Transgender, Intersex, and the Olympics

He who answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame to him. Proverbs 18:13

Now that the 2024 Paris Olympics are over–and I have taken some time–I am willing to comment. Years ago I was a founding member of another blog site—when online blog sites were something somewhat new. I remember being pushed as a leader in the FBFI to respond immediately to events happening in the world. Historically, we have not done that as a fellowship. Our primary publication is FrontLine Magazine. We lay out the agenda for that magazine a year in advance. Proclaimanddefend.org allows for more timely responses to worldwide events, but even with that we need to be careful not to answer anything too quickly.

Let’s take these Olympics for example.

I will bypass the pagan celebration of sin in the opening ceremonies and focus on the secondary drama of the Olympics—the transgender controversy regarding gold medalist Imane Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting. The controversy hit the news when Khelif’s opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, withdrew from a match weeping and claiming injustice.

Political and religious conservatives jumped on the story immediately, decrying transgenderism and the unfairness to women in allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports. This was no doubt also fueled by the agitation regarding the opening ceremony. However, as the story unfolded, it became more confusing.

There is such a thing as an intersex person.

There is such a thing as an intersex person—and it’s a biological condition, not a mental one. In addressing the transgender issue, we also must be aware that the intersex condition exists and it is not the same thing.

My first counseling case in ministry was with an intersex person. I was a 24-year-old church planter fresh out of seminary counseling classes and ready to solve the world’s problems. A young man trusted Christ through a ministry we called “yard sale evangelism.” My wife was the first person to talk to him and invite him to church. Thomas (not his real name) began to grow and to be faithful in church attendance. He was small in stature and slightly effeminate in behavior, but it did not seem to bother anyone at church. We were all thrilled that he had come to know Christ and was growing. This was 1988—before these issues were so prominent in the news.

After a few months of church attendance, Thomas asked if he could come to see me for counseling. Nervously I opened the apartment door and welcomed my first official counseling case. Thomas asked for advice in dealing with bitterness toward his father. Thomas explained that he was biologically intersex at birth. He had a combination of both male and female body parts. It was customary at the time, and might still be, for doctors to perform surgery to give the child a singular sexual identity. This is a true sense in which a child is “assigned” gender at birth. In Thomas’ case, his father chose for him to be surgically altered, and to be raised as a boy.

Thomas was bitter at his father because the father always wanted a boy, and Thomas felt that his father made his choice based on his personal desire rather than for the good of the child. Thomas would have to take hormones for life to suppress the development of female body characteristics.

We worked through biblical principles of bitterness and forgiveness. However, in the remaining time that Thomas attended our church, he struggled. He eventually chose to stop taking the hormones and live life primarily as a woman. The surgical treatment he went through as a baby was without his consent, and the transition he made as an adult was simply to stop taking hormones and let his body revert to the characteristics dictated by his birth condition.

The Olympic Committee leadership responded to criticism by saying that the issue with these two athletes is not transgender. Both of these athletes have understood themselves to be women all their lives. So, questions arise.

Are they transgender? The answer seems to be clearly no. Both athletes have been raised as women and understood themselves to be women all their lives. I assume a cursory physical examination would indicate they are women.

Are they intersex? The answer to this seems to be yes. However, neither athlete has identified as intersex. Both were disqualified from boxing as women by the International Boxing Association because chromosome tests came back “XY” indicating that they were male. Is it biologically possible to have female body parts and male chromosomes? Apparently, it is and it is a biologically provable condition.

Were they being deceitful and trying to compete as women even though they were men? I do not know. The IBA believed so. When they were disqualified a year ago the IBA’s president said this in a TASS interview.

“Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women,” the association’s president, Umar Kremlev, told Russia’s Tass news agency at the time. “According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

It is hard for me to believe this was intentional deceit. It is easy enough to determine how these athletes were raised and in the case of Khelif, transitioning gender is illegal in her Muslim home country of Algeria.

What is a woman?

With my apologies to Matt Walsh–the IBA and the IOC face a difficult decision in answering the question “What is a woman?” In this case, is it defined by the body parts present at birth, or the chromosomes? Babies do not usually get chromosome testing to determine what gender to put on the birth certificate. However, the decisions the sports governing bodies need to make about this situation are not moral or religious. Rather, they are about the fairness of athletic competition and safety.

For believers, it is important that we clearly understand what social/moral/biblical hills we will die on. This specific situation is not one of them. Yes, God created human beings male and female, and barring biological birth defects in which the chromosomes do not match the body parts, that is exactly what they are. When defined this way only .018% of babies born would fit this category.

Anne Fausto-Sterling’s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.  

We ought to have compassion for people who have to deal with this birth anomaly while we help all people become the godly men or women God made them to be.

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For the audio version of this article, see here: Transgender, Intersex, and the Olympics (substack.com)