Cut From Yahoo News:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Transsexuals were cleared Monday to compete in the Olympics for the first time.
Under a proposal approved by the IOC executive board, athletes who have undergone sex-change surgery will be eligible for the Olympics if their new gender has been legally recognized and they have gone through a minimum two-year period of postoperative hormone therapy.
The decision, which covers both male-to-female and female-to-male cases, goes into effect starting with the Athens Olympics in August.
The IOC had put off a decision in February, saying more time was needed to consider all the medical issues.
Some members had been concerned whether male-to-female transsexuals would have physical advantages competing against women.
Men have higher levels of testosterone and greater muscle-to-fat ratio and heart and lung capacity. However, doctors say, testosterone levels and muscle mass drop after hormone therapy and sex-change surgery.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the situation of transsexuals competing in high-level sports was "rare but becoming more common."
IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch said no specific sports had been singled out by the ruling.
"Any sport may be touched by this problem," he said. "Until now, we didn't have any rules or regulations. We needed to establish some sort of policy."
Until 1999, the IOC conducted gender verification tests at the Olympics but the screenings were dropped before the 2000 Sydney Games.
One of the best known cases of transsexuals in sports involves Renee Richards, formerly Richard Raskind, who played on the women's tennis tour in the 1970s.
In March, Australia's Mianne Bagger became the first transsexual to play in a pro golf tournament.
Michelle Dumaresq, formerly Michael, has competed in mountain bike racing for Canada.
Richards, now a New York opthamologist, was surprised by the IOC decision and was against it. She said decisions on transsexuals should be made on an individual basis.
"Basically, I think they're making a wrong judgment here, although I would have loved to have that judgment made in my case in 1976," she said.
"They're probably looking for trouble down the line. There may be a true transsexual — not someone who's nuts and wants to make money — who will be a very good champion player, and it will be a young person, let's say a Jimmy Connors or a Tiger Woods, and then they'll have an unequal playing field.
"In some sports, the physical superiority of men over women is very significant."
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Originally posted by Blue Horn
If we take your argument to its logical (or illogical) conclusion, there should be no distinction between men and women in sports. I suppose that you think we should just get rid of women's competitions all together and treat everyone equally based upon their god given ability. Should all sports be unisex and only based upon the player's ability regardless of their sex?
As I have said in my earlier posts I think that the justification for separating men's and women's competitions is based on encouraging women to participate in sport, not on fairness according to any definition of fairness that I can think of. And so far no one on the board has been able offer a definition of fairness that makes a race between any two people with different chromosomes unfair but a race between two people with the same chromosomes but different physiques fair.
My conclusion is not that we eliminate competitions for women but that we recognize that fairness is a non-issue in the debate about whether transexuals should be able to compete in their post-operative gender.
Originally posted by Blue Horn
If we take your argument to its logical (or illogical) conclusion, there should be no distinction between men and women in sports. I suppose that you think we should just get rid of women's competitions all together and treat everyone equally based upon their god given ability. Should all sports be unisex and only based upon the player's ability regardless of their sex?
As I have said in my earlier posts I think that the justification for separating men's and women's competitions is based on encouraging women to participate in sport, not on fairness according to any definition of fairness that I can think of. And so far no one on the board has been able offer a definition of fairness that makes a race between any two people with different chromosomes unfair but a race between two people with the same chromosomes but different physiques fair.
My conclusion is not that we eliminate competitions for women but that we recognize that fairness is a non-issue in the debate about whether transexuals should be able to compete in their post-operative gender.
