Olympian: are you a boy or a grrrl?

Lab Is Set to Test the Gender of Some Female Athletes

NY TIMES - "Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate “suspect” female athletes, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported."

"The lab is similar to ones set up at previous Olympics in Sydney and Athens, and will draw on the resources of the Peking Union Medical College Hospital to evaluate an athlete’s external appearance, hormones and genes."

The article continues with some titillating background.

"The lab is a relic of an earlier Olympic era, when every female athlete was required to submit to a sex-verification test before competing in the Games. The tests emerged in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering male athletes in women’s events to gain an edge. At first, women were asked to parade nude before a panel of doctors to verify their sex. "