Beijing Olympics organizers have set up a gender determination lab to test female athletes suspected to be males, China’s state media reported Sunday.

Experts at the lab, located at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, will evaluate cases based on their external appearance and take blood samples to test hormones, genes and chromosomes, said Prof. Tian Qinjie of the college hospital, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Gender verification tests emerged in the 1960s when Communist countries in Eastern Europe were thought to be using male athletes in women’s competitions. The tests were used at the Olympics for the first time at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

The concept has drawn criticism over the years, largely because certain chromosomal abnormalities may cause a woman to fail a test, even though it gives her no competitive advantage. Also, if a female athlete fails a test she must have a physiological examination, which many consider invasive and a privacy violation.

The ethical implications of the test and the notion of reducing female athletes to their sex chromosomes led to the International Olympic Committee’s decision in 1999 to stop requiring chromosome tests for every female Olympian; now the organizing body has the authority to arrange for gender verification if it is called into question.

At the 1996 Atlanta Games, eight athletes failed the tests but were all cleared by subsequent examinations. Santhi Soundarajan, a middle-distance runner from India, was stripped of an Asian Games silver medal in 2006 after failing a gender verification test.

What do you think? Is the possibility of male athletes posing as women in the Olympics great enough to warrant such testing? Or are these tests inappropriate?