Caster Semenya has lost appeal

A trait usually found in men? That's an understatement.

From a DailyMail article:

"Semenya, who was assigned the female gender at birth and was raised female, is actually believed to be intersex due a genetic condition which means she has both X and Y chromosomes, a trait usually found in men."

www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-8711163/amp/Caster-Semenya-loses-Swiss-Court-appeal-restriction-testosterone-levels-female-athletes.html

Trying to imagine myself having to put that in print with a straight face. Nooooope.

I remember when Caster Semenya first appeared on the athletics scene and one of her competitors was villifed as a bad loser because she said it seemed clear she was a man. I was googling to try to find out who that was (it was an Italian runner) and almost every article I found in the more mainstream press over the past ten or so years was full of wholehearted support for CS, painting a very sympathetic narrative and (inevitably) also comparing her to transgender athletes. And accusing her critics of using fake science and gatekeeping womanhood and all the usual buzzwords.

I had to find articles written for medical journals and athletics publications before I found even a hint of 'maybe all is not as it seems'.

I remember when I was younger and innocent feeling sorry for her, for the indignity of people saying she wasn't a woman, because I naively thought that no male would be so arrogant (or pathetic) as to compete against women. Now I just see an arrogant, entitled cheat.

But the media have access to the same Cas report and still report Semenya as “a woman with naturally high testosterone”. They weren’t complicit initially, but they’re complicit with the ongoing misunderstanding. It’s been over 12 months now in which time all major news organisations could have reported accurately.

I think it's not quite accurate to put all the blame on the media. Until the first appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2019, it was not actually known publicly which particular condition Caster Semenya has. Her appeal stemmed from an IAAF decision to introduce tests for androgen insensitivity. Before then, it was assumed that she was almost certainly intersex but not that she specifically had the 46 XY karyotype. There were a lot of threads on here at the time discussing this in detail.

All countries want to win Olympic medals and it has suited the South African athletics governing body to present her as a gender non conforming person disadvantaged by racist assumptions about what women look like. They were asked to withdraw her before the 2009 race so that her eligibility could be tested and decisions made in private but they refused.

I know much less about Margaret Wambui but Kenya is one of the countries with the highest number of athletes receiving sanctions because of doping. I can easily believe she was encouraged to take up the 800m when her talent was spotted in the hope she would become a medal winner. Elite athletes have to begin very young so she was unlikely to have deliberately decided to capitalise on her physical advantages herself.

That's why I can have sympathy for individuals while acknowledging that other women are disadvantaged by their competing.

If Semenya had grown up white in an affluent suburb of Cape Town, no way would this not have been diagnosed much sooner. Being poor and black and having limited access to health services meant Semenya got a long way before a diagnosis was made.

I am sure that there must have been some strong suspicions at least-this was a girl who was in her teens and showing no female development, not getting her periods and developing an increasingly androgenized body, Her poverty would certainly have formed a reason for turning a blind eye and pretending it was not happening since there was clearly a chance of turning her running into a career, and I can't blame her at all-I would have been tempted to do the same. I do feel very very bad for her. But I think the line has to be drawn or women's sports will lose their raison d'etre.

And it's about time that Caster - and any other biological males performing in women's sports - are stripped of any titles, medals and records, to be awarded to the rightful owners.

I have to add that it still seem to be a bit unusual to be reading something published in the New England Journal of Medicine that someone who runs and wins women's races may have a normal sperm count. Albeit with highly viscous semen and a low volume of ejaculate!

Is that article made up?

I tried googling it but I haven’t been able to find any interviews where CS describes herself as a man or uses male pronouns. Does anybody have a source for it?

Good result. Good to see there's at least one authority that won't stand for this bullshit.

Wiki probably unreliable.

This was published in the 'New England Journal of Medicine' and seems to have been written by researchers from Cornell. It is about paternity by intrauterine insemination using sperm from a man with 5 Androgen Reductase 2 Deficiency. Wonder what the difference from 1 is?

It doesn't seem on first glance to differ too much. Interestingly, it says the sperm counts from affected males can be normal but the semen is viscous and ejaculate can be low in volume. So maybe an assisted removal of sperm from testes again? In this case, the chappie with the condition successfully fathered a baby with his wife using his own sperm. Assisted reproduction.

However, a deficiency in dihy-drotestosterone production not only impairs differentiation of male external genitalia but also affects the development and secretory function of the prostate gland and seminal vesicles. 1,2,8-15 Consequently, affected adults have a rudimentary prostate and underdeveloped seminal vesicles, resulting in highly viscous semen and an extremely low volume of ejaculate, 8,16,17 although their sperm counts may be normal.

www.researchgate.net/publication/14136988_Paternity_by_Intrauterine_Insemination_with_Sperm_from_a_Man_with_5-Reductase-2_Deficiency

Haven’t RTFT but this link may be worth sharing again. I stopped feeling sorry for Caster when I realised it was known since 2009. There is a specific women’s category in order to highlight the talents of that group (not an exclusionary category) and in a contact sport there could be safety implications.

boysvswomen.com/

I have read somewhere that the 800 metres is a bit of sweet spot distance for natural advantage. The short sprints and the long distance need highly specific training. Obviously you need to train for middle distance but an average male will do relatively better on natural ability in the middle distance than the other distances which are more 'specialist'. That's not my theory, just something I read once.

What I object to is you referring to her as a man which is not how she describes herself.

Yes. It is how Semenya describes themself.

You are correct - why was this not news at the time?
The media are utterly complicit in covering this up.

It was news but only in a word of mouth way among ordinary people. The media stamped on it in exactly the same way as they and the woke screamed people down for pointing out that the Calais "child migrants" we took in a few years ago were mostly male and already using razors. The best the Guardian could do was a picture of a 16 year old boy. An adult male was put in a secondary school class and ended up harassing a 15 year girl but people were told they were a bunch of bigots for even questioning it. The parallels are striking. You must ignore the evidence of your own eyes and go along with the agenda or be cancelled as the emperor's new 'phobes.

I still don't know what the agenda actually is but I am noticing one overarching theme. If you point out a difference, a segregation, a boundary, you attract woke vitriol and condemnation.

Anything that aids the blurring or mixing of humans or human qualities is the agenda that is pushed.

So:

Segregation/Badness: pointing out men aren't women, pointing out that men aren't chldren, voting for political divides (Brexit), pointing out crimes associated with specific cultural groups (Rotherham, Cologne), wanting the tiniest of immigration controls into the UK, and wondering why the Royal Navy can't stop dinghies.

Mixing/Goodness: Pro-EU, open borders, pro trans, pro the quintupling of immigration into the UK, the BBC pretending 50% of the population is black when it's 5%, pro multiculturalism and hijabs on UK primary school girls, the primacy of gender identity, drag queen story time, sex education for toddlers down a dice game fetish rabbit hole.

It's ALL open society, open borders, no-boundaries-allowed, isn't it? Stirring us up into one amorphous mass so that we no longer have any allegiances and hence no lines in the behavioural sand. It's not divide and conquer, it's blend and conquer the indistinguishable mass while they're so confused they don't know their multicultural arse from their transgender elbow.

This is the pattern of gaslighting that I see.

It’s worth pointing out that Semenya was actually beaten in the 2012 Olympic 800m final: by a Russian who was doping.

But what I was getting at was - how do you decide in the more grey areas?

CS is not at all a grey area. She is genetically male XY, has internal testes, produces several times more testosterone than women, has a body modified by a testosterone puberty and presents as male off the track.

Top female athletes can't outrun high school boy athletes.

Yes, not even close.

Boy's 800m record 1:43.

Women's top list is heavily documented by Soviet era cheats, 12 of top 20 are 1970s/1980s Soviet/Cuban plus at least two are XY.

Men's list has no Eastern European 1970s/1980s.

Women's 800m World Championship 2019 (minus the XY people) was won in 1:58:04

A 13-year-old boy ran 1:56:41 against other 13 year old boys (well, they were a fair way behind him, so he would have won easily versus women)

Women's athletics was severely damaged and still damaged by 1970s/1980s steroid doping. Women can't compete with women on steroids, let alone compete with men.

Just googled the Rio trio and am now profoundly gloomy about the state of women’s rights worldwide. Can’t quite believe that no major news outlets covered this. Gold, silver, bronze in the 800m to women with male chromosomes, and who went through male puberty - HOW IS THAT NOT NEWS???? Ugh.

There are for some reason an extremely large number of African athletes with XY DSDs in the women's 800m.

I.e.:

Caster Semenya (South Africa)
Annet Negesa an also-ran far behind Semenya in 2011, WC, had gonadectomy and didn't compete again (Uganda)
Francine Niyosanba (Burundi)
Margaret Wambui (Kenya)
Jackline Wambui (World U18 'women' champion - Kenya) Now moved to 5km for 2020 as can keep T high
Docus Ajok (Uganda) - moved to 5km/10km also
Linda Kageha (Kenya)

This is Linda Kageha. Aged 17

pbs.twimg.com/media/EE2ZqFAWsAIreYr?format=jpg&name=large

There is also Aminatou Seyni of Niger, who was fastest African 400m in 2019, now running 200m (not restricted)

Kabange Mupopo also 400m, Zambia

However, if a 100 healthy 25-year-old men, regardless of athletic talent, trained the same as top female athletes, those men on average would throw farther, run faster and hit harder than many of the top female athletes.

Sorry, entirely irrelevant to the important topic at hand, but I have to know. Para 526 of that CAS ruling includes this: "The Panel has the publications which provide the data and has seen the witnesses in the hot tubs, where the data were discussed and analysed by witnesses from all sides".

Legal term I haven't come across, or a great new way to get the truth out of your witnesses?

CS is male. Having an ambiguous penis at birth or any other moment in a lifetime does not make one female.

Women's sport is for females.

It's not hard! Anyone still feeling sympathy for this person who knew they were male but still chose to compete in female sport - do you think CS feels any empathy for you, or for the female athletes deprived of their wins? CS comes across as entirely misogynistic in interview - the answer is no.

Why perpetuate the idea that women should feel sorry for men who just don't get what they want? Save it for men who actually suffer. Or better yet, think about the women deprived first!

If we don't draw the boundary for female sport where it excludes people who are male and have the performance advantages of male puberty and male testosterone levels, where should we draw it?

CS has spent since 2009 knowing they were XY competing as a female and earning millions in sponsorships etc whilst acting as a fully socialised male in every regard other than the track.

The women who came 4th/5th/6th against the Rio Trio have experienced no such fame or financial rewards.

Their athletic peak has passed. There's no second chances for them. Even if their (imho rightly deserved) medals were retrospectively awarded to them, their opportunity to capitalise on that and a lifetime of training has been lost.

Yet you feel sorry for CS?

What fucking planet are you on?

It does seem a bit unusual to be stating that someone who runs and wins women's races are of a cohort that are generally capable of producing viable sperm. According to Wiki.

This claim was added by a transactivist in 2007 (!) with no citation

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency&diff=113033968&oldid=112413195

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lwollert

Wikipedia is an unreliable source written by random nutters.

Some people with 5-aRD produce sperm, but not all.