Belz...
Fiend God
Which part of what I described is daft, and why?
Trans Women are not Women
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Which part of what I described is daft, and why?
The Atheist
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Very informative post, thanks.
JihadJane
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'Caster Semenya: No one wins' by intersex expert and commentator, Claire Graham, aka @MRKHVoice
https://mirandayardley.com/en/caste...r3kcy8i3LiRNZ0YDjpq_5X1DHfFtLX0iwEjVAAReQoTPs
https://mirandayardley.com/en/caste...r3kcy8i3LiRNZ0YDjpq_5X1DHfFtLX0iwEjVAAReQoTPs
I say let male and females (and anything in-between, or even beyond this scale) compete together in all sports. Why, if discrimination is something that's bad, should we be content with discriminating against people because of their sex at all?
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ponderingturtle
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Except of course that it is all conjecture and assumes her medical condition with out any direct evidence. The only medical detail that has been disclosed and hence the only one being judged on is the level of a single hormone in her blood.
though of course there logic would also ban Michael Phelps for not producing enough lactic acid unless he takes drugs to correct that, to preserve the integrity of the sport.
d4m10n
Penultimate Amazing
It's not entirely obvious how this would follow. Generally there needs to be a large base of amateur players prior to the formation of a professional class of players. This happened with gridiron football early in the 20th century, rugby football much later.
It does occur to me that the top level sports are significantly better positioned to come up with scientifically grounded sex-segregation policies, though.
Ziggurat
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The ruling specifies what medical conditions it applies to, doesn't it? Therefore isn't the ruling direct evidence of her medical condition?
Ziggurat
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This position is internally consistent and based on clear principles. But the reason we don't do it is because most people don't actually share those principles. Most people think it's OK to discriminate between men and women, at least in certain ways, and separating women's sports from men's sports is consistent with accepted forms of discrimination.
The US Strength Lifting Federation has taken a slightly non-traditional approach: instead of having a men's division and a women's division, it has an open division and a women's division. Only biological females can enter the women's division. Anyone, not just men, can enter the open division.
Actually, isn't this the case in most professional sports? I know women could potentially play in the NBA and NFL if a team would choose to pick them, but due to disparities in talent caused by *gasp* SEX, this isn't happening. Seems like the sporting world has this issue mostly figured out.
Ziggurat
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There is no women’s division for the NFL, so that’s not really comparable to sports where there is. Not sure about NBA. But I’m pretty sure the Olympics doesn’t allow women to compete in men’s divisions.
Rolfe
Adult human female
It's in the CAS report. 46XY. And since there's apparently no suggestion that her Y chromosome doesn't have a functional SRY gene, and her phenotypic appearance confirms she has a significant androgen response, that makes her biologically male.
There are two (main?) ways a 46XY genotype can produce a female foetus. One is CAIS, complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. Semenya quite obviously doesn't have that or she'd look like a black version of Hanne Gaby Odiele and lowering her testosterone wouldn't impact on her performance, which we know it does.
The other way is Swyer syndrome, where the Y chromosome does not have a functioning SRY gene. Again we know that Semenya doesn't have that because Swyer syndrome women also look like women and to be blunt, as The Athiest has already noted, Semenya looks like a man.
Nobody is disputing (or at least in my opinion nobody should dispute) that Semenya is legally and socially a woman, but she has a biologically male body.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Rolfe
Adult human female
This is so wrong in so many ways. First, as I said, intersex is an umbrella term for 40+ different conditions, not a category. Second, nearly all DSD people (the proper terminology) are unambiguously male or female in any case. Third, the minority who are ambiguous can be properly diagnosed by doing the right tests. Everybody is one or the other.
I actually agree that it's a bad idea to say, "we'll let you compete as a woman but only if you take these drugs," but you have to realise what you're saying. You're saying that biologically male people shouldn't be allowed to compete in women's events. No they shouldn't. But the trans lobby insists that they must be allowed, and since this has been conceded, it's necessary to mandate that drugs are taken. I think this is a horrendous decision, but there it is.
If it weren't the case that males are now allowed to compete in women's events, Caster Semenya would have been disqualified as soon as her genotype was known. But since they are allowed, with restrictions, she has to be allowed too. But she also has to be subject to the same restrictions, hence the drugs. You can't have it both ways.
Nobody is ever going to say to anyone, "you are a freak", so that's a straw man. As she is biologically male she would be entirely free to compete in the men's classes. The trouble is that her performance is poor for a man. If she'd been brought up as a boy (as might have happened if her family had had better access to healthcare when she was born) she would never have taken up athletics in the first place.
But you know, this situation happened sometimes, in the days when you had to be tested as genetically female in order to compete as a woman. A number of promising girls quietly retired about the time of puberty because it was realised they wouldn't qualify for the women's competitions. Nobody said "you are a freak" to them, though. Or I bloody well hope they didn't.
The decision doesn't depend on genitalia. I don't know if she has a vagina or not, although I suspect not. That's irrelevant. She has undescended testicles, but then CAIS women have abdominal testes too so that isn't the deal-breaker. She has a functioning SRY gene and significant androgen response. These are the criteria and by these criteria she's a male with a disadvantage, not a female with an advantage.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
The Atheist
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I'm going to say she probably has. Her father was interviewed early on in the whole saga, and his comment was simply that having changed her nappy lots of times, she was a girl.
Seemed like a reliable source.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Nobody probes a little girl's genitals to see if she has a patent vagina or not. That's sick. We know that as a baby she appeared superficially to be a girl, or at least much more like a girl than a boy. That tells us nothing about internal genitalia though.
Just to clarify, in case there's any misunderstanding here. It is impossible to see a little girl's vagina when changing her nappy.
Just to clarify, in case there's any misunderstanding here. It is impossible to see a little girl's vagina when changing her nappy.
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Meadmaker
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Terminology and all that. For some reason we say "vagina" to refer to all that girl stuff, despite the fact that the vagina is the part we can't see.
My take on this whole situation is based on my firm belief that the current trend to allow transgenders, i.e. people who grew up male, to compete as women is utterly daft, hormones or no hormones, surgery or no surgery. Once that happens, and it has in many places and many sports, then there's no way to make sense out of any policy, but at least the testosterone concentration test is consistent.
Rolfe
Adult human female
You may use words like that but I certainly don't. The claim was made earlier that someone who has a vagina is female. That in itself is not correct, and on top of that, we simply don't know if Caster Semenya was born with a vagina or not. There is a fairly high chance she wasn't.
If you're now going to move the goal-posts and say, well we didn't mean a vagina anyway, we meant something that kind of looked like a vulva, that's even less helpful. Even 5-alpha reductase deficiency boys have something that looks like a vulva when they're born, but they most certainly don't have a vagina and they grow up into more-or-less normal men.
The fact is that a baby born with an obvious penis, and by that I mean something the baby can pee out of, not an enlarged clitoris, is (almost?) certainly a boy. However a baby with nothing terribly obvious but some folds that might be a vulva isn't necessarily a girl in quite the same way. She's probably a girl because DSDs are fairly unusual in the grand scheme of things, but it's entirely possible for an essentially male infant with a DSD to look like a girl at birth.
The fact that Caster Semenya was "assigned female" when she was born really doesn't tell us anything in the light of what has transpired since.
While I agree with you that allowing biological males who have gone through male puberty (and in a number of cases actually competed as males in male events) to compete in women's events is utterly insane, it's only of peripheral relevance to the Semenya issue.
Testosterone is by no means the only thing that gives males the edge that they have in athletics. They have larger hearts and larger lung capacity relative to their size. They have more fast twitch muscle fibres, they have proportionately longer legs and arms, and they have more favourable pelvic anatomy for running and cycling. (Also more favourable shoulder anatomy for throwing things.) There is also a muscle memory effect, so that someone who has trained for a sport as a male will retain this advantage even when testosterone concentrations are lower. For all these reasons, even if you could reduce testosterone right down to female levels, it would still be grossly unfair to let men compete in women's events.
One thing that underlines this is the position of CAIS women in athletics. If testosterone was the be-all and end-all, you'd think they'd be nowhere, because they have zero effective testosterone, less even than a normal woman. But when sex testing was first introduced into athletics it was found that CAIS women were disproportionately represented among elite athletes. The slightly virilised body shape, which is barely noticeable, seems to be enough to confer a slight edge.
However testosterone is indeed a major factor. Witness the huge effect it had when it was used by the East Germans as an anabolic steroid to catapult their women athletes to the top of the medals tables in the 1970s and 1980s. Witness the very significant effect in the opposite direction when a male athlete suppresses his testosterone concentration when "transitioning". (Same thing happened to Caster Semenya when she had to suppress her testosterone.)
Normal female testosterone concentrations are around 0.5 nmol/l and seldom go above 2 nmol/l. However when the athletics authorities decided to let men compete they set the upper limit at 10 nmol/l. This was done so as not to penalise women with unusually high testosterone concentrations, but in practice it allowed the men to maintain concentrations enormously greater than those the vast majority of female athletes have. It's a lousy decision.
The wrangling that followed that was predictable. Should women be allowed to dope up to the level that males are permitted to have? Um, no? So they decided to bring the limit down to 5 nmol/l. This is what caught Semenya, and she tried to get an exemption on the grounds of being actually female. Unfortunately for her she isn't female in that sense, so her case was rejected.
Now we're being told that a bona fide XX female athlete will not have to suppress her testosterone below 5 nmol/l. Is this fair? God alone knows. Normal females still aren't allowed to dope themselves up to 5 nmol/l though. And meanwhile the men carry right on with the advantages built up over many years of having high testosterone, while (certainly at one time) a woman would be banned for life if she had ever taken the stuff. In addition, due to the limits of the testing regimen, they can quite easily fail to suppress for much of the time as they train, and only take the anti-androgens when they need to, to pass the blood tests.
It's a complete mess. Oh, and did I forget that some of the anti-androgens, notably spironolactone, are banned substances in their own right, but somehow spironolactone has to be allowed for men who are competing as women, because they have to take it to get their testosterone down. And to cap it all, does anyone think it's good for a man's body to mess with his natural hormone balance like this. No it isn't, and they're storing up trouble for themselves later.
All this utter and complete shambolic mess, all because men who want to be treated as if they were women insist on competing in women's sports. Instead of looking at the situation and saying, sorry, this isn't possible, sports are segregated by the sex of the body not by the feelings in your head, the sporting authorities caved in like a sand-hole in a tsunami and said certainly, but we'll try to rein in your natural advantages just a little bit.
It has, arguably, benefited Caster Semenya. She fails the genetic/hormonal tests to be considered female-bodied, and 40 years ago there would have been no question of her being allowed to compete in women's events. However, since actual men are now allowed to compete, obviously she must be allowed under the same rules.
Nevertheless her challenge to these rules has thrown up another anomaly. Now it has been confirmed that while a male-bodied athlete must conform to the testosterone-lowering requirements (and this includes Semenya), a female-bodied athlete (e.g. with adrenal hyperplasia) does not. So we're back to having to make a clear distinction between the biological sexes again.
So although the trans minefield is only of peripheral relevance to the Semenya issue, it is the thing that has allowed her to compete in women's events, and she is the case that has highlighted the glaring anomalies even more clearly.
Now of course we have Rachel McKinnon insisting that natural testosterone doesn't confer an advantage, and it's unfair to make him lower his testosterone at all. He's a woman in his head and that's enough to make his whole body female, testicles and all, and he should be allowed to compete as a woman with all his womanly androgens in their natural state. (He's currently turning back-flips to try to say that although reducing natural testosterone confers a disadvantage, having it in the first place is not an advantage. I'm not sure what his PhD is in but it ain't logic.)
I think this entire circus is going to disappear up its own backside in the not too distant future, but not before it has messed with a lot of people's lives.
The Atheist
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How many daughters have you had? I ask, because that's so completely wrong it's at massive odds with your previous, informative posts.
Little girls defecate in their nappies, and when they get old enough to sit up, the faeces gets squashed into the vagina. Most sensible parents wipe it out with designated cloths.
I would have said it's impossible to change nappies and not see the vagina.
That isn't the vagina, it's the arrangement of labia that form the outer part of the vulva. Changing a baby girl's nappies should not get you involved with the vagina, which is internal.
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