Gender as class in competitive sports -: Gender verifications in sports as an example of the "Small difference and its big consequences"

In competitive sports there is a segregation of the sexes which is usually justified with the physical differences between men and women. Although there are also other physical differences between people, e.g. height or ethnic origin, which affect athletic achievement in particular disciplines of sports, these differences are not used for a division into classes. Consequently, this paper proposes that differences between the athletic achievement of women and men are not the cause of the importance of gender in competitive sports. An instance of this hypothesis is so-called "gender verification" which was used until recently to prove that a female athlete actually is female. There seems, rather, to be a latent function in the segregation between men and women in sports: due to competition in different classes the differences between the sexes are stressed, dramatically performed, and reproduced. Hence gender is, along with the principle of achievement, a constitutive feature of competitive sports. The reason for this was probably the historical construction of gender as a prevailing social organizing principle in the 1 9,h century while at the same time the differentiation of sports as sub-system of modern society was taking place.