo sex reassignment surgery in order to compete in the Olympic games, according to new recommendations issued by the International Olympic Committee announced Sunday.

So, wait. The committee previously required transgender athletes to undergo surgery to compete with their peers? Effectively, it did. Which might sound kind of crazy.

Under the committee’s previous guidelines, adopted in 2003, transgender athletes had to undergo hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery — a requirement that some critics have long said pushed a form of institutionalized genital mutilation.

The new guidelines, developed after much committee hand-wringing, say surgery should not be required, but that men transitioning to women need to test below a certain level of testosterone for more than a year before competing.

That women transitioning to men don’t have to meet the same testosterone requirement acknowledges that men, broadly speaking, have a competitive advantage over women — and points to a tricky issue that the IOC has grappled with for a long time.

In the late 1960s, to level the gender playing field, the IOC required that women athletes submit to mandatory gender testing. The testing came in response to a handful of instances when men attempted to compete as women, and amid accusations that female athletes from Eastern Bloc countries — who had been pumped full of drugs to gain a competitive advantage during the height of Cold War competition — were actually men.

East German athlete Ilona Supianek was disqualified from competing after testing positive for anabolic steroids at the 1977 European Cup. © German Federal Archive.

At first the gender test was of a crude, drop-your-drawers variety. In some cases, female athletes were asked to parade naked in front of doctors or undergo full gynecological exams. But it eventually became a more respectful, chromosome-focused lab test involving a cheek swab.

The IOC officially abandoned compulsory gender testing in 1999 after decades of outcry from athletes and medical associations who said they were unreliable, inaccurate and inhumane. Over the 30 years or so that the IOC required “femininity” tests, 13 women “failed” them — and some, after failing those tests, faked injuries to avoid the humiliation of being “outed” as “men” or quit the competition altogether.

In the handful of cases in which men competed as women, it was, in fact, unintentional and due to rare hormone disorders that trigger “intersex” conditions (what used to be called hermaphroditism) or high levels of testosterone in women. In one famous instance, it took a murder to reveal a truth.

Stanisława Walasiewicz, a Polish sprinter, won gold and silver in the women’s 100 meters at the 1932 and 1936 games. In 1980, after she was shot dead by a robber, an autopsy revealed she had both male and female genitalia.

Stanisława Walasiewicz at the European Athletics Championships, 1938. © National Digital Archive, Poland.

The issue came up again in the mid-1980s when a gender test revealed that the Spanish hurdler Maria Jose Martinez-Patiño had a Y chromosome, making her “male” or an “XY” female. Doctors had determined that Martinez-Patiño had androgen insensitivity syndrome, which causes a person to be resistant to male hormones and develop as a woman, but Spanish athletic officials banned her from female competition.

The committee later adopted a new test, but at the 1996 Olympics eight athletes failed it, despite being “XY” females with androgen insensitivity syndrome. The committee dropped mandatory testing altogether after the Atlanta games, but it, and the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), allowed for occasional testing in cases where an athlete’s gender was questionable.

That allowance enabled the IAAF to test a South African runner, Caster Semenya, whose masculine appearance prompted charges she was male. The association banned Semenya from competition for 10 months as she awaited test results, but she was eventually allowed to complete in the 2012 Olympics in London, where she carried her country’s flag.

Semenya’s case, in particular, led to a growing awareness that the lines of biology are not always so clearly drawn and that, gender aside, it’s virtually impossible to truly level the playing field. Usain Bolt was born with a tremendous gift for sprinting. Does that give him an unfair competitive advantage?

In response to the furor over Semenya’s case, the IAAF announced a new policy acknowledging “a difference in sporting performance between elite men and women, that is predominantly due to higher levels of androgenic hormones in men.” The policy requires women with hyperandrogenism — or high levels of testosterone — to test below the male range of testosterone or to prove that those high levels don’t give them a competitive advantage.

That policy has since been challenged by the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, who in 2015 successfully fought a ban by the IAAF after a test revealed high levels of testosterone due to her hyperandrogenism. Chand and others with the disorder are now cleared to compete in the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — for now. The committee’s new guidance urges the IAAF and other sports organizations “to support the reinstatement of its hyperandrogenism rule.”

In 2013, Dutee Chand became the first Indian sprinter to reach a final at a global athletics event. © AFP

In other words, the committee is saying, athletics need a dividing line — and that dividing line is a hormone, not a surgically altered male or female body part.

“To require surgical anatomical changes as a precondition to participation is not necessary to preserve fair competition,” the committee wrote, “and may be inconsistent with developing legislation and notions of human rights.”