To be worried about the future of WOMEN'S athletics

[TeamCersei]

Just that really.

I've been avidly following the athletics and have noticed that at least two countries where the competitors are, how can I say this tactfully,? Are of dubious gender.
and guess what. They win the races. Every time.

How can women compete against this?
How is it fair?

I'm prepared to get my arse handed on a plate but I don't care.
I think this needs to be discussed.
God only knows how it feels from a competitor's point of view.
No matter how hard you train, the best woman can't hope to win against'men'

AlpacaI agree people are conflating the concept of intersex athletes with transgender athletes. I don't think some posters really want to acknowledge that there's a difference though. The irony is that statistically there'll likely be female athletes competing at these events with CAIS and those posters won't be able to tell. Unless they can do ultrasonography with their eyes, through the TV screen, to whether every athlete's vagina leads to a uterus.

Can we stop derailing the thread by talks my about women athletes achievements and how fair/unfair they are.

This is about intersex athletes and how unfair it is that they run against women.

"Won't beable to tell"

Well you'd have to be blind not to beable to pick out the athletes I watched this week.

IfYou - it came up because we were talking about natural advantages that some athletes have over others, whether that be high testosterone levels, big thigh muscles or big lung capacity or whatever. This clearly factors into the debate of whether those advantages can be considered unfair if someone is intersex but not unfair if they are not.

The male pacemaker thing was an aside. I am not out to belittle Paula Radcliffe's achievements!

ifyougodown but all not all intersex people are allowed to compete and not all are genetically XY.

Which intersex conditions in particular would you like to prevent from competing against women?

This is about intersex athletes and how unfair it is that they run against women

But would it be fair on the intersex athletes to run against men? Especially since their times do not suggest that they are performing at anywhere near the male standards and they are not men, were raised as women and had always considered themselves to be women. It's easy to say 'well, tough shit, they can't be athletes' but that does not seem fair. It is perfectly possible for a female athlete to beat Caster Semenya and Margaret Wambui because several of them have done.

That is very interesting about Paula Radcliffe and the male pace. She was thankfully cleared of the doping allegations as well, but it just goes to show that people get suspicious no matter who wins- either you must be doping, you must be cheating or you must be a man.

I could see your point QueenCersai till you wrote "her". That's just rude. It's a natural advantage but so is raw talent.
All this "as a mother of a daughter" stuff. Some people are mothers of intersex children. Should they not have hopes and dreams for them? Is life not hard enough for these children.

But morning - the teenager in your example still has a place to compete. Where is an intersex athlete meant to compete, if not with the men or the women PLUS if you're 16 you're 16, but if you're intersex you're somewhere on a very hazy spectrum. It's much less clear cut.

How does an athlete with complete androgen insensitivity have an advantage? They have less functioning testosterone than the average post pubertal female - no body hair and no spots/acne.

And a 16 year old athlete with complete AIS might not know it yet, depending on whether or not she's had investigations for not yet starting her periods.

The problem with the proposed "intersex" category is that they are a herterogenous group of conditions. Some such as 5 alpha reductase deficiency can look feminine at birth but virilise at puberty and have useful testosterone. They aren't able to compete as women and shouldn't have to run against women withCAIS who have no functional testosterone. What about CAH where girls and women can have clitoruses that resemble penises?

Should they all compete in their own categories, depending on which disorder that have, ensuring that every other person at the games can speculate about their genitals?

YANBU.

It is a grey area I have sympathy with, if the person is intersex, and again grey if the person competing is genuinely gender dysmorphic and has had full surgery and takes hormone treatment (not that this is sufficient to neutralise the biological advantage) ALL THE TIME and not just at testing.

But self identification? Why people can't see that this is hugely open to abuse baffles me. Men will self identify without any surgery for the duration of competition, win, and we won't be able to say a thing. It is really grim.

morningrunner my understanding of the rules is that a number of intersex athletes are already excluded, as is partial AIS and that CAIS isn't. Intersex isn't new.

This is all speculation on the basis that Caster is rumoured to have intersex and looks virilised. But only the geneticists and endocrinologists actually know to which level, if any, her testosterone is functional.

But self identification? Why people can't see that this is hugely open to abuse baffles me. Men will self identify without any surgery for the duration of competition, win, and we won't be able to say a thing. It is really grim

Has this happened in athletics though? Of course that it wrong, but I have yet to see concrete examples in athletics where a biological male is competing with the women because he self-identifies as female.

Age categories and sex categories in sport exist for the same reasons- fair competition. The only way to guarantee fairness in women's sport is to base qualification on chromosomes. I understand and regret that this will exclude some women from competing but the alternative is what we have now which is grossly unfair. Yes

Can I offer a round up of the science? (Since I'm presuming that no-one wants to trawl through a million and one internet links - but FWIW I find Joanna Harper, one of the scientists who advises the IOC - to be clear and open to discussing the pros and cons. Full disclosure - she is trans, but describes herself as "scientist first, athlete second, trans after those", and as far as I can tell, cares very much about the underlying principle that sport should be fair).

There was a big survey of female athletes done about twenty years ago. Non-intersex women typically have testosterone between 1.5 and 2.5 nmol/litre, but there are some outliers. The men's range is between 10 and 30 nmol/litre. To deal with outliers in the distribution, the upper limit of the women's blood levels was set at 10nmol/litre, the bottom of the naturally occurring men's range. This is 5 standard deviations from the mean of the female distribution. The IAAF then adopted a rule which said women (including intersex women) had to take androgen blockers which brought their testosterone below 10nmol/litre. (In some cases this can be something as relatively non-invasive as contraceptive pills, in other cases intersex women were pressurised into having gonadectomies, which I think is unacceptable).

There is a further complicating factor in that you don't just have to have testosterone in your blood, you have to have androgen receptors in order to make use of it to build excess muscle (excess relative to normal female levels). And intersex women can have either partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, PAIS, or complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, CAIS. Intersex women with the former will typically have body shapes visually closer to men - flat chests, male-looking musculature. Intersex women with the latter have typically female looking bodies and musculature. However, "looks like" isn't and shouldn't be the issue. (I'm old enough to remember the "is she really a man" furore over Kratachvilova. My suspicion, and that of most other people, would be that she was doping, probably with testosterone, but she definitely wasn't a man or intersex because she later went on to have a child). The issue is whether this gives these athletes an actual performance advantage, and if it does, whether that's any different to any other sort of naturally occurring variation.

Now quite rightly, none of us know the details of Caster Semeya or Dutee Chand's medical notes, and rightly so - they deserve to have their medical confidentiality respected. But what it is thought happened is this: in the early part of her career, Semenya was made to take androgen suppressors in line with the IAAF rules at the time, at which point her times dropped from world beating to somewhere in the chasing pack. Then Dutee Chand (who is thought to have CAIS) took the IAAF to the Court of Arbitration in Sport (CAS) and won, on the grounds that her actual blood testosterone levels were irrelevant if she had no receptors, therefore she should not be forced to take unecessary medication. This led to the two year "let's see what happens and do some further study" period where the maximum testosterone levels were relaxed.

I happened to watch the men's decathlon 400m just after Semenya's semi-final for the 800m last night, and was struck by how fast these non-specialist 400m runners were. For reference (I just checked) the four fastest men home in last night's decathlon final are all faster than Semenya's PB for the 400m. Semenya is fractionally faster (by about 2 or 3m) than the women not causing any suspicions, but wouldn't be anywhere in a field of world-class male specialist 400m runners. She has maybe a 1% advantage over the other competitors, but not the systematic 10% or thereabouts difference between men's and women's record times in running that we see at all distances from 100m through to the marathon. So we're back to the question of "is this natural advantage, like Phelp's hand/wingspan, or Bolt's incredible metabolism, or is it unfair?"

Has this happened in athletics though? Of course that it wrong, but I have yet to see concrete examples in athletics where a biological male is competing with the women because he self-identifies as female.

If I remember correctly, one Fallon Fox was a dude who went boxing against females. You can imagine what happened.

Which intersex conditions in particular would you like to prevent from competing against women?

Rather easy: Those who have, or had at some point in their lives, higher testosterone than women.
For all I know, hip bone development, and other bone development is also influenced by testosterone, so no testosterone, no problem, but I'm happy to be corrected if someone knows otherwise.

No idea how androgen insensitivity plays out. The individuals in question are usually psychologically healthy, so they cannot be completely insensitive to testosterone.

But no, I don't think intersex people are entitled to compete against women. They can compete against men. Where they may have a disadvantage, but, guess what? So have disabled men, who still have to compete against men, or, revolutionary thought, petition for their own category. Wherein they aren't all evenly matched, either.

If disabled people can have their own category, despite all disabilities being different, then why can't intersex people?

Papafran the law hasn't changed yet, until it does a person needs a doctor to sign off for the official records.

The proposal in motion at the moment is to change that, meaning anyone can decide to change their registered gender, and as a consequence compete as they choose, and to complain about this would be a hate crime.

Papafran
Yes, Alec but she runs the 1500 metres about 30-40 seconds slower than the men.

But she is not a man, but has male characteristics that give her an edge.
Which is her chosen event would make her faster than other women but still slower than men.

My understanding is that a basic chromosome test wasused to determine eligibility until the 1960s but this approach was abandoned when a number of high profile athletes failed the test.

WTF? The mind boggles.

vestal But those people with intersex with higher functional testosterone are excluded already.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the individuals in question are usually physiologically healthy so they cannot be completely insensitive to testosterone?"