Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate "suspect" female athletes. Certain female athletes may be evaluated by endocrinologists, gynecologists, a geneticist and a psychologist, The New York Times reports today.

Only female athletes whose gender has been questioned will be tested.

Beijing’s sex-determination lab is a modern version 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 began during the Cold War in the 1960s when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering male athletes in women’s events to gain a competitive advantage.

The tests never unmasked a man posing as a women, but ironically, several female athletes have failed sex-verification tests. For example, in 1967 the Polish female sprinter Ewa Klobukowska was required to appear naked in front of the judges, but still failed the chromosomal test in 1967. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Official website said that Klobukowska was found to have a rare genetic condition which gave her no advantage over other athletes, but was nonetheless banned from competing in the Olympics and professional sports.

Many believe that these women such as Klobukowska failed because they were born with genetic or hormonal defects that made the results appear that they were male.The tests have since been changed to adapt to new scientific understandings about gender, but critics believe the tests should be banned because they are intrusive, unscientific and discriminatory.