Gender verification based on genetic research: History and prospects for implementation

Abstract

Sporting achievements are traditionally assessed in terms of the gender and age categories, based on the ideas of the fundamental differences in skeletal, physiological and hormonal characteristics of a person of certain sex and age. Modern ideas about the genetics of sex, medical advances that allow changing gender, along with active lobbying of interests of people who do not meet the binary gender norm or identify themselves with the opposite sex compared to the one of which they were born, require increased attention to the problem of gender identification in high-performance sports. In this context, there are a number of issues that require the implementation of an integrated approach by medical professionals, sports officials, and lawyers. The main one is related to the feasibility of genetic testing of athletes, which is questioned due to the lack of a statistically significant cause-and-effect relationship between abnormalities in sexual development and achieved sports results. This simultaneously raises the issue of the effect of identifying such deviations on admission to competitions, depending on sport activity, the “direction” of mutation (from man to woman or from woman to man), and the possibility of resolving the situation in a medical way. When writing the article, methods of collecting and studying isolated facts; generalization methods; scientific abstraction methods; methods of learning patterns have been used. Upon the results of the study, it is concluded that mass genetic testing is not appropriate for gender verification and that there is a need for an integrated approach to the assessment of an athlete’s sex, which cannot be limited by his/her chromosomal characteristics, which follows from the practice of international sports organizations and existing medical approaches to solving this problem.