Male and Female He Created Athletes: Is There a Difference?

As the pageantry and athletic drama of the Olympics unfold with billions of people watching around the world, a laboratory is quietly working in the background to ensure the integrity of the games.  Officials have set up a "gender determination lab" to distinguish between male and female athletes and to ensure that disguised men do not unfairly win medals in women's events.

Unfortunately, this concern is not unfounded: in the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis secretly forced a man to compete as a woman in the high jump event (he finished fourth).  Also, in the 1968 Olympics certain Eastern European athletes competed in women's events with such masculine physiques and performances that their true gender was not immediately obvious. Despite the flattening effects of feminism in the culture, it is still generally agreed that women should compete only against women and not men, and vice-versa. 

Amazingly, there is radical disagreement over a methodology for distinguishing a woman from man, and whether or not such differentiation is even possible.  Jennifer Finney Boylan believes the labs are a mistake, and that "the Olympic hosts seem to want to impose a binary order upon the messy continuum of gender.  They are searching for concreteness and certainty in a world that contains neither."

While the labs objectively evaluate athletes based on chromosomes, hormones and physical appearance, Boylan contends that the lab tests "are likely to produce the wrong answers, because they measure maleness and femaleness by the wrong yardsticks."  She cites a statistic that one in 20,000 women carries a Y chromosome, which is supposed to be the immoveable marker of manhood.  Eight female athletes at the Atlanta Olympic games in 1996 tested "positive" for maleness because of this condition.  Such women are "androgen insensitive" and their bodies do not respond to the information coded on the male Y chromosome.  In light of  this evidence, Boylan observes:

It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles.  People can be forgiven for wanting to live in a world as simple as this, a place in which something as basic as gender didn't shift unsettlingly beneath our feet.

She concludes that "gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than be afraid of it."  She understands that gender can only be determined by the heart of the individual and how that individual lives in daily life.

Unfortunately, the Bible does not consider a sin-tainted heart to be a reliable guide; rather "the heart is deceitful above all things" (Jeremiah 17:9).  A male athlete who feels in his heart that he is a woman should not trust his heart.  Instead, he should rely on the Word of God and find some male opponents. 

Scripture presents gender as a binary condition, not a shifting continuum from male to female.  When God created man in his image, the Bible says, "male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27).  The Bible does not provide an explicit list of characteristics to distinguish a woman from a man, because it was understood to be self-evident (c.f. the reaction of Adam in Genesis 2:23).

Boylan's statistic is consistent with this divine truth and actually argues against her position:  if 1 in 20,000 women carry a Y chromosome, then 19.999 in 20,000 do not.  Any lab test that can objectively identify a female 99.995% of the time would be considered an extremely reliable guide to a binary understanding of gender.  Even among the exceptional .005% of women who carry a Y chromosome, most are feminine in appearance and are able to bear children.  Because this is a fallen world, there are birth defects that affect all parts of the human anatomy, but these extremely rare defects do not invalidate the binary nature of God's good design of manhood and womanhood.

(In any case, what in the world would a guy do with a gold medal won in a woman's event?  It's not the kind of thing to display on the mantle for all of your buddies to admire...)