Sex and Drug Testing

This essay is Part Three of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays.

One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT.

Here follows a series of brief essays, hastily written in conversation with Dr ——–‘s own examination of sport as a cultural phenomenon. These five essays are unedited, but organized in a way that, I hope, leads one to find something of a coherent narrative, and a path to how the long-form essay I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way came about.

Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies
Sports, socialization and the construction of gender | Sex differences and sex segregation | Sex and drug testing | Race and sports | Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Sex and drug testing

The gendering of doping is a useful lens through which to understand the social stigma and legislative processes that inconsistently operate in the pursuit of a “fair” sport. Yet while masculinized products like testosterone are seen to feminize men, there is currently no unambiguously feminized doping product. Will this change when female performances exceed those of male athletes?

By thinking of doping in gendered terms, we can better understand how anti-doping narratives collide with concepts of naturalized bodies, with “fairness” becoming synonymous with the preservation of the dominant discourse on sexual dimorphism. As such, it is useful to think of doping rules functioning to protect the naturalized gendered body as a concept, rather than protect individual bodies from health dangers caused by doping products (though the latter is often alluded to, and certainly does fall within the remit of anti-doping agencies).

If we are to imagine a world where female athletes have reached the endurance capacity repeatedly predicted by sports scientists, and as such surpassing current male performance, can we also see a world in which the doping products currently used by endurance athletes become synonymous with unnaturally raising men to women’s athletic level? For example, Erythropoeitin is a drug that causes the body to produce oxygen-carrying red blood cells at a rate and density far higher than can be achieved without medical intervention. It is easy to draw an associative chain from blood to the heart, which sits in contrast with the head. Do we then reach a feminized drug, which can serve to elevate male biology to perform at a comparable level to the female body? And does the drug disrupt the gender order, even if it helps reproduce male superiority (or at least mitigate its decline)? Or does the metaphoric heart lack the evocative power of the genitals and erogenous zones altered by steroids? Perhaps sporting equality will open up a new lexicon for doping.

Related reading:

The “Science” of Fair Play in Sport: Gender and the Politics of Testing [PDF] (Henne)
Fixing the Boundaries of Physical Gender: Side Effects of Anti-Drug Campaigns in Athletics (Davis and Delano)
Gender Transports: Privileging the “Natural” in Gender Testing Debates for Intersex and Transgender Athletes (Wahlert and Fiester)