Special to
Outsports.com — In the late ‘90s, as the
Olympic Games <http://www.olympic.org/>
finally dropped their long-hated requirement for women's
gender-testing, the Gay Games <http://www.gaygames.com/>
stumbled into hot water with its own gender policies.
First the 1998 Amsterdam Games required that any
competitors who had changed their birth gender to the
opposite gender must provide medical proof of "completed
gender transition." Organizers also decreed that
mixed-sex couples (including transgendered persons who
couldn't prove "transition" on paper) would not be
allowed in the ballroom-dancing event. Then the 2002
Sydney Games tried a different tack, by dividing
competitions into two divisions: "male" or "female."
Everybody, including transgendered and intersex athletes,
had to choose which box they wanted to compete in, based
on what their passport or birth certificate said about
their gender.
Writing for Independent
Gay Forum, Stephen H. Miller argued: "You'd think this
would be a no-brainer. After all, the reason that men
compete against men, and women against women, is because
the male body is, well, different from the female body
and same-sex competition ensures a level playing field,
gender wise." Curiously, this was almost the same
language that the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
had used to defend its gender testing for nearly four
decades. Some GLBT athletes and activists bristled at
both Gay Games' rules.
As the Gay Games wrestles
with gender policy, the real reason why gender became an
issue at the Olympic Games, back in the mid-1900s, is
almost forgotten -- along with the two Soviet sisters
whose "masculine" appearance pushed gender testing into
place.
War and
Peace
After World War II, as
the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics struggled to avoid total war on the
battlefield, these two superpowers also sought victories
away from the battlefield. They did this by ruthless use
of propaganda. General Eisenhower was still U.S.
President, and Stalin was still Soviet premier. Which was
better, democracy or communism? East or West? Each nation
kept its spin doctors working to prove that it was
better, wealthier, more powerful, with nastier weapons
and bigger harvests and harder-working, more patriotic
citizens. The Soviets extolled their freedom from
religion, while many Americans extolled their belief in
God. Naturally that fierce competition extended into
international amateur sport. Each side interpreted the
Olympic motto "citius, altius, fortius" as meaning that
its athletes would go "faster, higher,
stronger."
Gender testing was a
propaganda by-product of the Cold War. Based on the
discovery of DNA in 1951-53, new gene technology burst
into the sports scene during 40 long years of global
jitters, when the world felt it was teetering on the
brink of nuclear war. The era also spawned new military
technology -- the B-52 bomber, the intercontinental
ballistic missile, the nuclear submarine, the space race.
In the U.S., demand for gender testing came out of the
same superheated conservative climate that produced the
1950s McCarthy hearings, which aimed to root communists
and homosexuals out of our society. In many Americans'
minds, there was a link between "not being a real
American" and "not being a real woman or man."
It wasn't till 1952 that
the USSR decided to join in post-war Olympic competition.
Still rebuilding out of wartime rubble, the Soviets
patched together their first world-class team for the
Helsinki summer games. Convinced that their athletes must
be kept closeted from "decadent western influences," the
USSR -- as well as "satellite nations" of the Eastern
Europe communist bloc -- insisted on drawing the Iron
Curtain right through the Olympic Village, by having
their own separate Village. While many athletes accepted
the political rigors of communist life, partly because
they believed in communism, partly because sports gave
them a life of elitist privilege, some athletes might be
looking at international competition as an opportunity to
defect. Communist leaders couldn't risk this -- it made
them look bad. The KGB (secret police) kept a close watch
on their athletes. Over the years, dozens did defect
anyway -- runners, chess players, figure skaters and
others, including our own Martina Navratilova from
Czechoslovakia in 1975.
So fierce was that first
clash in Helsinki that more than 100 world records were
shattered. The medals race was on. Both Soviet and U.S.
athletes were under agonizing pressure to prove their
system's superiority by piling up medals. Right away the
Soviets showed that they had some exceptional female
talent, especially in the throwing events. While
Americans and Western Europeans dominated the sprints, as
they usually did, the USSR's Nina Romashkova took gold in
the discus, while Galina Zybina won gold in the shot put,
setting a world record of 15.28 meters.
But the final score on
Helsinki gold was: US - 40, USSR - 22. Americans
rejoiced. Democracy's superiority had been proven! For
now, anyway.
At the next summer
Olympics, in Melbourne, the atmosphere was even uglier.
Soviet tanks had rolled into satellite Hungary to crush a
rebellion against communist rule. Netherlands, Spain and
Switzerland protested by pulling out of the Games. Forty
percent of the Hungarian team defected to the West rather
than go home to territory occupied by Soviet troops.
Eager to beat the Reds again, the U.S. stayed at the
Games. But this time the Soviets grimly turned the
tables. Final score on golds: USSR - 37, U.S. -
32.
Many American athletes
and politicians went into shock. Some made excuses. After
all, they said, U.S. amateur athletes trained themselves
on a shoestring. They couldn't be paid if they wanted to
keep their amateur standing. Yet, they said, communism
made a mockery of amateurism by bankrolling its athletes,
giving them state support and expensive training, making
them essentially professionals. Logically, these
complaints should have gotten the communists blackballed
from Olympic competition. But nobody wanted to push
things that far.
At Melbourne, Soviet
women continued their takeover of field events that
require sheer strength. How could this be
happening?
The communist world had
liberated women in a way the West still declined to do,
insisting that the "decadent" West oppressed women. Under
communism, religion-based law banning divorce, adultery
and abortion had vanished. America, where abortion and
adultery were still a crime and divorce still difficult,
found this shocking. Soviet women were legally equal with
men. Many women worked side by side with men in
factories, agriculture, medicine, science, government,
even the military. Unencumbered by "decadent western"
notions that femininity meant being beautiful and sexy
and soft as a movie star, a Soviet woman could glory in
her physical strength, her muscles, her sweat, her manual
skills, in a way that many American women were reluctant
to do. Most importantly, some Soviet women were
"Stakhanovites," the term for super-achievers among
workers. Like medal-winning athletes, Stakhanovites were
held up as Heroes of the Soviet Union. The young female
Soviet athletes now showing up at the Olympics had been
born into that system. Even though they may secretly have
desired more political freedom, their bodies, minds,
emotions and spirits had still been formed by that
system.
The average American,
however, lived in a system where religious belief -- that
"women are weaker," that "women shouldn't do men's work"
-- still had its own powerful influence. Conservative
Americans dismissed Soviet women as unladylike, ungodly,
unglamorous and unappealing. In their view, what the
Soviets called "women's freedom" was a sham because it
wasn't democratic freedom. U.S. sportswomen were kept
painfully on the defensive about proving their
femininity. As late as the 1990s, leading American women
athletes would still feel compelled to make statements
like "I don't think being an athlete is unfeminine, I
think of it as a kind of grace." (Jackie Joyner-Kersee).
The word "graceful" became a favorite U.S. buzzword for
the feminine stereotype in American sportswomen, from
1930s figure-skater Sonja Henie to 1960s runner Wilma
Rudolph. The word was even generously applied to the
occasional communist female who met American beauty
standards! Soviet gold-medal gymnast Olga Korbut, for
instance, was amazingly "graceful" and became a Western
celebrity.
So, at the dawn of the
Cold War, imagine America's dismay when our women
athletes started running up against ungraceful communist
women who put a fierce Stakhanovite spirit into their
efforts. Trackside buzz was loud, about how "masculine"
some of these Soviet women looked, and what an unfair
advantage their muscles gave them. The United States,
with its biblical streak, its burr up the butt about
keeping a hard line between masculinity and femininity,
was fertile ground for this buzz.
Over the years, a few
Olympic women with "masculine qualities" had already
raised eyebrows. According to SportsJones, one angry fan
wrote the IOC to complain about Stella Walsh
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Walsh>,
gold- medal sprinter at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. He
fumed: "Her deep bass voice, her height and 10 1/2 inch
shoes surely proclaim her a borderline case if there ever
was one.... Rules should be made to keep the competitive
games for normal feminine girls and not monstrosities."
Eyebrows were also raised at a few early intersex cases
– European athletes who first competed as women,
then had reassignment surgery -- including two relay
runners and one skiing champion.
For a long time,
trackside rumor also insisted that some countries sent
biological men to compete in women's events in disguise,
to get another unfair advantage. So far, according to
SportsJones, "There [had been] been only one
documented case…. In 1936, a German athlete named
Hermann Ratjen bound up his genitals and, calling himself
'Dora,' competed in the high jump. He came in fourth,
beaten by three actual uterus-bearing girls." But during
the Cold War, this paranoia about men in disguise went
into overdrive. Many Americans believed that those
super-achieving Soviet women athletes were really
males.
The Notorious Sister
Act
Enter Tamara Natanovna
Press <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Press>
and her sister Irina Natanovna <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Press>.
They were Ukrainian Jews
born in Kharkov, a region famed for its rolling prairies
rich in wheat and sugar beets. They and their family were
among the few Jews left alive in the Ukrainian SSR after
World War II atrocities by the Nazis. In 1960 the two
young women arrived in Rome with 608 other females for
the summer games. As they marched into the stadium under
the red flag, they were the Kremlin’s latest
cold-war weapons – as if they were new ballistic
missiles being paraded by the Soviet army in Moscow's Red
Square. Tamara had already won discus gold and shot-put
bronze at the 1958 European Championships. She was 23
years old, looking at all the news cameras with a shy
expression on her freckled face. Irina was 21.
Despite all this
propaganda clank at the Games, vast changes loomed across
the world. In the U.S., Eisenhower conservatism was
waning, and a liberal Catholic Democrat named John F.
Kennedy was about to be elected President. The Sixties
would shortly explode into freedom-seeking and
authority-flouting on every front, with students and
ethnic minorities rioting in practically every Western
country. Racial freedom, sexual freedom, freedom of
speech, freedom to experiment with drugs, all were
demanded. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet
Union’s own citizens were beginning to demand more
of these same freedoms, and the country was undergoing a
powerful “thaw”. New premier Nikita Krushchev
was doing a balance act – trying to keep peaceful
co-existence with the U.S. abroad, and trying to keep
“the thaw” from going too far at
home.
In their way, the Press
sisters would be part of the changes coming -- human
reality arriving to challenge entrenched ideology on both
sides.
They were big muscular
plain women, complete with Adam's apples. SportsJones
comments: "To say that [they] looked a little
butch would be like noticing the World Trade Center
looked a little tall." Both had some facial hair. Tamara
had thick muscular thighs like a weightlifter, and a
powerful torso with just the barest suggestion of breasts
showing through her singlet. As spectators watched the
two women go into action, waves of buzz ran through the
stands. Instantly the Press sisters were pegged as the
latest "monstrosities." Tamara, the older and bigger of
the two, provoked the most curiosity and outrage. As she
walked onto the field for her first event, she must have
felt this scrutiny intensely -- along with the enormous
responsibility riding on her broad shoulders, to prove
that her country was better.
According to
HickokSports.com, Rome was a triumph for the USSR: "The
Soviet Union dominated women's track and field, aside
from the sprints. Led by sisters Tamara and Irina Press,
they won six of the other seven events….The
800-meter run, restored to the program for the first time
since 1924, was won by Soviet Lyudmila Shevtsova in world
record time." The two “monstrosities” swept the
entire division. Irina placed in the Top 6 in all events,
and won the 80-meter hurdles. Tamara Press blasted her
way to gold in the shot put and silver in the
discus.
Women’s throwing
events were slowly, reluctantly being accepted into the
Olympic program. Because they involved strength and
weapon-like items, they’d been viewed for a long
time as “unladylike” and
“unfeminine.” Women's discus was added in 1928,
javelin in 1932. In 1948 approval of the shot put was
possibly inspired by women's vigorous contributions in
World War II, both in the military and civilian sectors.
But the shot, as a sport started by British soldiers who
threw cannonballs around for fun, demanded greater
explosive strength than either the javelin or discus.
Therefore some people still considered it to be
inappropriate for females. The biggest no-no of all
– the women’s hammer throw -- would not be
allowed until Sydney 2000.
Adding insult to injury,
the Rome Olympics were the first seen on television.
Though there was no global satellite coverage yet,
Eurovision did offer live broadcasts to its customer
countries, while CBS rushed its dailies to New York and
aired them from there. TV had a huge impact on Americans'
sensibilities about Olympic athletes. Patriotic Americans
had to sit on their sofas and watch helplessly as
"state-supported atheist unfeminine commies" were beating
the panties off "god-fearing American ladies." Especially
those two amazons, Tamara and Irina Press. What had the
world come to?
Final score on Rome
medals: USSR - 43, U.S. - 34.
Right away the grumbling
and rumors went to orange-alert level. Not only were the
Press sisters trained by millions of Soviet rubles, but
no "normal" women could perform like they did. They must
be using some kind of unfair advantage. There was buzz
about drug use. Though the IOC had not yet outlawed
doping, some athletes on both sides were already pumping
their performance with amphetamines, anabolic steroids,
etc. Indeed, many in sports were OK with men bulking up
on steroids -- they looked no different than the popular
over-muscled comic-book heroes of the day, like Superman,
Captain Marvel, the Hulk. Allegations had it that
communist women, notably the Press sisters, were being
forced by their governments to use a lot of steroids. It
was NOT OK for women to look and act like
Superman.
But most of the buzz
about the Press sisters focused obsessively on their
gender. They couldn’t possibly be real women. "Real
women" were what the most popular American athletes
looked like. For instance the "graceful" Wilma Rudolph,
whose three gold medals in track gave Americans one of
their few happy moments in Rome. The Presses had to be
men in women's clothes. The IOC should demand to look
inside the sisters’ shorts to see if the right sex
organs were there.
Four years later, at the
1964 Games in Tokyo, tensions went even higher. Yes, the
U.S. did recoup on medals. They got 36 golds, compared to
30 for the USSR. But that awful Tamara Press deprived the
U.S. of another win in the shot put, plus a second gold
in discus. Her awful sister grabbed the gold in the first
women's pentathlon in history.
Tamara's fabled strength
and grim expression prompted Western male athletes to
give her a wide berth. Recently, on a Yahoo sports
newsgroup, one correspondent remembered: "A young
American shot putter who had qualified to travel with the
U.S. team to Europe and Russia for some international
meets wandered into the assigned weightlifting gym one
day and started lifting weights. Tamara Press entered the
weight room and started lifting weights far, far heavier
than the young American was capable of lifting. So he
thought it best to get the heck out of the gym and go do
some throwing from the ring."
Personal
Perspective
During the Sixties, I was
in my mid-twenties, still deep in the closet. I was
trying to be a "real American woman" myself ... meaning I
dutifully wore my favorite shade of lipstick and chic
little Chanel suits to the Reader's Digest office where I
worked. In 1957 I had married a Ukrainian emigre writer.
My close association with refugees from communism,
especially Ukrainian writers and artists who survived the
Stalinist purges of the 1930s, would move the Digest to
put me on some book and article projects about the Cold
War. Naturally I watched the 1960 and 1964 Olympics on
grainy black-and-white TV, and became fascinated with the
Press sisters. There were hair-raising images of Tamara's
volcanic strength, her sweaty face contorting and hair
flying as she launched the iron shot like a human
catapault. She became the first woman ever to hurl it
farther than 18 meters.
Though I was staunchly
pro-democracy, my heart went out to the Press sisters.
They made me remember my high-school days when I was the
hulking tomboy who picked fist-fights with other students
to try and stop their teasing. I wondered how Tamara,
especially, saw herself. In that firestorm of attention
and controversy, with some spectators cheering her wildly
and others booing and hissing, how did she keep her
focus, her confidence? Was that why she looked so inward
and grim on the TV screen?
My Ukrainian emigre
friends were fiercely anti-communist, and rooted for the
U.S. team in front of their TV sets, but they also took
fierce partisan pride in the Press sisters' exploits. My
friends had their own hot discussions about the Presses.
Were they men, or great big lesbyanky? Who cared?
Ukrainians and Russians were historic enemies. So every
time nasha Tamara ("our Tamara") or nasha Irina won a
medal, they were trampling Russians under their track
shoes. That was chudovo (beautiful).
By now Tamara and Irina
had won five golds, one silver, and a fistful of world
records. The grumblers went to red alert. It was time to
remove "monstrosities" from the scene.
Pressures were quietly
applied by Western countries, notably the U.S. Shortly
the IOC announced that gender verification would be
required of every woman competitor. The test made its
first appearance in 1966, at the European Championships.
In its first and most primitive form, it was a physical
exam. The women had to stand naked before a panel of
doctors and submit to having their bodies and genitals
fingered. There had to be a real vagina, and no penis.
Some women felt horribly degraded by the ritual grope,
and said so. Their countries complained to the
IOC.
In 1968, reacting to this
criticism, the IOC hastened to substitute a new, less
invasive technique at the Mexico City summer games. The
buccal smear made it possible to examine a woman's sex
chromosomes under a microscope, in cells swabbed from the
inside of her mouth. If female gender was "verified" in
the form of two X chromosomes, the woman got a
certificate that let her compete. If anything different
was seen, the ax fell. The IOC allowed her to pretend
sudden injury or illness, and go home quietly. But her
future in international competition was over -- the
International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF)
<http://www.iaaf.org/>,
the Asian Games <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Games>,
the Commonwealth Games <http://www.commonwealthgames.com/>
and others were adopting the test.
However, the truth about
gender definition, and how sports authorities could
enforce it, was not so black and white. Gender-testers
would find themselves confronted with real living people,
not ideology.
X's and Y's
"People come in
bewildering sexual varieties," says Brown University
professor Anne Fausto-Sterling <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Fausto-Sterling>
in a Science World article. Humans are born with
46 chromosomes, in 23 pairs. The two chromosomes that
determine the child's gender are the X (female) and Y
(male). Most women are XX while most men are XY. In those
days, it was assumed that the mere presence of a Y
chromosome absolutely determined male gender. However,
new scientific research was discovering that, in an
estimated few among thousands of births, there can be an
amazing range of variations. Some people are born with a
single sex chromosome -- they are 45X or 45Y. Others are
born with a third sex chromosome -- 47XXY or 47XYY or
47XXX.
These and other
variations were now throwing wrenches into the machinery
of Olympic gender-testing. The gender-testers would find
no biological men competing as women. What they found,
often, was a woman with XXY chromosomes whose genetic
makeup included a factor for testosterone resistance --
yet this women had a perfectly "normal" female
appearance, with no extra muscle mass that might give an
unfair advantage. The gender-testers would have to flunk
her anyway. Testers also encountered strongly built
masculine-looking women, like sprinter Maria Matula, who
proved to be a standard XX and passed the test again and
again. Plus they encountered women with intersex
genitalia. Some of these had a bit of Y chromosome
attached to an X -- others were "normal" XXs whose
genital development may have affected by hormonal
imbalance or even fetal damage. Facial hair on a woman
could be the result of chromosomal variation, or a simple
imbalance between estrogen and testosterone. According to
Fausto-Sterling, "Chromosomes, hormones, the internal sex
structures, the gonads and the external genitalia all
vary more than most people realize."
Later, in 1997, Stanford
Today would put it another way, saying, "The very science
that enables sex testing is demonstrating that simple
definitions are no longer biologically sound. ... Try as
they might, researchers are having trouble stuffing human
biology into two distinct boxes labeled 'male' and
'female.'"
But back in 1968, at the
Mexico City Olympics, few people were listening to any
scientific caveats. After all, the reason for gender
testing was political: win the Cold War any way you
can.
Mexico City went down in
history as the Olympics where Mexican troops fired on
demonstrating students, killing 267 and wounding 1000. It
went down in history for black runners Tommie Smith and
John Carlos making the Black Power salute on the victory
stand, to protest racism in the U.S. Women's growing
protests of the gender test were drowned out by the blood
and thunder of bigger events.
Everybody buzzed about
the Press sisters not being on the Soviet team this time.
Tamara and Irina had quietly retired from international
competition before the 1966 European Championships. The
story was, that they were taking care of their ailing
mother back home. Had the Kremlin kept the two women home
because they wouldn't pass the test? No one knew for
sure. But the champions of femininity gloated -- judging
by the medals numbers, the mere threat of a test was
surely having a deterrent effect. In 1960, USSR women had
won eight golds in track and field; this time, not a
single track-and-field gold went to Soviet women. The
shot put was won by a West German, Margitta Gummel. When
the Games ended, the gold-medal score was U.S. - 45, USSR
- 29. Score one more for democracy. And score a big one
for "real women."
Though some still alleged
that the Press sisters had been on steroids, this –
if true -- wouldn’t have prevented them from
competing in Mexico City. The IOC wouldn't ban steroids,
and start testing for them, for another nine
years.
The Presses may have
vanished from the Olympics, but Tamara got one last
laugh. In 1965, at a European meet, she had set one last
world shot record of 18.59 meters. The record stood for
three years, until it was broken by another Soviet woman.
Tamara’s final achievement seemed like a sweaty and
powerful middle finger raised in defiance at the West, as
she and her sister retreated into proletarian obscurity
in their native country. Whatever their physical or
genetic or gender realities had been, these would remain
a mystery.
Despite athletes' growing
opposition to gender testing, the IOC continued to
require it. Thirteen women "failed" the test between 1972
and 1984 alone. Was there a clear body of emerging
evidence that being "chromosomally unacceptable"
conferred any extra power to win medals? No. Yet women's
careers were destroyed if they failed the test. Polish
sprinter Ewa Klubukowska, who had a “normal”
female phenotype but proved to be an XXY, was barred from
international competition, stripped of all her past
medals, and her world record was scratched off the books.
Yet, years later, she was normal woman enough to have a
baby. Spanish hurdler Maria Patino also turned up with an
XY. She was so outraged at being exiled from
international competition that she carried on a fiery
legal campaign against the IOC for three years, until she
finally got reinstated. But the rule stayed in place for
everybody else.
In the mid-70s, the
buccal/sex-chromatin test was deemed unreliable, and
replaced by an updated DNA test. Yet testing turned up no
cases of men competing as women. Athletes’ bodies
were more visible to the public anyway -- they had junked
the old-style loose-fitting track suits in favor of
“mod” tight colorful spandex outfits. With drug
testing now in place, they had to give urine samples
under direct observation. So it was laughable to think
that a male "ringer" could slip through so many layers of
scrutiny. Through the 80s, as sports got more enlightened
about women's abilities, and women's training improved,
and strenuous events like the marathon were added to the
women's program, it was noted that masculine-type muscle
was not necessarily an advantage. Slender feminine Joan
Benoit's winning marathon time in 1984 was faster than
any men's winning marathon times before 1956 -- a signal
achievement, given that women marathoners were still
discovering how fast they could run 26.2
miles.
And what of the male
Olympians who might be XXY, or XYY? Male XXYs often have
a slender, more feminine physique, that might give them
an unfair advantage in events like gymnastics and
equestrian events. Some studies suggested that XYY men
were more aggressive, which might confer an unfair
advantage as well. But men were not gender tested. Any
variants were allowed to compete unmolested.
Myron Genel, MD, was one
expert who became convinced that gender testing was a
joke. In 1990 he and others accepted an IAAF invitation
to get together for a workshop on "femininity
verification." Later Genel wrote in Medscape Women's
Health: "Our group concluded that laboratory-based sex
determination should be discontinued…The purported
rationale is to detect male imposters who would have an
unfair competitive advantage. In point-of-fact, genuine
imposters have not been uncovered; however, gender
verification procedures have resulted in substantial harm
to a number of unassailable women athletes born with
relatively rare genetic abnormalities that affect
development of the gonads or the expression of secondary
sexual characteristics."
In 1992, as a result of
this study, the IAAF defied the IOC and stopped gender
testing. The Commonwealth Games and various sports
federations followed suit, as did the American Medical
Association <http://www.ama-assn.org/>,
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
<http://www.acog.org/>,
and other medical bodies. But the testing juggernaut
rumbled heedlessly on. At the 1996 summer games in
Atlanta, there was a cumbersome DNA screening process for
3,387 women athletes, that proved to be vastly expensive
for the Games. Eight women were red-flagged, then further
scrutinized and discussed -- and allowed to
compete.
Finally, in 1999, even
the IOC's own Athletic Commission went to the executive
board and demanded that testing stop. Testing was
suspended on a trial basis for the Sydney and Salt Lake
City Games. But the IOC hasn't abandoned the old
ideology. It reserves the right to re-apply the
much-discredited test in any individual case that is
brought to their attention. Meanwhile, on the U.S.
political front, gender realities continue to be ignored
by many conservatives -- as in Texas, where the 4th Court
of Appeals ruled in 1999 that only couples with standard
XY and XX chromosomes could be married.
What Happened to
Them?
Today, gender controversy
still makes headlines, though the arena of controversy
has shifted to the GLBT sports world. Here, officials and
organizers must repeat the painful Olympic effort to get
a handle on gender policy that athletes are willing to
accept.
Meanwhile, it's hard to
find any current mention of the Press sisters, who
prompted the launch of testing so long ago. They’re
in the record books, of course. Tamara is listed on Track
and Field News' all-time world rankings for the women's
shot put. She holds nine world records in shot put and
discus. Olympic historian David Wallechinsky considers
Irina the greater of the two, for her dominance in a
broader range of events and her 16 world
records.
But the Press sisters'
impact can hardly be measured by the number of medals
they won. For that reason, they are evidently the target
of lingering bias and vindictiveness, and have become
strangely invisible in the media. They may have gotten
their due Soviet Hero honors when they went home with
their medals, but outside the USSR they never made it
onto any "great sportswomen" lists that I found. Most of
the scanty current material on them dwells on the old
controversy. In 1998 David Wallechinsky, publishing his
encyclopedia work about the Olympics, felt sure the
Presses were men. On that Yahoo sports newsgroup I
mentioned, former U.S. athlete Karen Huff recalled seeing
the two sisters at several joint U.S./USSR meets. She
said, "When our teams would eat together in the cafeteria
at Stanford, Tamara would eat alone. It was sad. Does
anyone know what happened to Tamara and Irena
??”
As yet I’ve found no
information on what the Press sisters did with their
post-Olympics lives.
Whatever they did, they
kept a low profile. This is understandable. Any attention
to them would inevitably bring all those old painful
questions back to their front door. The 1995 Russian
Jewish Encyclopedia, which documented 8500 Jews still
alive and living in former Soviet territory, lists the
Press sisters along with a few of their family members.
Tamara would be 66 today, and Irina 64.
A final word on their
careers is offered by Jews in Sports online: “Doubts
and questions still linger regarding whether the Press
sisters had been injected with male hormones by Soviet
officials, or as some assert, were actually men. Either
way, their records and accomplishments remain on the
books…. Combined, Tamara and Irina set an incredible
23 world records.”
Yes, the real agenda of
gender testing was definitely NOT to ensure fair play at
the Games. The gender test outlived the Cold War by only
a few years. In 1991 the USSR was finally overwhelmed
from within by political, economic and ethnic problems,
and collapsed into an array of struggling independent
republics. Communism fell in the satellite countries as
well. Ironically, though the Cold War is gone today, some
post-Soviet hostility still courses through the Olympic
Games, where controversy now centers more on doping and
judging. At Salt Lake City in 2002, all that brouhaha
around the figure-skating gold medal, with the Russians
accusing Western judges of anti-Russian bias, owed much
to the distant past.
Ironically, gender
testing never gave the U.S. any hoped-for advantage in
the women's throwing events. Over the years, females from
communist countries consistently grabbed the shot-put
golds. Though these countries are no longer "Red", their
women continue to medal frequently in that event. At the
Sydney summer games in 2000, Yanina Korolchik of Belarus
won gold in the shot put, with silver going to Russia's
Larisa Peleshenko. According to Track and Field News, the
USSR remains the highest scoring nation in history in
this event. Do such achievements still happen today
because these women have an unfair genetic advantage? Not
likely. Do they happen because these women use
performance-enhancing drugs? Well, many athletes today,
including Americans, use a state-of-the-art array of
performance-enhancers, despite IOC efforts to stamp out
doping. More likely these women have the final edge
because they are still less fettered by "conventional
femininity." Indeed, their dominance in the shot put is
now a tradition, in the same way that the U.S.
traditionally excels in sprints.
Meanwhile, a Cold War
ideology of "masculine-looking female bad guys" managed
to masquerade as sports science for 32 years. Gender
testing could have come straight out of a Tom Clancy
novel, if Clancy had ever written about
sports.
