South African runner Caster Semenya must take testosterone-suppressing drugs in order to continue to compete in women’s track events. That’s the ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which acknowledges the decision discriminates, but is better than any conceivable alternative solution. Semenya, and others, say the ruling discriminates against people who are just trying to be who they really are.
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Ruling: High-Testosterone ‘Woman’ Must Take Drugs to Compete
South African runner Caster Semenya must take testosterone-suppressing drugs in order to continue to compete in women’s track events. That’s the ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which acknowledges the decision discriminates, but is better than any conceivable alternative solution. Semenya, and others, say the ruling discriminates against people who are just trying to be who they really are.
25 replies on “Ruling: High-Testosterone ‘Woman’ Must Take Drugs to Compete”
I realize I am terribly late coming to this discussion, but there is a question which has been haunting me: will nobody do anything to make amends for all those Russian “women” denied the right to compete in the Olympics all those years ago, their aspirations crushed by transphobic DNA testing?
Bill, might what you call a “birth defect” just be one of those “unfair” genetic advantages an otherwise undisputed male or female has over any other undisputed male or female. We all are subject to the natural ‘unfairness’ of our inherited traits. I say we keep it to the binary XX/XY standard. The ‘exceptions’ will only prove the rule
Instead of calling them Men’s sports and Women’s sports, let’s just call them XX sports leagues and XY sports leagues and be done with this subjective horsesh*t
Why aren’t the Regressives happy to award the trans-athlete a participation trophy before the event and call it a day? I thought competition was baaaaad?
The whole transgender dynamic along with the lefts backing of homosexuality, paedophilia, abortion, etc is due to the fact that they generally believe in both over population and zero sum economics.
If the world is overpopulated you want as many people out of the reproductive population as possible so you popularise castration and sterilisation with transgender sex change, which for males just makes them eunuchs.
You push homosexuality because most homosexuals don’t have kids. [The left got very bitter and twisted when lesbians started having babies with turkey basters and donated semen from homosexual males.]
You push paedophilia or ‘lowering the age of consent’ because young girls don’t have babies or if they do, and live, they generally can’t have a second because permanent damage is done.
They have backed the legalisation of incest because it produces still births or sterile and very damaged off spring.
Bestiality and robot sex is backed, Canada, because its ‘sex’ with out reproduction.
Advocacy of abortion and euthanasia is the least well hidden aspect of this.
The dominant underlying economic idea of the left is that there is a fixed pool of world resources. Labour makes it useful and moves it a round but can’t increase it. Entrepreneurs are seen as those who steals or diverts resource and passes it off as new produced resource. There is a big envy factor in socialism but that does not explain rich successful entrepreneur leftists like the ones in silicon valley. They genuinely believe in limited sum economics and so really believe they have ripped someone off somewhere. Their political and charity activity is about assuaging the guilt.
When socialism fails they point to either embargoes or military build up as sabotage of the socialist operation. This is what they are saying about Venezuela. Libertarians join in using this argument. They say if we traded freely with a socialist country we would kill off that excuse. This has been tried in Africa and Asia; the free traders eventually get ripped of by the socialists and leave or get arrested and killed.
Its is really quite a coherent pattern of behaviour.
On the topic of handicapping people; does anyone recall the short story where everyone had sufficient “handicap” to make everyone average? The father wore a helmet that made a loud sound to temper his smarts, the dancers wore metal so they couldn’t jump so well. Etc. One character breaks free from his handicaps and is doing everything well until the woman from the “state” shoots him. That’s what I thought Scott was going to bring up and now I can’t think of the story.
Anyway, we have spent the last 50 years with anti-doping agencies trying to get the illegal doping out of sports. The “East German women’s weight lifting team” was a punch line. Now we are going to kill it all.
I am not sure that killing off sport is not the goal for a bunch of people who can’t actually compete. These are the same people who didn’t want to keep score for their kids because they were embarrassed by losing when they were kids.
BTW – this is not hard, Y chromosome = competes with the men. Not good enough. Oh well. Most of us aren’t.
Are you referring to the Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron”? I read that as a kid in the early 70’s. I’m sure that even at that tender age, the effect was strong enough to set me on the path to conservatism. I saw the evil.
Yes, thank you Barbara. Tried a few searches and couldn’t find it. That should be mandatory reading in high school.
It is actually available on the interwebs as a PDF.
http://wordfight.org/bnw/bnw-unit_packet.pdf
What an unfortunate name she has…
Actually the name predates the term semen and both have the same linguistic root. The name also indicates that she is not full blood african. Its a Mediterranean name. This all started when Caster Semenya was excluded from boys races as a child and teen.
A rare condition can result in someone having XXY instead of XX or XY. It sounds to me that may be the case here (but, of course, we can’t know for sure from the position we’re in). Should people with that condition (super rare though it is) be forever prohibited from any kind of professional athletic competition? Should they be required to compete in the men’s competition? Maybe we should not have a standard of XX or XY, but just the Y. The standard could be that anyone with the presence of a Y chromosome gets classed in the men’s group for purposes of athletics.
Although I could understand why that may be a hard sell, as many of those people appear completely female and only discover that they are XXY when they fail to get a period during puberty or have trouble getting pregnant as adults.
Your argument, I think, is getting to the heart of the matter
Just playing devil’s advocate: Lance Armstrong has an abnormally large heart. This could rightly be considered a birth defect, but it benefits him in terms of circulation and oxygenation of his muscles.
Should he be prohibited from competing because he tests way outside of the normal range for a human being?
What if the basketball woman in Scott’s example wasn’t a natural 8 foot tall, but instead she was 9 feet tall because she has Marfan Syndrome or hyperplasia of the pituitary gland?
Also, Michael Phelps has unusually large lungs in a large and long torso with comparatively short legs and big feet. Secretariat also had an abnormally large heart. The truth is that every elite athlete is a statistical outlier by definition. So while I believe that ultimately, Bill is right (life’s not fair, get over it), I also have to wonder why some statistical outliers are okay and others aren’t. Not arguing specifically about intersex or trans (I think the only rational way to make sex-based awards, whether in sports, acting, or any other competition where men and women’s differences warrant separate categories, is to go by strict chromosonal definitions, those few who don’t fit it are out of luck), but rather arguing that we need to think carefully and rationally about where and why we draw those lines.
Everyone is missing a key point.
The dispute concerns a PRIVATE sports authority which has the right to set its own regulations as to this issue or all others. This is not a government making the decision.
If this authority, or any other group, wants to create a third competition category; fine.
Maybe there should be a third division: Male, Female, and Miscellaneous.
That miscellaneous category is what several groups have been calling for since 1972. Its why I used the term morons for the sporting bodies. The real solution has been rejected. Today the main advocates for the third race category are blade runners who want to run with normal runners. The fact that they featured in the last Olympics as a show sport means they are making progress. An Open race category would have Men, women, intersex, blade runners and cyborgs (Yes we have a runner with an artificial heart that’s excluded). Generally most able bodied men would not bother running in the open or miscellaneous class. It means more races and more medallions but that is possible.
Intersectionality stepping all over itself. I get the whole intersex argument, but that population is still too rare for it to be a main factor in determining who should compete in which category. To use Bill’s comment – they’re an outlier from the standard deviation and outside of the bell curve.
The handicaps will be determined by the robot umpires.
Bill’s right – even if you create “equality” of men and women by artificially manipulating hormone levels, you still have the issue of “sexual dimorphism”… the natural evolutionary tendency (in Homo sapiens and some other animals and plants) for one sex to be bigger, stronger, differently colored (such as many birds) than the other. Obviously there is some overlap… not EVERY man is taller/bigger than EVERY woman. But roughly 90% are. So even if you level the playing field hormonally, men would still (usually) have an unfair competitive advantage.
Do some research guys, she is known intersex. Multiple sex chromosomes. 3 or more. That has been known since 2009 (when confidential sporting body DNA tests leaked), XXY or (YYX correction YYXX). She is and never was either male or female. This is a battle to get the sporting bodies to deal with intersex coherently which the morons at the Olympic committees and the international sport bodies have failed to do.
I know two intersex people, I know an anti-transvestite transvestite that I suspect is intersex, she is a conservative, she has not confided in me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya#2009_sex_verification_tests_and_controversy
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/the-humiliating-practice-of-sex-testing-female-athletes.html
This subject of “trans” is becoming a very serious debate if not just a serious social problem, especially in California. I have a friend who has done a great deal of research on this topic (in CA) and the re-orientation of schools, teaching sex education to children in kindergarten, allowing gender “reassignment” in primary school, just wrong. Meanwhile, the environment is being bombarded by high levels of toxins, including estrogens in plastic water bottles, glyphosate that masks as glycine, and so on, so it should not be a surprise if there is an “organic” reason for all this gender confusion.
Until we can start to control these toxins in our environment, I go with Bill’s concept: females have two X chromosomes. Period.
Bills test fails where the person is intersex and tests out as XXY or XXYY or XXXY for butch girls and tomboys. For feminine looking males YYX or YYYX or YYYYXX. We have know the genetics is not binary for 35 years. We must not fall into the trap of confusing intersex with transgender. That’s what the left wants us to do. The gender assignment surgery was developed to fix bad intersex cases. It was unavailable in South Africa were Caster Semenya was born. Some of the researchers that developed gender reassignment surgery are fundamental opponents of using it on non intersex kids.
Exactly: the Left always wants to use the outlier to change the rules for everyone else, so they want us to conflate intersex and “trans-sex.” (Just like using the tiny number of rape or incest victim mothers to justify abortion on demand for everyone, another illogical emotional appeal which should have ended when the first person born from rape stood up and said, “I’m a real person and I’m glad my mother didn’t abort me.”)
Ultimately Bill is right, though. Life’s not fair.
One reason why intersex is on the rise is that generally there is bad urinary tract damage or missing urinary tracts altogether. They died of urinary tract disorders or kidney failure before reaching 2. Doctors can fix that now and so more survive.