Does anyone else know about this? At the Beijing Olympic Games, if officials cannot determine that a female athlete is not a male, she must undergo 'sex determination.' This has apparently been going on for quite some time. Today, the New York Times reports that the lab is ready for sex testing in China.

Experts at the lab, located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, will evaluate cases based on their external appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes, said Prof. Tian Qinjie of the college hospital, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Gender verification tests emerged in the 1960s when Communist countries in Eastern Europe were thought to be using male athletes in women's competitions. The tests were used at the Olympics for the first time at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

In 1999, the International Olympic Committee revised the testing to only occur when the female athletes sex was suspected to be male rather than every athlete who competed. The test being carried out in Beijing is the same that has been used in previous games.

The test aims to maintain fairness of the Games, and to rule out inaccurate test results.

Experts say test results for about one in 500 to 600 athletes are abnormal.

That is quite a large number. Why is it that so many female athletes cannot 'pass' gender tests? The Wikipedia offers some of the controversies:

The practice has come under fire from those that feel that the testing is humiliating, socially insensitive, and not entirely accurate or effective anyway. The testing is especially difficult and problematic in the case of people who could be considered intersexual. The genetic tests provide potentially inaccurate results and discriminate against women with disorders of sexual development. Genetic anomalies can allow a person to have a male genetic make-up but be physiologically female.
A commentary published in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated,
"gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate. Furthermore, these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors (eg, some 46,XX males), are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who 'fail' a test."

The article also states:
"Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticists, endocrinologists, and others in the medical community. One major problem was unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male pseudohermaphroditism).
A second problem is that only women, not men, were stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up was rarely available for female athletes "failing" the test, which often was performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up was crucial because the problem was not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism."

I feel as if Judith Butler would have an excellent analysis of this phenomenon. There have apparently been many individuals over the years who have run into trouble with their gender and these absurd tests and have had their medals taken away. Wiki makes a point - what about intersexuals? What about people with ambiguous genitalia? Why is this even an issue? I want so badly to discuss why we have separated the olympics into this bullshit gender/sex binary that just plain-and-simple does not work or separate people into 'boy' and 'girl.' Thoughts?