Interesting article regarding gender in the olympics...

[dawgstudent]

http://www.si.com/olympics/2016/08/11/caster-semenya-2016-rio-olympics-track-and-field

 

[ugabully]

It is super interesting. I agree with the guy at the end who points out the inconsistencies in the rules for transgender and intersex people. I think that there should be one blood level limit for all competitors and that women who are neither transgender or intersex should be allowed supplement with testosterone to meet it.

The present system basically allows two tiny segments of the competitive pool the advantages of steroids and denies that to others.

 

[patdog]

Interesting. You have to feel kind of bad for the 800m runner who is winning all the races, but gets all this negative attention. I think the 2011 rule is probably about the best way to handle this. Let them compete as a women, as long as their testosterone is below a certain level. It would be a ***** to enforce properly though.

 

[8dog]

Dont all olympians have a natural advantage over those who didnt make it? Usain bolt didnt get that fast by working hard.

 

[DerHntr]

We live in some very complex times when it comes to gender. I wonder if the NCAA will have to address these same issues soon. When a 7 foot trans guy is dunking on everyone for Tennessee women's basketball, will they be forced to into it?

Until this article, I always thought softball and basketball were the most obvious places where problems would occur. Smaller sports like track, tennis, swimming, etc. appear to be much more significant though.

 

[VillagepeopleDogs]

Would be a problem with a 7 footer during a dunk if his wang fell out and popped some chick in the side of the head. Would that be some sort of personal foul?

 

[Shmuley]

^^^ DS, probably needs to be put on the clock.

 

[VillagepeopleDogs]

Would that be the play clock or the game clock?

 

[ugabully]

Yeah, all Olympians are better than non-Olympians and especially gifted, but are you seriously suggesting that literally having some of the sex characteristics of a man which confer a competitive advantage but competing as a woman is the same as what nature gave Bolt?

And I think Bolt did work hard, but that some of it's God or nature given.

And if Bolt showed up with 10 times the testosterone of a normal guy does, he'd get flagged for steroids, I'm pretty sure.

 

[8dog]

Yep. I am. she just got an incredible natural gift.

 

[ugabully]

Do you feel the same way about transgender athletes who got the natural gift of being born the "wrong" gender compared to how they identify?

Do you think that Intersex athletes just get to pick whether they compete as men or women when they have characteristics of each or are there some limits to competitive natural gifts?

 

[8dog]

this is nothing like people who choose to change genders.

Maybe i judge what constitutes a male
Differently.

If my testosterone is measured low enough would i get to compete with females? I just dont know where the line is here.

 

[ugabully]

I'm not sure where the line is either, and I think things are just going to get weirder with sex and gender related issues.

I know that I feel bad for Semenya that this detracts from her accomplishment. I don't think she's doing anything to deliberately cheat, and I think she thinks of herself as a woman. But when she was required to keep her testosterone down, she was nowhere near as competitive. It makes it pretty clear that it's the extra testosterone that is her gift and it's a gift that other female athletes can't supplement. (ETA: actually she was still competitive; what she wasn't was as dominant.)

If I were making the rules, I think that I'd say women competitors had to be XX and that any sex specific hormones had to be within a clearly defined range. This would be a bummer for the intersex and trangender folks, but it would be clear and fair for the other 99 percent of folks. If testosterone didn't confer such an athletic advantage, I don't know that I'd care very much.

If I knew any transgender athletes or intersex period in real life, maybe I'd feel different about it.

 

[LTblows]

If we didn't define gender by clothes, appearance, attitudes, or actions but by chromosomes, it would make things a lot easier. XX competes with other XX, XY competes with other XY, and the tiny percentage of hermaphrodites can choose either. That would completely eliminate grey area in sports.

 

[wasabaka]

If we didn't define gender by clothes, appearance, attitudes, or actions but by chromosomes, it would make things a lot easier. XX competes with other XX, XY competes with other XY, and the tiny percentage of hermaphrodites can choose either. That would completely eliminate grey area in sports.

It isn't that simple. From an article about Caster in The New Yorker:

In normal human development, when a zygote has XY, or male, chromosomes, the SRY—sex-determining region Y—gene on the Y chromosome “instructs” the zygote’s protogonads to develop as testes, rather than as ovaries. The testes then produce testosterone, which issues a second set of developmental instructions: for a scrotal sac to develop and for the testes to descend into it, for a penis to grow, and so on. But the process can get derailed. A person can be born with one ovary and one testicle. The SRY gene can end up on an X chromosome. A person with a penis who thinks he is male can one day find out that he has a uterus and ovaries. “Then, there is chromosomal variability that is invisible,” Anne Fausto-Sterling, the author of “Sexing the Body,” told me. “You could go your whole life and never know.”

All sorts of things can happen, and do. An embryo that is chromosomally male but suffers from an enzyme deficiency that partially prevents it from “reading” testosterone can develop into a baby who appears female. Then, at puberty, the person’s testes will produce a rush of hormones and this time the body won’t need the enzyme (called 5-alpha-reductase) to successfully read the testosterone. The little girl will start to become hairier and more muscular. Her voice may deepen, and her testes may descend into what she thought were her labia. Her clitoris will grow into something like a penis. Is she still a girl? Was she ever?

If a chromosomally male embryo has androgen-insensitivity syndrome, or A.I.S., the cells’ receptors for testosterone, an androgen, are deaf to the testosterone’s instructions, and will thus develop the default external sexual characteristics of a female. An individual with androgen-insensitivity syndrome has XY chromosomes, a ******, and undescended testes, but her body develops without the ability to respond to the testosterone it produces. In fact, people with complete A.I.S. are less able to process testosterone than average women. Consequently, they tend to have exceptionally “smooth-skinned bodies with rounded hips and breasts and long limbs,” Dreger writes in “Hermaphrodites.”

People with incomplete A.I.S., on the other hand, could end up looking and sounding like Caster Semenya. Their bodies hear some of the instructions that the testosterone inside them is issuing. But that does not necessarily mean that they would have an athletic advantage.

So, according to your suggestion, Caster would be forced to compete with other XY athletes (males), even though she has female genitalia and has less than 1/3 the testosterone level of a typical Olympic male athlete. Sound fair?

Also, do some reading on the Wikipedia entry for Intersex. It lists 16 genetic anomalies, some of which occur in as few as 1 in 1,000 births. That should tell you that this issue can't be boiled down to whether someone simply has XX or XY chromosomes. It is also why the International Olympic Committee abandoned chromosome testing for gender in 1999 after 31 years of the practice.

 

[dawgdr]

So the thing is. In T fem(testicular feminization) you are missing an enzyme that makes u develop into a male. We all start embryologically as female. Dont tell Adam! Outside you are female. ****** is blind ended though. No uterus. But you should have your testicles removed. Standard treatment that she apparently hasnt had done. They are at icreased risk for malignancy in abdomen. so yeh. She should have to have those removed then be supplementes with estrogen if she wants to be a female. But you cant blame her for wanting to win.

 

[00Dawg]

Fair for whom? The people losing badly to her think she has an unfair advantage.

You have to have a black and white line. At the moment, it's either testosterone levels, which then opens the door to boosting or suppressing, or chromosomes, which results in folks getting offended.