5 Famous Cases of Gender Issues at the Olympics

Officials in Beijing have spent over a year developing the sex determination lab that will be used to test female athletes during the 2008 Olympic Games. Sex determination testing is not new in the Games. It was first implemented in 1968 at the Mexico City Games after the I.O.C. found the gender of some athletes competing as women to be questionable. It has been a topic of controversy, causing humiliation in the past to athletes who are "intersex," meaning their chromosomal gender is ambiguous, or to transgender athletes who have gone gender reassignment. Here are the 5 most famous cases of gender determination in Olympic history:

1. Shanthi Soundarajan
Soundarajan's silver medal for the 800m at the Asian games in 2006 was revoked after she failed a chromosomal gender test. She was inspected by a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, and geneticist, and though the exact results of the test have not been revealed publicly, it is suspected that Soundarajan suffers from Androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which an individual expresses female body parts but has a male chromosome in her genome. Extreme public humiliation led her to attempt suicide, underscoring the problematic nature of this type of testing.

2. Edinanci Silva
Silva is a Brazilian judo fighter who was born with both male and female sex organs. The I.O.C.'s official rule is that athletes who undergo sex changes may only compete two years after surgery. Therefore, Silva, who had had surgery in the mid-90s to become fully a woman, was eligible to compete. Problems arose when she won the gold medal in the 2004 Sydney Games. Opponent Natalie Jenkins referred to Silva as "he" in a statement about the match, after which Silva provided a cheek swab to scientists who proved she was in fact female.

3. Heidi Krieger
Kreiger's unfortunate struggle with gender identity began when her shot-put coach began her on an intense regiment of steroids and and contraceptive pills so that she would gain muscle and become stronger. The drugs interfered with her sexual development, and she began to suffer from medical problems and depression, leading her to attempt suicide. In 1986, her huge physique indeed led her to become a shot-put champion, but she was irrevocably damaged. She later underwent gender reassignment surgery and changed her name to Andreas. couldn't find out for myself which sex I wanted to be," Krieger said. "They just used me like a machine."

4. Dora Ratjen
Notorious for never changing or showering in front of women, Ratjen, Germany's high jump competitor in the 1936 Games, quickly roused suspicion among her opponents. "I had competed against Dora and I knew she was a man. You could tell by the voice and the build. But 'she' was far from the only athlete. You could tell because they would always go into the toilet to get changed. We'd go and stand on the seat of the next-door cubicle or look under the door to see if we could catch them," said Dorothy Tyler, the British competitor. As it turned out, Ratjen was indeed a man who had been recruited by Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler in a scheme to prove Aryan dominance in the Games.

5. Stella Walsh
Walsh was a Polish-American sprinter who was discovered to have mosaicism, a condition in which an individual has both male and female sex chromosomes. She competed in the 1932 and 1936 Games, winning gold and silver medals respectively in the 100m sprint. During her very successful lifetime, her gender was never questioned, and her condition only became public knowledge after a post-mortem demonstrated both female and male genitalia.