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A change in the rules designed to stop men masquerading as women in
this year’s Olympic Games could ban some sportswomen from most competitions
but allow them to compete in athletics events. Women who do not have the
normal complement of two X chromosomes have been banned from the games for
over 20 years because they fail the sex test laid down by the International
Olympic Committee (IOC). According to a leading critic of the test, the
change has left the forthcoming Barcelona Olympics in ‘a muddle’.

Since 1968 the IOC has tested the genetic make-up of female competitors
by the buccal smear test. An examination of cells taken from inside the
cheek simply shows whether the competitor has two X chromosomes. The test
excludes women with a single X chromosome (a condition called Turner’s syndrome).
It also excludes women with a more common condition known as androgen
insensitivity syndrome. Here an individual has one X chromosome and one
Y chromosome, and produces almost as much androgen as a normal male. But
because their cells cannot respond to the hormone, most would never know
that they were not genetically female.

Geneticists and athletes have campaigned for more than 20 years for
sports regulators to drop the buccal smear test, which excludes people with
these syndromes.

In February last year campaigners won a major victory when the International
Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) dropped the buccal smear test, and with
it the idea that a person’s genes determine their sex. In future, the federation
will exclude from women’s events only people who are obviously physically
male.

The federation’s rules govern all athletics, including Olympic events,
so the decision left Olympic athletes uncertain about which tests they would
face in Barcelona.

To clarify their position, the chairman of the IOC’s medical commission,
Prince Alexandre de Merode, wrote to national Olympic committees last September.
In the letter he says: ‘During the Olympic Games in 1992, femininity control
will be carried out using the buccal smear test, followed by further investigation
should this prove necessary.’ But ‘those femininity certificates issued
by the IAAF . . . will automatically be valid’, he says.

This will add to the confusion, says Malcolm Ferguson-Smith, professor
of physiology at the University of Cambridge. Women who could quite legally
run races in Barcelona may be banned from swimming competitions. ‘The IOC
is getting itself in a real muddle,’ says Ferguson-Smith.

However, the secretariat of the IOC’s medical commission in Switzerland
says it is waiving tests for women with IAAF certificates at this year’s
Olympics only in deference to the IAAF’s unique role in the games. Eduardo
Hay, the vice-chairman of the IOC medical commission, said last week that
the commission is in favour of keeping the existing system of buccal smear
tests.

Hay fears that unscrupulous Olympic committees in some countries might
abuse the IAAF’s new system by giving femininity certificates to men. ‘Some
countries will accept someone who just turns up and says they are a girl-either
because they want to or because they do not have the facilities to check,’
he says. In private, the IOC is worried that some countries will seek out
young girls with male traits to train.

Ferguson-Smith says that any men thinking of competing as women will
be discouraged by the procedures used for random drugs tests. Because athletes
have sometimes tried to cheat by substituting someone else’s urine for their
own, an official now watches as the athlete urinates into a vial.