THE INDIGNITY OF QUESTIONING FEMALE ATHLETES' FEMININITY

AT the Paris Olympics, boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan were subject to questions about their sex identity.

Speculative accusations were made against these female athletes with intersex traits of being male and transgender. What's galling is people in powerful positions have often spread such misinformation and disrupted the lives of many female athletes.

Pratima Gaonkar, a young female athlete with intersex traits, ended her life in October 2001 after being questioned to prove her biological sex identity through a so-called 'sex determination test'.

This started in the 1940s. For a long time, female athletes with genetic differences were targeted with 'sex verification tests'. There is limited data available on male athletes' chromosomal or hormonal profiles. However, a study conducted on over 600 elite athletes in 2014 revealed that 16.5 percent of male athletes had low testosterone levels, while 13.7 percent of female athletes exhibited high testosterone levels. It is estimated that nearly 2 percent of male competitors had testosterone levels within the typical female range.

But it's female athletes with intersex traits who are often misbranded as transgender. For instance, G Nagalakshmi, a former national-level competitor with intersex traits, was selected for a post in the Tamil Nadu police. However, the state police disputed her sex identity, which was ignorantly misrepresented as transsexual by the media, medical practitioners and the judiciary. There are over 20 south Indian female athletes with intersex traits who lost track of their lives and careers because of misinformation and ignorance.