On Performance Enhancement....

[MavKikiNYC]

Sexuality, Drugs and the Ideal of Sport
By DAVID TULLER

Published: August 1, 2004


THE Olympic Games take place in Athens this month, even as an investigation into the use of steroids has led to suspicions that some of the biggest names in track and field, as well as other sports, are using banned drugs. That makes this an awkward time for the International Olympic Committee to decide, as it did in May, that transsexuals may compete openly in the Games. None are expected to participate this time, but the decision raises difficult questions about the nature of sports achievement.

Does allowing a small number of athletes to take large doses of hormones threaten to undermine the international effort to rid sports of performance-enhancing drugs? As a columnist for The Irish Times wrote, because the decision "officially brings into the international sporting community athletes who have undergone a radical and life-altering course of hormone treatment, it is bound to provide a further smoke screen for the malevolent practitioners of science who engineer the substances that seduce athletes."

To proponents of transsexuals' inclusion, the issue is fairness. Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a member of the I.O.C. committee that made the decision and a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said it was not fair to leave them without a place to compete.

But others disagree. "Men have an inherent advantage in sports that rely on strength, speed and power," said Libba Galloway, senior vice president and chief legal officer for the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which requires that members and players at its events be born as women. "The concern is that these people would still have a greater muscle mass and other physiological advantages over someone who was born a woman."

Transsexual athletes and many doctors who treat them dismiss that argument. They say that the prolonged use of estrogen by those transitioning from male to female neutralizes any physiological advantages.

"Estrogen is not a performance-enhancing drug," said Michelle Dumaresq, a transsexual Canadian mountain-bike racing champion, who is 34. "It's a performance decreaser. I still have a very large bone structure, but I no longer have all the muscle mass I did to help me move it."

In any case, experts say that objections to transsexual inclusion arise less from physiological questions than from vague assumptions of what is natural and what is artificial when it comes to the human body.

"It's no accident that the way people think about the transgender issue in sports overlaps a lot with the doping issue," said Dr. Stephan Walk, a professor of sports sociology at California State University at Fullerton. "They think there's something out there called the natural state of human beings, against which we juxtapose these supposedly artificial manipulations."

"But so much of what athletes do is an intentional attempt to manipulate the body's natural processes," he added. "Is the whole idea of increasing muscle mass by overusing the muscle natural or artificial? Is there anything natural about a specialized sports diet? The distinction between natural and artificial got blurred a long time ago."