It's official.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Transsexuals were cleared Monday to compete in the Olympics for the first time. Under a proposal approved by the IOC executive board, athletes who have undergone sex-change surgery will be eligible for the Olympics if their new gender has been legally recognized and they have gone through a minimum two-year period of postoperative hormone therapy. The decision, which covers both male-to-female and female-to-male cases, goes into effect starting with the Athens Olympics in August.

I frankly hadn't been following the subject much, but it caught my attention after seeing some high-spirited discussion on the topic over at Dog Snot Diaries, if you wish to check it out.

Realistically, I wonder how many athletes at the Olympics will actually be transsexual? Will we be able to tell who is just by looking? If we see a tall woman with a prominent "Adam's apple" beating her second place finisher by a long stretch, will it be obvious who was competing? It probably won't be that visible to the naked camera eye. Hopefully the publicity won't engender (excuse the pun) a "Scarlet Letter" aspect: transsexual athletes having a special logo or designation, or commentators making a casual mention of..."back when Jane Doe was in college, her name was John."?

What I hear a lot of people saying between the lines is that they're worried that male-to-female TS will have the advantage because of athletically superior male physiology, not the other way around (female-to-male transsexuals gaining advantage by taking male hormones to enhance biologically female anatomy).

It can be argued that female-to-male transsexual athletes "break the rules" the most, because they require endogenous androgens (testosterone) to maintain their male appearance and secondary sex characteristics like facial hair and muscle mass. By that logic if we don't allow biologically XY athletes to take testosterone, then it would seem unfair to allow a biological XX competing as a male to do so, even if he needs the hormones to function as a male. But would the hormones give a female-to-male transsexual an unfair edge over men? Somehow I don't think really think so.

To me, this is sounding like the usual "do we allows those freaks to play on our team" objection, but the real issue isn't about gay/straight, or even male/female in my eyes. What this really is, is the first time we are having true biologically altered athletes competing in the Olympics - something we haven't done to this point. It's a test case for an extreme situation some other readers have talked about, the "clones coming out to play".

Transsexual people are of course not "clones", but they have modified their bodies surgically and hormonally to an extent we're not sure how to deal with yet in closely-scrutinized Olympic competition. It gives us an idea of public opinion if athletes with new, as-yet-undeveloped modifications like muscle grafting, gene therapy or even "designer babies" are allowed to compete in the Olympics with unmodified individuals, with the added psyche-snaggers of sexual and gender identity.

It's a more potent and far-reaching milestone than it appears at first glance.

What solution is there? Should we force transsexual athletes to compete according to their sex of birth, rather than sex of assignment? What if a gender-neutral individual wanted to compete? It's a complicated issue, but still, it seems fundamentally unfair to ban transsexual athletes from Olympic competition outright. The ideal of the Games has always been about pushing the limits of human body within the constraints of fair competition, but does fair competition mean that transsexual athletes must "come out" as such, so their fellow athletes and the world know?

The Olympic Games are an international event - and this issue clearly shows that some nations have a more liberal outlook than we do, some a more conservative view, while we here in the USA - thankfully - we still have the opportunity to hash it out somewhere in between.

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