Who's Unnatural Now?

The disqualification of a female athlete for taking HRT raises wider questions

17th July 2000

Adapted from an original posting to the UKPFC-News mailing list

It doesn’t take a huge leap of empathy to guess that Kathy Jager, a mother of two, may not be best pleased at being referred to in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle as a “gender bender”, merely for taking medication frequently prescribed for women after the menopause. It adds another insult to the injury of the loss of the medals she won at last year’s Veteran World Championships for her athletic performance.

The cruel irony of her situation will, of course, not be lost on trans people. Here’s a woman leading an ordinary life, who achieves something which many others aspire to: proving her abilities in open competition. And because someone has decided to use medical technology to apply a few tests without thinking through the consequences of such a broad application of narrow physiological criteria, she finds that the wholly private matter of her medical treatment becomes not just a public issue … but an excuse for denying recognition of her achievements, and subjecting her to the sort of mockery to which the Newcastle Evening Chronicle’s report has descended in the article below.

The truth, of course, is that if Kathy Jager is a “gender bender”, so are tens of thousands of other grandmothers around the world who would never have questioned their status as women. The presence in her body of small levels of testosterone is not at all unusual for a woman receiving HRT after the menopause (I know several women whose doctors have recommended similar treatment): what marked her out was simply that she found her biochemistry being scrutinised — and then problematised — by people who had adopted a narrow definition of what is appropriate and “normal”.

Kathy Jager (photo © BBC)

Suddenly, she found her status shifting from that of being another athlete to being not just a possible cheat but an oddity … a person who now finds herself labelled and stigmatised not just as someone who might have obtained unfair advantage in competition, but as someone whose gender is remains fair game for public comment, even a year after the full details were revealed. The initial coverage went straight into alleging that she “could be male” … but when that particular charge clearly didn’t fit at all in her case, we find that instead of the issue being reassessed, the press has shifted back to the much vaguer label of “gender-bender”. In her situation, I’m not sure which I would find less offensive.

The many trans people who have been the subject of press exposure will instantly recognise the formula: making a public controversy out of a private matter, using terminology clearly intended to label the person as a freak, and justifying it all in the name of biology.

“You’re not natural, so you’re a fair target” is sadly an ancient logic of intolerance, and only the reliance on science distinguishes this very 20th-century form of exclusion from its historical antecedents.

But aside from sympathy with Ms Jager, what I find particularly interesting about this case is that it takes us a step further than the problems thrown up by previous use of chromosomal testing in sports, or by the cases where athletes have apparently been taking testosterone supplements for non-medical reasons such as performance-enhancement.

My understanding of previous cases has been that trans and intersex people have been the prime victims of medicalised “sex-testing”; yet here we find a victim of these techniques who we have no reason to suppose is either trans or intersex. Instead, she is one of the many women who uses the same medical technologies as trans people use, albeit for different reasons … and a result, finds herself subject to the same consequences of discrimination, loss of privacy, and public ridicule.

It seems to me that this case marks a major blow to the notion that sport, or indeed any other area of human activity, can continue to rely on notions of what is “natural” or inherent in determining sex.

The Olympics has already abandoned chromosomal testing; but here we find clear evidence of the need for a much wider shift in how physical sex is understood. The medical technologies previously frowned upon as the preserve of those odd transsexual people, or those bad cheats, are of course widely used. It not for the benefit of its miniscule transsexual population that my village pharmacy stocks plentiful supplies of hormone supplements and hormone-suppressants: they are there for the many other people who use them for all sorts of routine medical purposes, including the millions of women who use hormonal contraception.

This evening, the radio news carried a report that a male contraceptive pill had proven successful in tests. I don’t know its composition or how it works, but I guess that it too may have an effect on the user’s hormone levels. If widely used, such a pill could lead to a large proportion of the male population also having “unnatural” hormone levels.

It is probably little comfort to Kathy Jager, but she may be the first of many people to fall foul of this sort of test. In the course of the next century, an “unnatural” hormonal balance looks set to become a much more widespread human phenomenon, both as a contraceptive device and as routine medical maintenance for an ageing population increasingly buffeted by plummeting nutrition levels in food and by the uncharted effects of environmental pollution. In a world where artificial sex hormones are used by more and more people, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain the stigmatisation of those whose endocrinology is crudely problematised as “unnatural”.

That can only further dent the credibility of biological fundamentalism in determining sex … and further strain the creaky edifice of a binary model of sex imposed on the reality of a species now recognised to include a rapidly growing spectrum of conditions still problematised as “intersex”.

This issue is not going to go away. Instead, an increasing proportion of the human population is going to find itself faced with exactly the same problem as that endured by trans people: that biological tests are a poor determinant of social questions.

How many more Kathy Jagers will have endure the consequences of such misused science before we can all start to escape the tyranny of the test-tube?

Claire McNab (Vice-President, Press for Change)

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