ABSTRACT
Gender verification has been a contentious area and one where the medical profession has played a major part in defining policy. It is a female issue because testing has only been applied to women competitors. There are known cases of males competing as females, but most are in the distant past and none have been revealed by formal gender verification tests. Gender testing by examining chromosomes was introduced by the IOC in 1968 and abandoned in 1999. The history of gender testing offers a fascinating insight into sports politics and the problems of getting the medical viewpoint across (Ferguson-Smith 1998).
