Transsexual and potential transsexual

The most important thing in transsexual issues is how to maintain the fairness between transsexual athletes and normal athletes. Especially, when male athlete transfers into female athlete, because the androgen still maintains at a high level at the beginning of transsexualism, the sport ability will not change. Therefore, a standard of androgen is needed to test the athletes’ androgen levels before the games.

Another issue is potential transsexual which the female athletes abuse the steroid or other androgen medicines by themselves or by coaches. In order to increase female athletes’ physical strength and endurance, some coaches ask their athletes to take androgen medicines or some female athletes will choose to take. In other words, those female athletes received the potential transsexual for the purpose of winning the champions.

However, taking androgen medicines absolutely has the side effects to the female athletes. They will show masculine qualities, such as growing a beard, darkening body hair, and deepening voice. Those changes also will cause their psychological problems which make them feel inferior. Other serious problems will appear when those female athletes retire from sports. In order to keep female characteristics, they have to take estrogen medicines paid by their own. In the first place, however, most retired athletes in China are struggling to find a job, and those estrogen medicines are really expensive. Therefore, those female athletes live miserable lives during both athletic periods and retired periods. This is not the issue just happened in China, but in the whole world. If interested, please see Honour, J. W. (1997). Steroid abuse in female athletes. Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology, 9, 187-192.

Gender equity in media coverage

“Successful female Olympic athletes contribute to closing the gender gap in media coverage” (Hovden et al., 2008, p.1). According to Hovden et al. (2008), female and male athletes had almost the same media coverage in China. However, female athletes got fewer percentage of media coverage compared to their greater achievements. In 2004 Athens Olympics, Chinese female athletes received 63% of Olympic medals, but only had 52% of media coverage. This situation was even worse in Belgium which female athletes received 67% of medals compared to 43% of media coverage and in Germany which received 57% of medals compared to 39% of media coverage (Hovden et al., 2008, p. 8, table 7).

Overall, Chinese women sports receive more achievements than men sports. In 2008 Beijing Olympics, female athletes and teams won 57 Olympic medals, while male athletes and teams only won 42 Olympic medals. Especially, for “big balls” (soccer, basketball and volleyball), Chinese women teams won many world champions. However, most people in China will choose to watch men’s games instead of women’s games if these two games played at the same time. People think that male athletes are stronger, faster and more skillful than female athletes. When Chinese men soccer team entered the World Cup 2002 for the first time, the whole country was crazy! I was an eighth grade student in 2002. I still remember that one of the strictest teachers in our school cancelled her class, and she bought a big radio to the classroom. All students sat around that radio to listen the game---China vs. Brazil. Actually, the whole country did the same thing, from schools to companies, from government officers to taxi drivers.

The media coverage of Olympics in China based on who has greater chance to win gold medal rather than gender difference. Particularly, media and audiences all focus on top athletes who are former world champions. Therefore, the only hero is gold medal winner; the silver and third winners will be forgotten quickly.