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Former Olympian-turned university professor Bruce Kidd

A former Canadian Olympian thinks gender testing in sport should be abolished and wants Canada to publicly declare its opposition to the practice before the start of the 2012 Summer Games, now less than six months away.
   
Bruce Kidd, a professor in the faculty of physical education and health at the University of Toronto, was once a national track-and-field star; named "Athlete of the Year" in 1961 and 1962 by the Canadian Press, he competed in the Men’s 5,000 race at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, finishing ninth in the first round’s first heat.
   
Invited to Winnipeg by the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, Kidd gave a free lecture last week titled "The case for gender self-determination: a defense of Caster Semenya against the International Olympic Committee’s gender testing."
   
Caster Semenya is a South African runner from a rural village who burst onto the international track scene in 2009 with a decisive win in the 800-metre race at the World Track and Field Championships in Berlin, her first major event. Semenya’s victory was overshadowed by controversy when news leaked to media that the International Association of Athletics Federations had ordered the then-18-year-old to undergo a "gender verification test" in response to concerns about her muscular build, deep voice and dramatically improved race times.
   
It took 11 months for the IAAF to make a decision in the case, during which time the young athlete was sidelined from competition and subjected to intense media scrutiny, including unsubstantiated reports that she was found to have both male and female reproductive organs. In July, 2010, Semenya was cleared to race; details about the IAAF’s decision — including whether or not the runner was required to undergo medical treatment — were kept confidential.
   
Speaking to about 25 people, Kidd argued that gender testing — a practice introduced by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1966 — was created in response to "a moral panic around strong women."
   
Sport has always been gendered, he said, and it remains male-dominated today. Men comprise the majority of coaches and continue to decide who is (or isn’t) allowed to participate. Gender policing is also persistent in sports, he said, noting female athletes must define themselves and act in specific ways lest they be called names or otherwise punished.
   
Women’s success in sport is perceived both as unnatural and as a threat to male power, Kidd said.
   
"When women get really, really good, their femaleness has tended to be challenged: they’re not really women, they’re dykes, they’re men pretending to be women. Something’s gotta be wrong because real women can’t be that good," he said.
   
Rather than see men and women as two separate groups, Kidd said "we need to think of humans as a spectrum of variation," particularly since many other factors — for example, household income level and the availability of community resources — have a far greater influence on individual athletic performance than gender. (He also noted that there has never been a single case of a man pretending to be a woman in order to win a competition, likely because sports are "male-cultured," which means a man would not gain anything by doing so but, in fact, lose social status.)
   
Going forward, Kidd said sports should be re-organized such that athletes would compete solely on the basis of ability and suggested that the introduction of interim policies modelled on affirmative action practices would be a good first step towards that goal.
   
Furthermore, he said athletes should be allowed to self-identify as whatever gender they feel they are. "If a human declares herself to be a female and lives as that, that should be enough for sport — and if they win, we should celebrate them as legitimate champions," he said.
   
Mandatory gender testing was abolished by the IOC in 1999; nowadays, it’s only done when a female athlete’s gender is questioned. However, given the media frenzy that surrounded Caster Semenya, Kidd worries that the IOC might choose to reinstate compulsory testing prior to the 2012 Summer Olympics. He wants Canada to set an example for other nations by speaking out against gender testing and endorsing the idea of gender self-determination.
   
Uptown contacted both the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport for comment. Neither organization responded by press deadline.