Out of Bounds? A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes

Katrina Karkazis is a medical anthropologist at the Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University. Her first book, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (Duke University Press, 2008), looks at the question of how to treat infants whose bodies do not fit neatly into our scientific categories of “male” or “female,” from the perspective of doctors, parents, and adults with intersex conditions themselves. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we fail to ask much more difficult questions. Do gender-atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? Is “sex” as man-made as “gender”?