The Gender Trap

After reading “The Gender Trap” by Emine Saner, it was amazing to learn about some of the more famous occurrences when female athletes were caught in the gender trap. I couldn’t believe all of the tests they make many female athlete go through. I can’t imagine how degrading it must be for those athletes to have to do all of those gender-determination tests in front of the doctors. In the case of Soundarajan, it must have been heartbreaking and humiliating to have to give back her medal from the 2006 Asian games after failing a gender test. In the case of Dora Ratjen, I was not surprised when I read that Hitler had his ways of cheating, trying to show the supremacy of the Aryan race. Hermann Ratjen, who was part of the Hitler Youth, was forced by Nazis to enter the 1936 Olympic Games as a woman. According to Saner (2008), “It is believed that as many as 10,000 East German athletes were caught up in a nightmarish state-sponsored attempt to build a race of superhuman communist sports heroes and force-fed cocktails of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.” It was terrible to learn that Heidi Krieger was treated and used like that. From Saner (2008), it was pretty crazy to read about Stella Walsh, and how “in 1980, Walsh was killed by mistake during an armed robbery at a shopping mall in Cleveland, Ohio. The postmortem revealed she had male genitalia, although this did not prove that she was a man as she was also found to have both male and female chromosomes, a genetic condition known as mosaicism.”