It's now on MSM - Laurel Hubbard

women with androgenic DSDs

It needs to recognises that these are ‘males’ with differences of sex development. They have testes and have produced male hormones. They are not females. Apart from a very few rare cases, people with DSDs are either male or female, just like the rest of us.

Much as I hate to say it, there are some technical complications in the world of elite women's sports, because women with androgenic DSDs are disproportionately overrepresented in elite women's sports. As you would expect, because the presence of androgens makes them faster / stronger etc. This has created a lot of problems for individual people in the past, Caster Semenya being the obvious example, but there have been others. This is why the IOC doesn't just go by XY chromosomes when deciding who goes in what category - they go by testosterone levels.

Where the IOC is wrong is in making the allowed testosterone level way higher than a natal woman would typically have. Laurel Hubbard managed to suppress Laurel's testosterone to a level where Laurel's levels were just within the 'allowed' category. Hence we have this farce.

Should go without saying that Laurel being in the women's category is grossly unfair - but I'm actually quite pleased about it as I believe it will cause a worldwide peakening.

As for the rules, I believe the IOC needs to step away from using testosterone levels as the test for sex categories and agree on some other measure that creates sex category fairness whilst not disadvantaging natal women with DSDs.

Or create a third, unisex category where trans people can compete, alongside anyone else who wishes.

Should also go without saying that elite sport is only one tiny part of the sports world. For most other areas, simple chromosomes / phenotype should be enough and it should not be complicated. The idea of having self ID in contact sports such as rugby and MMA is disgusting and will lead to a fatality or life changing injury at some point.

I am struggling to understand how men competing in women’s events will inspire more gay kids to try sports

Exactly. Trans has nothing to do with homosexuality This is the problem with forcing T in with LGB. It’s worse than irrelevant — the problems it causes actively disadvantage LGB people.

None of it is complicated until you start to pretend sex doesn't exist.

Very insightful comment.

bio-psycho-social-cultural issues

Just when did everything start becoming political instead of merely practical? It seems you can barely breathe now without being told you're doing it wrong because of some political significance or other.

As far as I can tell, yes @MarianneUnfaithful. There's a standard WADA Therapeutic Use Exemption for testosterone for females identifying as male. I find it almost incredible that it exists. Possibly not coincidentally, American male athletes have for the first time recently been able to get TUEs for testosterone in recreational and non elite competitive sport.

Are female athletes allowed to take testosterone that pushes their levels up to the allowed level for trans athletes?

That's because the male typical level of testosterone does a fucking number on whomever has it in their body.

It doesn't matter if it's a male who has it by virtue of being a male and going through a male puberty, or a female who has essentially doped and drastically chsnfed her physique (and often looks far older than her years). Pictures make it evident that none of this is fair to women who genuinely just want to compete without being unfairly disadvantaged, whether it's by cheating males, or cheating females.

Images are a really bad idea though.

It isn't possible to tell someone's sex for sure from a still photo, or even from a single clip. Look at to photo of Mack Beggs (female) wrestling another female; many allegedly GC accounts post his picture because he looks like a man wrestling a woman. Even in cases where I'm pretty sure, if nobody will say anything, you can't be sure, eg the Chinese relay team members.

The transmen in sport are really interesting.

Chris Mosier was the figurehead for the 2015 change of IOC policy to remove the surgery requirement. Chris Mosier is female. That wasn't accidental.

The Wikipedia page for 'transgender people in sport' has a list of athletes. IIRC males and females are mixed in the list. If you go through the list one by one and identify which ones are male, which ones female, you can mostly then track their actual sporting careers (what?? It was lockdown, I had time on my hands). You end up with less than a handful of female athletes who have ever competed in a male competition. Where it's happened, it will usually be a single event or season. So, Patricio Manuel won a single fight against a male. Schuyler Bailar and Jay Pulitano swam single college seasons in the men's team: Bailar, who as a woman swam with the national elite such as Katie Ledecky, in the men's team had 'third fastest time of the season' at his university. In some cases you can work out whether they might be on testosterone or not: Pulitano was, I believe. Chris Mosier won an age group category at a national level, once; there were no other competitors in the race.

There are a few others, and of course there will be more. But the information is designed to be as obscure and misleading as possible. I hate it.

It can't be that complicated if us silly little women with our ladybrains can see the problem. Perhaps all the male brains who find it all so perplexing aren't half as clever and logical as they think they are.

I also imagine the TRA/MRA cheerleaders of men in women’s sport are tied up in knots over Hubbard. They’re salivating that Hubbard is in the team, but probably hoping that they don’t actually win, cos then it really will explode and not in a good way.

Hasn't she had a 'special invitation' which allows her to participate?
Yes, but as, presumably, there is a limit on tripartite invitations then another woman has still missed out as they would have got the tripartite invite if Nini had qualified outright - as she clearly should have done.

Yes, I get internal rage when I head people saying how 'complicated' the issues are. No! They are not complicated, you just want to pretend you give a shit. As Naunet says they are only trying to justify it.

The amount of handwringing and tying themselves in knots that has to be done when the possibility of not giving men what they want comes into play. But women? Sure they are just collateral damage.

Also, all I've heard over the past year regarding Coronavirus and vaccines is 'trust the science, listen to the science, believe the science'. But when it comes to TWAW, science is inconvenient, science suddenly doesn't matter? Bullshit!

@QuarantineQueen

I've been wondering the same. Either trans people all compete in the category for their adopted gender, in which case biologically female people lose out twice. Or all trans people compete as women, which makes the categories 'men' and 'biological females, whatever their gender identity, plus anyone born male who identifies as a woman'. Which is also unfair to women, though slightly less unfair to trans men.

I'd be interested to know how trans men feel about the issue - would they rather compete against/play with men even if this puts them at risk of physical harm, and means their chances of winning are vanishingly small?

No-one cares.

I wonder why.

Has anyone advocating for trans people to compete in the category of their gender identity thought about the impact this has on trans men? It pretty much wipes them out of sport if they have to compete in the male category.
And it's illogical to say trans women compete with women because they are women but trans men aren't men. Where are the TRA voices up in arms against this exclusion of trans men from competitive sport?

Of course its not complicated, it's cheating.

It's cheating.

And I couldn't care less that 'it's about the rules'. The people making and following the rules are cheating.

Nic Williams spent fucking ages actually compiling a meta analysis of all the studies to prove that these men, no matter how much they reduce their testosterone, carry an innate advantage, that is blisteringly obvious to everybody, including those who deny it.

She had to do this, to counter the quite risible argument that reducing testosterone reduces the advantages that testosterone has already given.

And yet some people still appear to be saying it's complicated, and what about the science??

We've done the fucking science, you cheaters.