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Cont: Trans Women are not Women II: The Bath Of Khan

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In the meantime it seems Caster Semenya (only her, not other XY athletes still covered by hyperandrogenisation rules) is free to compete in IAAF events unimpeded (apparently she used oral contraceptives to comply previously which was one of the allowed doping methods to lower T-level) until Switzerland's supreme court gets together another team to rule on the case.

I read that she's in a Diamond League event in California in a week, though oddly the W800m has a suppressed entries list. There are only seven meetings containing the 800 in the 2019 season in this league. Probably she will be able to get into the remaining three after that one in Birmingham (UK) Paris and Brussels by September. Semenya won one (and a 1000m) in 2018 before the rule change.
 
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mumblethrax said:
Because there's a plausible evolutionary account for neuroanatomical basis of gender identity. We haven't had teapots (or western beauty standards, or apache helicopters, or whatever else people wish to come up with) long enough for that to be the case.
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Can you describe what you mean by "gender identity"? I don't have one myself.

I'm not aware of any "plausible evolutionary account for neuroanatomical basis" for this mysterious inner essence, either.
 
Francesca R said:
FWIW that bit isn't a response to anything I wrote (and kinda looks like it is)
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No, sorry, it was a response to a completely different post which I quoted without filling in the name of the poster - who was Mumblethrax in fact. I added it rather than making a separate post. I can see it's misleading, sorry about that.
 
Francesca R said:
Semenya's (financially-incentivised) handlers could have thought of that a decade ago instead of pushing her into championship mid-distance competition, submitting her to testing without telling her much of anything about it, and running her into a collision with just about the only authorities where clinical biology rules and personality can go whistle.

But I think perhaps they opted not to bother. If anyone has been guilty of the most extreme insensitivity to DSD and gender ID affected trauma it is probably them. Way to dismantle the sensibility of someone who otherwise seems to have had no external issue whatsoever impacting her ability to live socially and legally as female.

The CAS arbitration in full (except it isn't) is here PDF 163pages
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Exactly this.

I can't honestly tell whether Semenya herself is really as hurt and devastated as she makes out, or whether it's a careful act to attract sympathy. Either way, hurt feelings don't change biological reality. Also, either way, she has been shamefully used, and the primary responsibility lies with the IAAF and its stupid rule-change 20 years ago to allow anyone brought up as a girl to compete in women's events.

1948 was a different time. Diagnostic techniques were nothing like as advanced as they are now, and nobody could have had any clue that "Erika" Schinneger was actually 46XY. The structure of DNA was only discovered in 1953! She was brought up as a girl in absolute good faith and became women's downhill skiing champion in 1966 in absolute good faith.

Fast forward to 1968 and DNA and the genetic code have been cracked. The Olympics are worried that some countries are sneaking men into the women's events so they institute sex testing, and lo and behold, Erika turns up what must have been pretty much the identical results to Caster. She was already 20 and at the top of the sport. This was obviously pretty rough for her, but nobody was prepared to sweep away the rules just because Erika's feelings were hurt. Indeed, her feelings didn't come into it at all.

For the next 30 years there were no incentives to nurture male-bodied "girls" with ambiguous genitalia, because the sex testing was going to catch them. There are various stories of promising juniors quietly retiring in their mid-teens due to "injury", and gossip that testing had actually shown them to be XY. Rules being rules, you'd think the incentive was to identify these youngsters as early as possible to minimise the psychological distress.

But that didn't always happen, especially in third-world countries. The lack of any mandatory testing for juniors allowed doubtful competitors to progress to senior level and the distress that results when somoene realises her dreams of athletics fame and fortune are in tatters must be extreme. This was handled insensitively and I believe one person committed suicide. And this is where the accusations of racism start to come in, because it tends to be the third-world countries where children with ambiguous genitalia aren't investigated in infancy.

To my mind the best approach would have been to mandate testing at junior level for anyone on track for the big league. Test them all - a simple karyotype test doesn't cost much and the vast majority of girls who are phenotypically female and 46XX won't need anything else. Doubtful cases could progress to more detailed testing. Do it when they're about 13 or 14 for preference and settle the matter. Then those with a disqualifying result can be counselled and helped into a different career or hobby before too much is invested in athletics.

But no, that didn't happen. Insted the IAAF were very badly advised by people pushing the human rights agenda and prioritising "fairness" to the tiny number of XY "girls" over fairness to the people the rules were devised to protect - people with actual female bodies. So they stopped the sex testing, declared that if your home state recognised you as female you were in, and just sat back to see what would happen.

And of course Caster Semenya happened. There were mutterings about her right back to when she was about 15, but nobody tested her then, all we got was vehement declarations that she was female. She herself has spoken about the repeated humiliation of having to pull down her panties and expose herself at meeting after meeting, to prove to suspicious officials that she wasn't a boy in disguise. That's a pretty unpleasant thing to do to any 15-year-old girl, never mind one who must already be conscious that her body isn't exactly in the middle of the normal distribution curve.

She was 19 and already in the big time before she was tested. The test results were concealed and the impression given was that she was a woman with adrenal hyperplasia. They just said that she had elevated teststerone concentrations, and she was female, so that's what I concluded, and that's what we were meant to conclude. But something else was leaked and I have to admit I didn't really run that part through my brain. It was leaked that she has testicles, not ovaries.

If you put all that together, it's obvious. Yes, there is a condition (CAIS) where women have (vestigial) internal testes, but Semenya quite obviously didn't have that. She is clearly androgen-responsive. Put "elevated testosterone", "androgen-responsive" and "internal testicles" together and you have a male, albeit one where PAIS has caused ambiguous female-looking external genitalia.

I don't know whether they actually told Semenya at the time or not, but I suspect they didn't. We're into the time when people wilfully ignore someone's biological sex in favour of affirming their "gender identity", and if you can tell a normal male transwoman that he's "really a woman" it's a no-brainer to keep telling Caster Semenya that she's "really female".

Since the rule change in about 2000 Caster wasn't going to be disqualified on account of being actually male, and the SA athletics authorities care far more about the medals than about the mental health and wellbeing of their athletes. So now we're into arguing about how to compensate for Semenya being a male who is allowed to compete in women's events. It turns out that she's pretty androgen-responsive, and that reducing her testosterone down closer to normal female concentrations seriously affects her speed.

She's been told for all these years that she's a woman and this high testosterone she has is a natural part of her womanhood. So obviously she resents having to suppress it, and at the same time the SA authorities are extremely keen that she should not have to suppress it, as they want these medals. So we're into this crocodile (or maybe not) tears act about hurt feelings, and to hell with the hurt feelings of the fastest XX girls who only get a look at the back of Semenya's heels.

This is absolutely poisonous. We know there are coaches scouting for intersex girls in the same category as Caster Semenya, for their medal-winning potential. Even if there are only a handful of them, and there seem to be three competing at the moment, that's enough to wipe out the careers of the top actual women.

And all this is feeding into the even more poisonous issue of the trans athletes. Normal 46XY men who decide that their laydee feelz mean that they're really female and should be able to compete in women's events. And the crazy wokebeards in charge are actually going along with this. At school and college level these boys don't even have to suppress their testosterone, they just race as they are. At senior level they do have to suppress their testosterone, but nowhere near down to normal female concentrations. And now we have Rachel McKinnon and others like him, insisting (just like Semenya) that as he has laydee feelz he is a woman and his body is female and it's outrageous to require him to suppress his natural feminine testosterone secreted by his natural feminine balls.

The way this is going, someone in authority is going to give in to this too, and women's events will be open to any man who's prepared to swear an oath to a JP that he intends to "live as a woman" from now on.

This is all completely freaking insane, and the sooner we get back to making the rules on the basis of actual biological SEX and dealing with hurt feelings the way hurt feelings should be dealt with (a hanky and a sympathetic arm round the shoulders), the better for everyone.
 
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Darat said:
A bit tongue in cheek but actually your user name is expressing a gender identity, using a name that in our culture is identified as a female name.
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I'm pretty sure that this isn't what people identifying themselves as transgender are talking about when they refer to their "gender identity", which is something inside them, not their label.
 
Rolfe said:
The way this is going, someone in authority is going to give in to this too, and women's events will be open to any man who's prepared to swear an oath to a JP that he intends to "live as a woman" from now on.
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I think there is a nontrivial likelihood that the Swiss judges will overrule the IAAF when they get around to it, suspending the rule against Semenya in the interim seems to be a bit indicative to me.

We have 1) the CAS admitting the rule is discriminatory, but using justification that is frightfully-out-of-date/transphobic to a movement still in its ascendancy, 2) the precedent of Semenya having been allowed to compete without anti-androgenising for years and 3) the whole tortuosly bizarre backwardness of official policy actually being prescribed hormone interference in order to qualify for athletics, rather than a reason to be disqualified from it, sanctioned and your reputation shredded.

I don't know this but I would have thought that even if the FSCOS sides with the lower ruling then Caster's lawyers will have leave to appeal to Strasbourg after that too.

I don't know how the International Association of Athletics Federations is run or whether it was "state-captured" in the past when making cack-handed decisions, only that it seems to be in the right now but quite possibly on the wrong side of the contemporaneous battle of ideas. If so, expect more of a string of DSD world champs.

Sha-carri Richardson remains the fastest woman in the world for now though (and nobody has beaten Flo-Jo's speed set years before any of today's elite was born)
 
And Flo-Jo was quite possibly not entirely without benefit of androgens herself, shall we say.

The whole thing is a complete nightmare. They need to understand that this is about biology not feelings in people's heads and work out a simple and testable definition of "female" and stick to it. We managed it a page or two back, it's not hard. Then insist on testing all juniors intending to progress to senior competitions and have a system of counselling and support in place for kids who get an disqualifying result.

It's either that or forget about separate women's events entirely.
 
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I am not aware of that controversy as far as my knowledge goes there has never been any evidence she (Flo-Jo) doped herself. Of course almost every winner attracts suspicion.
 
Francesca R said:
I am not aware of that controversy as far as my knowledge goes there has never been any evidence she (Flo-Jo) doped herself. Of course almost every winner attracts suspicion.
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I have read such suspicions. Of course they may be entirely unfounded.
 
Darat said:
A bit tongue in cheek but actually your user name is expressing a gender identity, using a name that in our culture is identified as a female name.
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If your name is your gender identity then transgender people wouldn't be changing their names.
 
Francesca R said:
I am not aware of that controversy as far as my knowledge goes there has never been any evidence she (Flo-Jo) doped herself. Of course almost every winner attracts suspicion.
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At a time when she was already a mature, seasoned athlete she suddenly trimmed about 0.5 off her best 100m time and about 0.6 off her best for 200m. Just prior to this there was a noticeable bulking up of her muscles and deepening of her voice. She abruptly retired after her record-breaking Olympic runs. This all strikes me as evidence.
 
Yeah, that's what the article I read was talking about. No proof, but certainly circumstantial evidence.

While testosterone is not the only factor influencing superior male performance, its effects on the female body are such that believe nobody who has gone through male puberty OR has ever taken exogenous testosterone should be eligible for women's events. Adrenal hyperplasia is a difficult one. The point is the effects are not entirely transitory. Yes Semenya slows down when she suppresses her testosterone, but there are other residuals.

The situation with CAIS women is so interesting. You'd think that someone with zero effective testosterone would come nowhere even in women's events, as normal women have some bioavailable testosterone. However CAIS women are enormously over-represented among elite athletes. The slight edge apparently conferred by their androgynous build (hip and shoulder angles and so on) is apparently enough to more than compensate for the lack of testosterone.

I suspect Flo-Jo was at it, latterly, and what we're seeing there is the effect of testosterone on an already top-class elite athlete. I think Semenya without the testosterone would have been nowhere near elite class from the get-go. She still has the male advantage of build and body shape, but take away most of the testosterone and she doesn't win.
 
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GlennB said:
This all strikes me as evidence.
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Except that none of it is. She was tested extensively during 1988 even though it was not mandatory. She retired to have a child. IIRC some teammate sold a splash to the press about her and also Carl Lewis taking hormones but also had no evidence and struck out.


Need a far higher standard of evidence than "suspicion". As you do for biological gender which is why rules are not enforced against Caster Semenya just because "she looks like a bloke" or "she's too quick"
 
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JihadJane said:
I'm not aware of any "plausible evolutionary account for neuroanatomical basis" for this mysterious inner essence, either.
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Depends on whether you believe human sexual dimorphismWP is the result of adaptation.
 
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