Surprisingly clear news article from Australia re XY humans competing at Olympics in female sports

I see. Thanks.

Well, not for the stuff about human rights, that's just terrifying! But thanks for the other information about the CAS case.

But this:
What was surprising in the 2019 CAS judgement is that they restricted the judgement to certain events,
..is sort of what was at the back of my mind, I think. Made no sense in principle.

What was surprising in the 2019 CAS judgement is that they restricted the judgement to certain events, however, the International Athletics Federation has since extended the requirement for 46XY athletes to conform to defined testosterone levels to all events and if I am not mistaken, also reduced the level (but I have read so many policies, I don't hold every detail at the front of my mind)

If I understand correctly, CAS didn't make World Athletics prove anything.. it is the IOC that stated that advantage needed to be proven, by individual event.

As for the fact that the court of human rights found the ruling against Caster Semenya to be a breach of human rights.. I find the human rights aspect, frankly terrifying. No one is advocating for the human rights of women to have fair competion and there are many arms of Human Rights organisations advocating for the rights of men.. (without meaning to derail... not least the group of legal experts at a WHO level who issued a statement that inforcing the age of consent was a breach of human rights and also some awful seedy suggestion elsewhere of decriminalisation of incest.)

Human Rights Lawyers are not always on the side of women and children.

If that hasn't been superseded by a subsequent judgement, that is fantastic. But if that was the legal background, I'm very surprised that CAS made World Athletics prove discipline by discipline that there was an advantage for males.

Everyone in sport who is involved with writing frameworks and policies cannot fail to have read the decision by the Court of Arbitration of Sport in 2019:

'This is because the reason for the separation between male and female categories in competitive athletics is ultimately founded on biology rather than legal status. The purpose of having separate categories is to protect a class of individuals who lack certain insuperable performance advantages from having to compete against individuals who possess those insuperable advantages. In this regard, the fact that a person is recognised in law as a woman and identifies as a woman does not necessarily mean that they lack those insuperable performance advantages associated with certain biological traits that predominate in individuals who are generally (but not always) recognised in law as males and self-identify as males. It is human biology, not legal status or gender identity, that ultimately determines which individuals possess the physical traits which give rise to that insuperable advantage and which do not.

Accordingly, the purpose of the male-female divide in competitive athletics is not to protect athletes with a female legal sex from having to compete against athletes with a male legal sex. Nor is it to protect athletes with a female gender identity from having to compete against athletes with a male gender identity. Rather, it is to protect individuals whose bodies have developed in a certain way following puberty from having to compete against individuals who, by virtue of their bodies having developed in a different way following puberty, possess certain physical traits that create such a significant performance advantage that fair competition between the two groups is not possible.'

Everyone should read this!! https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Executive_Summary__5794_.pdf

'The Press' don't get to hide behind - the IOC told us not to write this - excuse.

Freedom of the press is enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights.

This has been an issue since 2016 when athletes were banned from speaking about it and were told 'the authorities' would 'sort it out'. Women who spoke about unfairness were threatened with having their sponsorships removed and with loosing their places in teams.

When the Court of Arbitration in Sport ruled, they were only ruling on a small section of events and then in 2021, the Olympic Committee put inclusion above all else.

There are thousands of people who have stood by and watched this play out.... what is even more galling is the silence after the 800m final in Rio and the amount of praise heaped on the Zambian footballers - not to mention the amount of money that was paid in transfer fees for them - record breaking in the women's game.

I am glad that journalists are starting to write about this.... but they have stayed silent and indeed, abused, cancelled and silenced women who have spoken out before.

Too many people have stayed silent and continue to insist that we should protect these individuals. It's not a witch-hunt against the athletes, IOC - it's a witch-hunt against everyone who decided that the women's competition did not matter!

Read the IOC Framework. https://olympics.com/ioc/documents/athletes/ioc-framework-on-fairness-inclusion-and-non-discrimination-on-the-basis-of-gender-identity-and-sex-variations. and see how many times women are being told that they do not matter... and if they can prove, with specific verified evidence that in a particular event, sex matters, the competitor can simply transfer to another event. The presumption throughout the framework is that inclusion in the category should be on the basis of identity.

Dear god - just look at the olympic records, there is not one single event where women are faster, better, longer or stronger than men.. (human on horse events excluded)...

@Christinapple "I'm sure the people who make the decisions at the Olympics know better than any of us."

Would that be the same people that continuously ignore evidence of doping in tests of Chinese athletes? 'Oh, the food was contaminated? Well then....'

The IOC is a commercial affair, not the footie club round the corner, where fairness reigns supreme. They and their local subdivisions are only interested in money.

No woman or man will fail the sex test. The XY or XX one. Gender is not a scientific test, it's a make up word for feelings. There are two males already banned in boxing for being male. But the Olympics is different, they are allowing men to pretend to be women, and allowing the men to compete without a sex test.

Oh @NotBadConsidering ... we know they are not women - that should be enough to exclude them from the women's competition.

Language is so important. Hence the other side's attempts to enforce it.

For years, the story was that CS was a woman who had a disorder causing high T and looked a bit manly. And that any advantage in sports wasn’t her fault. I think a lot of us believed that and were shocked to find out that CS is a male with a male DSD.
The unfortunate word “intersex” has muddied the waters badly too.

In other words....

"shut up and stop asking (not very) difficult questions, you annoying cis-women"

You have to laugh at the faux innocence.
😝🤣🤣

We do know that the boxers failed sex verification tests. Only a male would fail.

We do know that someone with a male DSD is male.
There should be no regulations which do not bar entry for males in female competition, DSD or no. It's the female category.

Caster Semenya put himself and his condition in the public domain by mounting a legal challenge to the testosterone limiting regime he was supposed to follow.
That's how we know he has a male DSD.

Sex testing does not come down to facial features. It's a DNA test using cells collected from the inside of the cheek.

Exactly, it took so long for me to reach this point - that they're actually men - not "special women" - just because of the confusing language, and others just looking at the headlines briefly will have the same issue.

Back in the late 90s early 2000's, when I was at university with a very prominent journalism program that accounted for a large part of the student body. I lived with many of them in my first year and had classes with a lot of them too.

These were not people who were ever likely to fight against big institutional narratives. Most of them weren't creative thinkers, they didn't particularly have a lot of deep insight into issues, and they absolutely "identified" with institutions like the national broadcaster and certain political parties. They were also resolutely middle class kids with university educated parents.

Many of them went on to work for the national broadcaster.

Well, I guess I am saying that they are men competing against women.

There is nothing different between Caster Semenya and another male in sporting performance potential. Genital differences do not make a male athlete less able to perform at the same level as other male athletes. Or do you have found evidence that shows there is a difference?

Semenya has testosterone levels in the normal range. So, why is Semenya’s performance lauded? Why isn’t that Rio race considered to be won ‘by a man’, except for compelled language that some people (and organisations such as MN) feel they should use to obfuscate that the established word used for a male person is ‘man’.

in what way is Semenya ‘not a man’?

Oh I see. Because the fastest 800m mens is way faster than the women's. But you meant the men competing against women.

They wanted to campaign for genital surgery, together, in case that's not clear.

Obviously, not something that the society would agree to.

And the link between trans campaigners and 'intersex' is about bodily autonomy, not a desire for surgery. The history of imposed surgery on people with DSDs really us abhorrent (should read Middlesex again).

The open letter that the Intersex Society, I think it was, published online was about surgery.

I think it was GIRES who targeted them relentlessly to form an alliance. They wanted them to go on a programme like Panorama as a unified front. The society refused, but the targeting did not stop.

They eventually published an open letter online detailing the issue. Including, if memories serves me, copies of the actual letters sent by GIRES.

Of course there is danger in racial profiling. Hence in the past, ALL female athletes were tested for eligibility for the Olympics.

The argument that those athletes are subject to indignities, loss of privacy and danger of medical intervention should be addressed by going back to these simple tests. Where needed, if a female athlete has a chromosomal DSD but is a female person with ovaries and not testes, that may require further testing.

However, in all these arguments that have been used, the harm and indignities for female athletes needs to also be balanced. I have not seen anywhere that these original activists considered that in depth. It was all based on philosophical belief that if someone was told they were female at birth, then that is all that is needed to be included.

It was and it still is so fucked up to dismiss female athletes the way they have been dismissed.

There's lots of nuances to these stories, there is the obvious possibility that they are simply trans in which case rules are in place to deal with the scenario (it's up to the individual sports though not the IOC) but there's also a range of DSD situations where male puberty may not have happened, or happened fully, may have been raised female from birth etc for which rules are in place too. I don't know what category these boxers are, but the rules don't seem to be fit for purpose in these cases

More from Madeleine Pape

"Pape began to form friendships with women who had high testosterone, which forced her to ask herself, ‘Was I willing to recognise my friends as women outside of sport, yet deny them the right to compete alongside me?’"

"She realised that the answer was no, and by 2015 her views had evolved so dramatically that she testified in support of Indian athlete Dutee Chand, when she appealed against World Athletics’ (formerly the International Athletics Associations Federation) set of rules that rendered her ineligible to compete on the track as a woman, due to her naturally high testosterone."

Hardly the action of an impartial person who is responsible for influencing and setting international sports policy at the highest level.

There are things we definitely don't know - we don't know that these boxers are male and although we know that Caster Semenya has children, we don't know (and nor should we) how those children came to exist. It's easy to overstate what we know in upsetting circumstances.

The list of identified DSDs is long but finite. It should not be difficult at all for the IOC to make regulations about which DSDs do not bar entry to female events, without hanging individual athletes like CS out to dry with their medical history in the public domain.

And the link between trans campaigners and 'intersex' is about bodily autonomy, not a desire for surgery. The history of imposed surgery on people with DSDs really us abhorrent (should read Middlesex again).

Madeleine Pape's interview was really interesting. So is her work, ive been skimming a few papers. She's not wrong that focusing on eg facial appearance as a proxy for sex, as in tech protocols defined by a very small group of Caucasian and Asian-dominated, make dominated people, could be a recipe for racial and sexual exclusion (remember the Apple health apps that didn't include a menstrual tracker?) But as always, I come down to the fact that sex and sexed reproduction remains a reality and trying to pretend it isn't disadvantages women.

True.

Yes. Males with 5ARD have been recorded in the past as having been able to provide viable sperm and father a child.