Medical and Ethical Concerns Regarding Women With Hyperandrogenism and Elite Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In May 2011 and June 2012, respectively, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) (1) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) (2) implemented new regulations governing the eligibility of female athletes with hyperandrogenism to compete in elite sport. The IAAF policy stipulates that a female athlete is eligible to compete in the women's category only if she has blood T levels below 10 nmol/L, the lower limit for men. Athletes found to have T levels above this lower limit, without an associated androgen insensitivity, are required to undergo medical intervention or risk being excluded from women's events. The move by the IAAF and IOC to use serum T as the sole biological variable to regulate eligibility in women's events has been met with controversy (3). Critics argue that this decision relies on the false assumption that T levels in blood determine athletic performance, which is not supported scientifically (4–7). The IOC/IAAF policy is motivated by a misguided sense of “fairness.” The policymakers seem to believe that some natural qualities in women (like endogenous T) are so significantly associated with outstanding athletic performance that, unlike other naturally occurring variations that may affect performance, they must be diagnosed by testing and reduced or eliminated by medical intervention to create fairness in athletic competition. Even if it can be shown that high levels of natural T predictably determine better athletic performance (which the research to date does not support), we do not accept that it would necessarily violate the ideals of sport. We must point out that for many years now, natural advantage among male athletes has not been policed and reduced in sports, but on the contrary has been admired and celebrated. These are important arguments; however, our primary concern here is with the medical and ethical issues these policies raise regarding the governance of elite sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.033 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".