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By Stanman63 I Have A Question! Synopsis:I have heard about how in the past where there was some question about certain women athletes from Russia that were either injected with steroids to give them an edge or were men forced to become women to compete. Is there any truth to that? And what about inter-sexed athletes? |
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Stanman May Your Light Forever Shine |
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As far as I know, there were no forced sex changes
On the other hand, lots of women were given large doses of male hormones to build up their muscles, and there was one supposed man, Dora Ratjen, who competed as a woman for the Nazi team in 1936, but it seems doubtful that "he" was anything but intersexed, although it caused a scandal reminiscent of the treatment of Caster Semenya in its day:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,649104,00...
Heidi Krieger was a particular victim of the East German doping programme:
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/hormone-heidi-con...
But it's also true that many female or intersex athletes have been persecuted by gender zealots who have a mania about the issue, one of whom, Santhi Soundarajan, tried to commit suicide to escape the nasty-minded attacks made on her as a supposed man.
The Russians were unfairly accused of extensive doping programmes, mostly because there were a lot of Russian female athletes who'd grown up on farms and didn't look at all like June Cleaver. The "gender" controversy was largely a Cold War propaganda tactic on the part of the USA, and fit right in with Red-baiting, "fellow-travellers," and the rest of the paranoid fantasies so popular at the time. Nowadays, the same sorts are worried about Obama's birth certificate.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
As you noted...
The East Germans were tar'd with the same paint. And, in my recollection, far more often than the Soviets.
In thinking back to the Olympics I viewed back in the Cold War days. I don't recall many Soviet athletes that "looked like men". As puddin pointed out, how they lived had more to do with it. Remember, during the Soviet days, once an athlete got on the national team, he/she typically was moved to a central area, paid a salary, and their job - train. That kind of training has an effect.
Did it happen? You can safely assume that there were SOME athletes in almost any part of the world that had access to hormones took advantage (real or percieved) of them. Just look at our Pro Sports, and the prevalence of Human Growth Hormone use.
Anne
>> The East Germans were tar'd with the same paint.
I think that the East Germans had a particular problem, partially because their programmes were centrally run, just as there are pockets of "doping" in the USA that centre around certain coaches or "nutrition" consultants. There were lots of complaints about the East German programmes from the athletes themselves after re-unifcation, but not so many from the former Soviet Union after Perestroika.
This is not to say that the East Germans were the only ones who risked the health of their athletes with dangerous drugs and hormones, because (as you point out) the temptation is there for everyone.
I'm not a sport fan, so my own views aren't informed by any deep knowledge of any particular sport, but I do keep track of systemic abuse of women in many fields.
I particularly object to invidious discrimination against gender-variant women, as was done to Caster Semenya, because essentially every female athlete in professional or world-class amateur sport is gender-variant to some degree, all of them at the extremes of physical development, and many of them artificially aided through sophisticated "treatments" designed to pass through drug screenings.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Heidi Krieger
As Puddin points out, this was one of the most dramatic cases. In 1997, after the effects of years of doping had left her with a body that was far more masculine than feminine, Heidi Krieger chose to undergo GRS and is now known as Andreas Krieger. As he puts it in this article from the New York Times, "They killed Heidi."
I'm not aware of any actual cases of forced gender changes either, but it should be noted that many of the East German athletes were minors and they were given these performance enhancing drugs without their knowledge. Even if they were told what the drugs were for, under the system that was in place at the time they wouldn't have been given a choice, so in a very real sense Heidi Krieger and others were forcibly masculinized.
Scott
I cried for her.
I cried for me.
I cried for a world that wouldn’t let her be.
-- from Luna by Julie Anne Peters
http://genomorph.tglibrary.com/
Bree
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-- Tom Clancy
http://genomorph.tglibrary.com/ (Currently broken)
http://bree-ramsey314.livejournal.com/
Twitter: @genomorph
Only in the sense that Barry Bonds
was "masculinised." Doping with steroids and/or growth hormones, exacerbated by whatever exotic drug cocktails can be dreamed up to create freakishly modified bodies, either male or female, isn't a "gender change," but a particular type of abuse, no matter who inflicts it.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
You may be thinking of
You may be thinking of Tamara and Irina Press, who dominated track and field right up until the IOC announced the first tests for testosterone and such. They then vanished. They were probably just girls who had been given testosterone and/or precursors until they looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The events they dominated were pure strength ones, like javelin, discus, ...
There have also been some track stars who turned out to be a bit more than believed, when they passed away decades later and were autopsied. I can't think of the European 'female' runner was...
Diane Castle