Still no 'justice for all' for female athletes

Policies must be refined to safeguard women in sports from media circuses about sex tests

2014-08-04

(Press-News.org) Spanish hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño, who in the 1980s endured harsh global media attention when she was subjected to unscientific gender tests, is co-author of a study that takes stock of current sexual verification policies in athletics. While such policies were originally designed to weed out men who impersonate women at female-only events, issues of privacy and confidentiality remain paramount to safeguard athletes from unnecessary embarrassment, says Nathan Ha of the University of California Los Angeles in the US, lead author of the review in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) have since 1966 had various sex verification policies in place – from demeaning physical inspections of female competitors to scientifically and ethically flawed genetic tests to verify the presence of male or female chromosomes.

Such policies have caused great embarrassment and injustice especially to female athletes who were born with disorders of sex development (DSD) which cause the atypical development of their chromosomes, gonads, or reproductive anatomy. Patíño, for instance, has complete androgen insensitivity. This means that, although she is genetically male, she is physically and outwardly female. She was disqualified from the 1985 Kobe Universiade after a genetic test showed that she had XY (male) chromosomes. The news was later leaked to the press. Patíño said the ensuing "almost unbearable" media attention made her feel "like being raped." She openly challenged the ruling.

Since 1999, medical evaluations of an athlete's sex are done only when there is so-called reasonable suspicion about a person's sex, but this can still cause embarrassment. For instance, in 2009 South African athlete Caster Semenya received damaging global media attention after an official broke the IAAF's confidentiality policies by confirming gossip about an assessment of her sex. The hyperandrogenism policy of 2011 sought to rectify the situation by setting standards around the upper hormonal limits allowed for athletes taking part in women's sporting events.

Ha and his colleagues believe this new policy should be improved even further to ensure greater justice for all athletes. Equitable administration and eligibility standards for male and female athletes must still be set, along with policy on transgender athletes and those who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery. Privacy and confidentiality clauses should specify which officials must be informed of an evaluation, and also consider legal action when information is leaked. Informed consent should be an explicit right, while a neutral ombudsperson could be valuable to help an athlete make informed choices throughout the process. Psychological counseling is especially important when an athlete is found ineligible to compete further. The initiation of assessments must also be revisited.

"The International Olympic Committee should continue to monitor and revise the hyperandrogenism policy with diligence in the near and distant future," says Ha.

INFORMATION: Reference: Ha, N.Q. et al. (2014). Hurdling Over Sex? Sport, Science, and Equity. Archives of Sexual Behavior. DOI 10.1007/s10508-014-0332-0

The full-text article is available to journalists on request.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Attention, bosses: web-surfing at work has its benefits

2014-08-04

A new e-memo for the boss: Online breaks at work can refresh workers and boost productivity. Early findings from a University of Cincinnati study will be presented on Aug. 5, at the 74th annual meeting of the Academy of Management in Philadelphia. The study led by Sung Doo Kim, a doctoral candidate in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, opens a rare avenue of research into coping with technology-induced distractions in our contemporary society. Previous research has focused on breaks during off-job hours such as evening, weekend and vacation periods, or on traditional ...

Fruit flies going high-tech: How touchscreen technology helps to understand eating habits

2014-08-04

A new study reveals surprising similarities between the way mammals and flies eat. What and how we eat is a crucial determinant of health and wellbeing. Model organisms such as fruit flies have provided crucial insights into how our brain decides what and how much to eat. But until now it was not clear how similar eating was in fruit flies and mammals (vertebrates). In a paper published today (Itskov et. al 2014) in the scientific journal Nature Communications, scientists from the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, Lisbon, Portugal, in collaboration with the University ...

Nanoscale details of electrochemical reactions in electric vehicle battery materials

2014-08-04

UPTON, NY-Using a new method to track the electrochemical reactions in a common electric vehicle battery material under operating conditions, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have revealed new insight into why fast charging inhibits this material's performance. The study also provides the first direct experimental evidence to support a particular model of the electrochemical reaction. The results, published August 4, 2014, in Nature Communications, could provide guidance to inform battery makers' efforts to optimize materials ...

Eating resistant starch may help reduce red meat-related colorectal cancer risk

2014-08-04

PHILADELPHIA — Consumption of a type of starch that acts like fiber may help reduce colorectal cancer risk associated with a high red meat diet, according to a study published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "Red meat and resistant starch have opposite effects on the colorectal cancer-promoting miRNAs, the miR-17-92 cluster," said Karen J. Humphreys, PhD, a research associate at the Flinders Center for Innovation in Cancer at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. "This finding supports consumption of resistant ...

Video-game playing for less than an hour a day is linked with better-adjusted children

2014-08-04

A new study suggests video game-playing for less than an hour a day is linked with better-adjusted children and teenagers. The research, carried out by Oxford University, found that young people who indulged in a little video game-playing were associated with being better adjusted than those who had never played or those who were on video games for three hours or more. The study finds no positive or negative effects for young people who played 'moderately' between one to three hours a day. However, the study, published in the journal, Pediatrics, suggests that the influence ...

WSU researchers see violent era in ancient Southwest

2014-08-04

PULLMAN, Wash.—It's a given that, in numbers terms, the 20th Century was the most violent in history, with civil war, purges and two World Wars killing as many as 200 million people. But on a per-capita basis, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler has documented a particularly bloody period more than eight centuries ago on what is now American soil. Between 1140 and 1180, in the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado, four relatively peaceful centuries of pueblo living devolved into several decades of violence. Writing in the journal American Antiquity, ...

Kangaroos win when Aborigines hunt with fire

2014-08-04

SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 4, 2014 – Australia's Aboriginal Martu people hunt kangaroos and set small grass fires to catch lizards, as they have for at least 2,000 years. A University of Utah researcher found such man-made disruption boosts kangaroo populations – showing how co-evolution helped marsupials and made Aborigines into unintentional conservationists. "We have uncovered a framework that allows us to predict when human subsistence practices might be detrimental to the environment and when they might be beneficial," says Brian Codding, an assistant professor of anthropology. "When ...

New trick for 'old' drug brings hope for pancreatic cancer patients

2014-08-04

Cancer Research UK scientists have found a new use for an old drug by showing that it shrinks a particular type of pancreatic cancer tumour and stops it spreading, according to research published in Gut*. "It's a crucial step forward in developing new treatments for this devastating disease..." - Dr Jennifer Morton, study author The scientists, at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute and the University of Glasgow, treated mice with pancreatic cancers caused by known genetic faults with the drug rapamycin**. Previous clinical trials did not find this drug to be ...

Primary care telephone triage does not save money or reduce practice workload

2014-08-04

Demand for general practice appointments is rising rapidly, and in an attempt to deal with this, many practices have introduced systems of telephone triage. Patients are phoned by a doctor or nurse who either manages the problem on the phone, or agrees with the patient whether and how urgently they need to be seen. A new large study, published in The Lancet on 4 August 2014 and funded by the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), has investigated the potential value of telephone triage for patients and for the NHS. It concluded that patients who receive a telephone ...

Tumor suppressor mutations alone don't explain deadly cancer

2014-08-03

Although mutations in a gene dubbed "the guardian of the genome" are widely recognized as being associated with more aggressive forms of cancer, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found evidence suggesting that the deleterious health effects of the mutated gene may in large part be due to other genetic abnormalities, at least in squamous cell head and neck cancers. The study, published online August 3 in the journal Nature Genetics, shows that high mortality rates among head and neck cancer patients tend to occur only when mutations ...

NFCR congratulates Dr. Robert C. Bast, Jr. on receiving the AACR-Daniel D. Von Hoff Award for Outstanding Contributions to Education and Training in Cancer Research

Still no 'justice for all' for female athletes

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: