Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

I agree that the observation that Khelif is not behaving as anyone would be expected to behave who had believed himself to be or been treated as a Moslem woman in rural Algeria for any significant length of time would ever behave, nor is he being treated by those around him as if they believe he is a Moslem woman is off topic, and yes indeed a conspiracy theory, so I'll leave it. Without digging up the pictures of the actual Algerian woman sparring in her black hijab.

It's possible we may never find out. But I'd put more money on his being a normal man than on his having 5ARD or similar.
 
We get it!
Women living in Muslim countries shouldn't behave in ways that don't conform with the ways women are supposed to behave in Muslim countries.
If they do, something is obviously wrong with them. It's unnatural.
Imane Khelif, the Olympic gold-medal-winning boxer from Algeria who was targeted with disgusting, defamatory attacks from some of the internet's and the world's most powerful people, including Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JK Rowling, Logan Paul, and countless others, is now going on the offensive and taking these bigots to court for spreading the dangerous lies and disrespecting her core identity.
Bigots Get Blindsided by Boxer's Refusal to Cave to Their Lies (TYT Sports, Aug 15, 2024 - 11:43 min.)
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Awful! What's next? Will chicks without dicks pose as male pole vaulters and get an undeserved advantage because their genitals don't knock down the bar?
Is pole vaulting even something real women would do? I know a lot of women, and there's not one single pole vaulter among them. I've asked them, just to make sure.
Suspicious, isn't it?
 
I don't think there's anything wrong with him. That's kind of the point.

Critical thinking? I could weep.
 
dann said:
We get it!
Women living in Muslim countries shouldn't behave in ways that don't conform with the ways women are supposed to behave in Muslim countries.
If they do, something is obviously wrong with them. It's unnatural.


Awful! What's next? Will chicks without dicks pose as male pole vaulters and get an undeserved advantage because their genitals don't knock down the bar?
Is pole vaulting even something real women would do? I know a lot of women, and there's not one single pole vaulter among them. I've asked them, just to make sure.
Suspicious, isn't it?
Click to expand...
I am puzzled by this post.
Dann, are you suggesting Imane Khelife is female?
 
I think she probably is, but it is not a question I am really interested in. I don't give a **** what kind of genitals or chromosomes she has. The French pole vaulter could be a woman with a massive strap-on for all I care.
I am entirely uninterested in sports, which is why I have focussed exclusively on the super-spreader aspect of the Paris Olympics.

I am just poking fun at people's arguments for her not being a woman in a Muslim country and the norms they want Muslim women to live up to in order for them to be recognized as women.

By the way, I know nothing about women in Algeria other than what I just read on Wikipedia, but based on that, I don't think it can be argued that because Algeria is a Muslim country women are expected to ... whatever.
Muslim countries aren't all alike. Neither are women. Or Muslim women.
 
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dann said:
I am entirely uninterested in sports, which is why I have focussed exclusively on the super-spreader aspect of the Paris Olympics.
Click to expand...

This urgent Covid-2019 message was brought to you by a stellar poster in 2024.
 
dann said:
I think she probably is, but it is not a question I am really interested in. I don't give a **** what kind of genitals or chromosomes she has. The French pole vaulter could be a woman with a massive strap-on for all I care.
I am entirely uninterested in sports, which is why I have focussed exclusively on the super-spreader aspect of the Paris Olympics.

I am just poking fun at people's arguments for her not being a woman in a Muslim country and the norms they want Muslim women to live up to in order for them to be recognized as women.

By the way, I know nothing about women in Algeria other than what I just read on Wikipedia, but based on that, I don't think it can be argued that because Algeria is a Muslim country women are expected to ... whatever.
Muslim countries aren't all alike. Neither are women. Or Muslim women.
Click to expand...
This individual is male.
The BBC have finally crafted a narrative that confirms this, and at that point it is game over, for the n'th iteration.
Sebastian Coe says I have daughters, I plan to fix this by standing for leader of the IOC.
This Imane Khelife is doing it to lift his family from poverty.
But he has almost killed young women in that pursuit.
 
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Samson said:
This individual is male.
The BBC have finally crafted a narrative that confirms this, and at that point it is game over, for the n'th iteration.
Sebastian Coe says I have daughters, I plan to fix this by standing for leader of the IOC.
This Imane Khelife is doing it to lift his family from poverty.
But he has almost killed young women in that pursuit.
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Link please? The latest BBC news story searching "Khelif" refers to her as female.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2njjm4e2po
 
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OK, this suit/complaint situation apparently involves a law enforcement agency & prosecutors in Paris which have acknowledged that they've received it and will do what they always do with such filings. It's a way of asking them to investigate an alleged crime. That at least clears up the confusion created by calling it a "suit" and a "complaint".

But I expect practically nothing to come from it.

First, I don't know whether TYT ever gets around to this in their hysterics about it or not, but, as I expected & said in my last post, NBC's calmer & more level-headed report on it includes an expert commenting that the first challenge it faces is jurisdiction. It's a French legal matter and none of the people who are referred to in English reports about it are French. (Maybe they'll end up prosecuting some French people whom we Englishers have never heard of.)

Also, I note that no reports on the subject have said that the crime being alleged is stating/thinking that Khelif isn't a woman (which I've seen no indication is illegal in France). It seems that the crime being alleged is being extra-mean about it. That means Khelif & prosecutors won't be expected to prove Khelif's sex in court. If French law enforcement even decides to actually prosecute somebody at all, they'll just be expected to prove how mean the defendant(s) was/were about it.
 
A simple DNA test would solve this legal action quickly.
One way or the other.

I bet khelifs lawyer won't suggest that at all.
 
Aber said:
There's a long piece that does not come to an explicit conclusion, but shows all the building blocks.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlr8gp813ko
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Thanks. That was an interesting read. As you say no explicit conclusion. I think one interesting bit is the mention of "males who have XX chromosomes" and later "females with a DSD known as androgen insensitivity syndrome have XY chromosomes; " which confirms my view that I don't know enough.
 
I think Dr Hefferman is being quite obfuscatory there. He is conflating female XY conditions such as Swyer's and CAIS with male XY conditions such as 5ARD, which is not helpful. I believe the 33-year-old patient he referred to had CAIS, which has nothing to do with the fully virilised conditions that are causing the controversy.

He also refers to not knowing if male 46XY DSDs have as great an advantage as normal males. They probably haven't, but that isn't the point. They still have a very significant advantage over females, as the 800 metres podium at Rio amply demonstrated. Woman's events are not a consolation prize for slightly impaired men.

He then goes on to point out that simple XY screening isn't sufficient - which is something Emma Hilton has also been absolutely clear about - and that further testing may be required. Emma lays this out very clearly, and none of the additional testing is invasive, but he talks about measuring breast and clitoris size, for pity's sake. To my mind this is all designed to make it appear that returning to sex testing for women's athletics would require adolescent girls (perhaps all of them) to be subjected to horrendous intimate examinations, when nothing could be further from the truth.

It's actually quite simple, as Emma describes. (I can't find it now as I'm locked out of Twitter by a technical issue I'll have to sort out.) First-line screening could be by checking XY/XX chromosome complement, but it's probably easiest just to go straight to screening for the SRY gene - as was actually being done until 1999.

Anyone without an SRY gene is in, it's that simple. And any girl who has started her periods knows for certain she does not have an SRY gene, so it's not exactly stressful. (Any girl who hasn't should probably be advised to get herself checked over anyway, it could be something as simple as over-training.)

What do you do with people who have an SRY gene but are presenting as female? Testosterone concentration is the obvious divider. There is no overlap between male and female levels of testosterone and one could conceivably use that as the screening test, except that it's way too easy to manipulate. Men can take drugs to lower their testosterone into the female range. So you'd want some way to be sure that the athlete is not doing that, but if that's possible then female testosterone concentration and you're in, male testosterone and you're out.

ETA: Sorry, typing too fast there, I left out about CAIS women, who have both the SRY gene and high testosterone, but lack the ability to respond to the testosterone. There is some controversy about this, much of it semantics, with people insisting on referring to these women as male. Nevertheless, this is not about CAIS. Women with CAIS are not androgenised as the athletes under discussion obviously are. If a girl is discovered to have probable CAIS by athletics screening then this is not a trivial in/out issue, it's a significant health condition and she needs to be properly diagnosed by a specialist for her own sake. And really, better sooner than later.

Nobody is going to need their breasts or their clitoris measured, or the amount of body hair or the depth of their voice, to see if they're allowed to enter the girls' races, it's ridiculous. It's pure scaremongering.

Obviously anomalous results have to be handled carefully. A few people may be getting a diagnosis that's a shock to them, even if it's CAIS or Swyer's. But the point that's being made is that this should be done once in a lifetime at the age of about 14, before anyone is anywhere close to the big time in athletics or has dedicated years to making a career of it. Nobody would find themselves in the sort of limelight Castor Semenya or Iman Khelif have had shone on them. Handled right, these children will get the medical and psychological care they need to deal with their medical issues, and supported to go on to the life pathway they choose. It's just that the ones with SRY and high testosterone won't be able to choose women's athletics.

The article is also obfuscatory about what exactly has been found in Khelif and Lin. Both have definitely been found to have XY chromosomes, twice - in 2022 and 2023. There are even images of the karyotype results online for crying out loud. Both have also been found to have high testosterone concentrations in different tests carried out under different circumstances. (Normal dope testing involves measuring testosterone, though it's not entirely clear what is then done about that.)

So they're both male. There is no question of Swyer's or CAIS in either of them. In fact you only have to look at them to see they're visibly virilised, and make an extremely educated guess as to what their testosterone is doing. Women with Swyer's and CAIS don't look like men, and these two do.

We're simply back to the question of whether being male or female should mean what it says on the tin, or whether you get to present a passport with an F marker (easily obtainable on demand in many countries) or a picture of a little girl with ribbons in her hair and cry about how you ought to be allowed to punch women in the face.
 
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Wudang said:
Thanks. That was an interesting read. As you say no explicit conclusion. I think one interesting bit is the mention of "males who have XX chromosomes" and later "females with a DSD known as androgen insensitivity syndrome have XY chromosomes; " which confirms my view that I don't know enough.
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As I said, he's being deliberately obfuscatory. Males with XX chromosomes (de la Chapelle's syndrome) aren't even going to be involved in this, as they're men, and we're not going to be sex testing the entrants into the men's events. Most of them don't even know they have the condition, at least in their early lives, and aren't going to be entering the girls' races in the first place. Most of them have the SRY gene (just not on a Y chromosome) and those in which it isn't evident on normal sampling obviously have tissue with active copies of the gene somewhere, or they wouldn't be men. He's only bringing this in to confuse people and prevent straightforward thinking.

The reference to "females with a DSD known as androgen insensitivity syndrome have XY chromosomes" is to CAIS, and that is a diagnosable condition, see edited post above. There is some controversy about this condition, but on the whole there seems to be agreement that they shouldn't be excluded from women's events, and they are not the topic on the card, which is men with both the SRY gene and androgen sensitivity.

It's not that complicated, and most of the smoke and mirrors seems to be generated by people who want to obfuscate the issue in such a way that feelings and gender identity become more important than actual biological reality, even in sporting categories.
 
To simplify, screening should be:
- XY gene?
- do they produce testosterone?
- can their body use testosterone?

Therefore as I understand the consensus - Female category therefore excludes XY genes, except for the special case where their body does not produce male levels of testosterone, or cannot use testosterone.

Rolfe can probably put numbers on the prevalence of each category.
 
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