With the 2024 Summer Olympics ending last weekend, no longer will I have to endure discussions about stolen victories and medal tallies, or the endless, real-time commentaries of ongoing matches on messaging apps (at least, for another four years). I have never liked sports, whether as a spectator or participant. I have no patience for complicated rules, nor the nationalistic chest-thumping that comes with international competitions.
I do not like excessive physical exertion and I have poor hand-eye coordination. I take brisk walks for my cardiovascular health, but more so because I like the beautiful, well-tended public park that I walk in. I lift moderately heavy weights to keep my muscles toned.
But I am secretly glad whenever it rains and I have to skip my walk that day or the trip to the gym. Having said that, there were some interesting things about the 2024 Olympics that caught my attention. There was the sharpshooter from Turkey who went onto the shooting range looking like a dad on his way to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.
There were the unsubstantiated assumptions from various quarters that athletes from China were cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs. And there was the row over the genders of Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, who competed in the women’s boxing events. Based on the appearance of Khelif and Lin, and the fact that both had previously failed gender eligibility tests administered by professional sports bodies, “anti-woke” activists were quick to protest against their inclusion in the Olympics.
Some high-profile commentators even made the false assertion that they were female-to-male transgender individuals, whose participation in women’s sports was unfair and even potentially dangerous. The controversy surrounding Khelif and Lin led me to discover the biological phenomenon called differences of sex development (DSD). While most females have two X chromosomes and most males have an X and a Y chromosome, there are about 40 congenital conditions, involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs, where a person’s development of sexual characteristics differs from most other’s.
Tests may determine the presence or absence of the Y chromosome, but for people with DSD, having XX or XY chromosomes does not necessarily mean that they are females or males. As these conditions may not be immediately apparent at birth, they are more common than previously thought. People who lived their entire lives as women, say, may discover later in life that they possess male reproductive organs within their bodies or that they have XY chromosomes.
Scientists still do not know why these genetic variations occur in human beings, but from references and allusions found in ancient myths, literary works and primary historical sources such as diaries, we know that DSD is not a modern phenomenon. It may appear to be more prevalent now because what used to be mostly invisible to the naked eye is now observable with medical imaging and tests. Up until recently, the Chinese used the vernacular word yinyang ren to describe people ( ren ) with both female ( yin ) and male ( yang ) sexual characteristics.
There are sporadic mentions of these individuals in fiction and official records in premodern China, usually with a great deal of exaggeration and sensationalism. In one court case in the late 13th century, an unmarried girl was made pregnant by a Buddhist nun, who was found to have the external genitalia of both genders. The writer of the book Unofficial Matters from the Wanli Reign Period , completed in 1607, averred that “persons with dual configurations at birth have existed since ancient times”.
Nowadays, words like yinyang ren are considered pejorative, and they have been replaced by more medically accurate terms. With more scientific knowledge and greater awareness of DSD and other related conditions, our binary understanding of what is “male” and “female” is being challenged, with consequences that go beyond “unfair advantages” in the sporting arena..
