Monday, September 1, 2014

Gender Testing of Athletes Activity [Interactive Graphic]

On this website, students can click through an exercise in "determining" an athlete's gender/sex.  This is a useful activity for helping students complicate their understandings of gender and sex.  It would also help begin a conversation about gender and sports.

The website states:
"Do you think that determining an individual's gender should be straightforward? Can you think of a single test or examination that can unambiguously identify a person's gender? What happens if various tests disagree?
"Try this interactive exploration that challenges you to determine whether an athlete is qualified to compete as a female. Along the way you may gain some understanding of the biology of sex and in particular how sex is determined in humans."

I assign this activity as homework and have students discuss in the next class how the activity illustrates the social construction of gender and sex categories.  In conjunction with this activity, I provide examples of the media coverage of athletes who have had to undergo this type of testing.  I also discuss the concept of “determining gender” from the article “Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System” by Westbrook and Schilt (2014).

Link to activity: http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/gender-testing-athletes



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