Caster Semenya

[mummybear701]

Semenya has yet again ignited the debate on testosterone levels in women athletes, such that her own career is under threat. These arbitary levels suspended a few years ago would force women with excessive testosterone to take hormone suppressing drugs or lose their right to compete. She has already faced humiliating gender testing throughout her career.

There are a few other women in this category, notably the 800m at the Rio games.

Is this a quote from an article? What did you want to discuss?

What makes you think that assassinated?

Its a straightforward question how unfair or otherwise setting 'normal' hormonal levels on women who don't conform to certain ideals. Its not her fault, even if she is a hemaphrodite or intersex as has been suggested.

You didn't actually ask a question in your OP.

I don't think it's fair to discuss a specific individual. What to do about athletes with a DSD is very tricky, and I'm not sure that hard and fast rules are the right way to go. And none of the discussion about intersex athletes should have anything to do with the rules around transgender athletes.

What to do about athletes with a DSD is very tricky, and I'm not sure that hard and fast rules are the right way to go. And none of the discussion about intersex athletes should have anything to do with the rules around transgender athletes

I agree. Intersex athletes should be treated on a case by case basis, as it is far more complex than just testosterone levels.

Are you saying "because some women with intersex conditions have high testosterone levels any person with any level of testosterone should be allowed to compete in women's events"?

Considering that some women (usually with intersex conditions) do have high testosterone levels and don't want to artificially lower them, maybe it's about time the IOC (and other sports bodies) stopped categorising people by "testerosterone level higher than or lower than X".

In fact maybe we could (controversial suggestion here) consider defining sport divisions by [siob] biological sex.

Would that work, perhaps?

And (as I'm sure you know) referring to people as "hermaphrodite" isn't very polite

I mention Caster as she is very much in the spotlight over this issue and quite unfairly, but its not just about her. It has wider implications for other women. Dutee Chand was another, and remember the controversy after the Rio games. A halfway measure might be to have an intersex category, if there were enough athletes to make up a race.

I do agree on one thing it is distinct from the transgender debate, someone else brought that up here.

Would having category's based on testosterone work

Completely ignorant here as i havent read my Testosterone Rex book yet

So no male or female as such just Testosterone like weight...

Or male and female but also based on Testosterone within that

Another one could be Have you now, or have you ever had, a penis.

Would having category's based on testosterone work

Possibly. Semenya and Niyonsaba times were at the lower end of the mens. Who knows how many would have comparable testosterone levels but it would be mostly men. Might keep the likes of Sharpe happy though. But then you get into discussions of lung size, heart size etc.

Another one could be Have you now, or have you ever had, a penis.

Irrelevant as this is nothing to do with testosterone levels and is about women.

Another alternative. Give Semenya and others the respect they'd give a white American who destroyed the field. At most a clean drugs test is all that is needed.

A white American athlete who had higher than the female allowed testosterone levels would have failed a drugs test, surely?

They may well not have been subject to the same level of intrusion and leaking of private medical information as Semenya though.

I really don't know what would be "fair" around female athletes with an intersex/DSD condition, who have higher than the allowed female testosterone level. It seems unfair to disallow someone born and raised female from competing, yet it seems equally unfair to allow competitors with elevated testosterone to compete against those without.

I understand the controversy, but I think the way Semenya was treated was disgusting. She absolutely should be able to compete as a women without taking testosterone suppression drugs. I’m staggered at the difference between how she was treated and how the weightlifter (whose name currently escapes me sorry) has been treated, he has a right to compete as a woman but Semenya seemingly had no right to compete at all.

I think that intersex athletes need to be assessed individually but need to be allowed to compete. Mostly I imagine they will compete in women’s sports and we’ve just got to accept that. Switching between men’s elite sports and women’s is entirely different. I think definition of male or female that focuses entirely on testosterone is problematic.

I think "Do you have, or have you ever had, functional testes, whether intra- or extra- abdominal?" would be a better question.

I feel incredibly sorry for her. She hasn't been affforded any privacy with regards to the diagnosis of her DSD/intersex because it's been of huge interest to the world. She went from being a girl who was good at running to having the whole world waiting on tenterhooks for the results of her intimate testing. The fact she's been messed around and so poorly treated has made it harder for decisions to be made about what to allow her to do or how to compete. I personally think she shouldn't be eligible because of her level of advantage, but I also see a vulnerable person whose life and medical notes are subject to scrutiny others don't get. It's likely her livelihood will be taken away. It will be the right sporting decision for fairness but it's going to be sad and I hope she finds a good future.

It's also worth noting that this situation is a reflection of poverty; there's no way a girl like Caster would have not been diagnosed much earlier if they were living in a western country, or even a more affluent part of South Africa.

Back around 2010, some details from Caster's medical records became public. The information was from a medical report stating that examinations had found an absence of uterus and ovaries but the presence of un-descended testes.

So, for me, it's not so much about Casters current levels of testosterone, so much as the question of the effect of those high levels of testosterone on physical development through puberty. Height, higher bone and muscle density, larger heart and lungs allowing greater aerobic capacity, faster muscle twitch, longer legs, pelvis width and Q angle?

But she could not be expected to run as a male athlete? She believed herself to be female and couldn’t really be described as male. I can’t see a way of barring her from female sports without barring her from competing completely. I’m not comfortable with including men in women’s sports but I think intersex women need somewhere.
The nature of elite sports is that most people are excluded.

I feel sorry for her too - she spent her whole life thinking she was a "normal" girl, was good at running, and then all of a sudden she's being called all sorts of names and told that she has a major medical issue which will result in her being infertile - and to top it all she might be pushed out of her sport. Not to mention the intrusive press coverage. It was, and still is, shit.

But the difficulty is that while we might all agree that women (born women, with female DNA) with high testosterone levels should be allowed to compete as women, these rare high levels are being used by TRAs as "proof" that men, with similarly high levels should be allowed to compete in women's events because they "feel they are women".

In ye olden days where women had to have low testosterone levels, pre-surgical trans-identified men wouldn't have matched the criteria to compete as women. Now that there is no upper level (or a very high, impossible for 99.9% of women to reach) of testosterone, it's opened the doors to many men.

So by being "fair" to the very small numbers of women with high levels, we are being unfair to the many more women with "normal" levels.

It's a mess.

So by being "fair" to the very small numbers of women with high levels, we are being unfair to the many more women with "normal" levels.

We (or that is the sporting bodies) would not be unfair to these women if the rule stated clearly that this special rule, created for women with a DSD, applies only to biological women and those who are indeed assigned female at birth because they looked more female than male on the outside - whatever's going on on the inside.

So levels below 10nmol/l for women and women with a DSD. That's it.

Then finally create proper rules for transgender athletes and don't just allow one group to appropriate a rule made for a completely different and unrelated group.

As for Caster and those like her - I've wrangled with this a lot, esp since I have friends whose kids compete at national level.

So forget about testosterone for a second and consider Usain Bolt for a second. Specifically his physiology. By some freak of nature the man has the exact perfect dimensions and proportion of leg bones to joints to overall size to bone structure and muscle type (ie skinny dude vs built like a tank), perfect lungs, perfect heart, perfect stride length for the short distances etc. I saw an analysis on this once and this is extremely rare.

That's why by some measure, for a lot of the time, no one stood a chance against him. What Mother Nature provided him with was superior to all of his competitors. Let's assume he didn't apply some hitherto undiscovered kind of doping but this natural jackpot of advantages was all he had. Plus his motivation, dedication etc.

Everyone less lucky than him just had to suck it up.

I could have brought up Andy Murray who is in the opposite situation. An exceptional talent, at any other time he'd have completely dominated at the number one spot for years. But the sport was blessed with three other, once in a century, exceptional talents. Which the laws of probability allow for, weirdly enough. So he had to share the top spot.

So, back to Caster.

In the interest of fairness and because Caster like all other athletes also has to sustain her motivation, dedication and training regime, remain illness and injury free etc AND is actually a woman (that's how her individual intersex condition works out), she should be allowed to compete but subject to regular hormone level tests (to make sure no one dreams of abusing the intersex rule and dopes with a little extra T).

That's just my personal view of course and it took me over five years to get here, but in the end it was actually the transwomen who did it. If I look at how fair this all is, then I would say favour these women over those men.

I've supported Caster Semenya from the start. I would be 100% behind a rule such as the one you have suggested. The trouble is the IOC guidelines are being drawn up by a very small group of people (with at least one very vocal trans identified male) and they are using Caster to push their agenda.

I'm not sure that there is a will to come up with a solution that would allow Caster and others like her and at the same time exclude trans identified males who claim to be women.

The former are few in number; the latter are multiplying at such a rate that they will destroy women's sports.

Yes, you are absolutely right. I was talking to my parents about the weightlifter today and they were aghast. Just completely incredulous that this would be allowed. Most people will, I fear, not take notice until it has had a huge effect on women's sports (or women's rights).

There was a case like Caster's in the 1930s, Mark Weston, who competed as Mary Weston, the sex he had (with some confusion) been raised until he found that he had undescended testes.

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19360820&id=LQosAAAAIBAJ&sjid=E7oEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1225,1468831&hl=en

I think it is rather difficult to comment on specific individuals, but biologically male people can be raised female due to ambiguous genitalia, etc., so having been raised a woman doesn't necessarily mean you are one - in some cases puberty or some later point will result in this being rejected.

Yes. I think fairness would have us return to sports segregated by sex not gender. That female bodies compete against female bodies, and males to compete against males. Begin to mess with that basic rule and it opens up all kinds of "But what about...?" challenges, loopholes, unintended consequences.

But intersex is more complicated than sex and male/female bodies. If you have Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) you'll have XY chromosomes but no sensitivity to testosterone at all. You'll be phenotypically female. If you have Partial AIS, the degree of virilisation varies. It's perfectly possible that an athlete with CAIS has won a women's medal somewhere. But they conferred no advantage from testosterone. So chromosomes, accurate diagnosis of condition and consideration of possible advantage is needed. Which is where things are with Caster.

So about 99.98% of the population is either male or female. The rest are abnormalities (for lack of a better word, if that sounds negative). About half of that 99.98% is female the rest male (not exactly ofc). We protect one half because of physiological differences (simply put, they are inferior, again for lack of a better word, physically). The question of where to place the 0.02% is a very difficult one, but to say Semenya and others like her are normal females simply with exceptional T levels, is not accurate. Some people claim this, they are normal females but just exceptional like Phelps had an exceptional physiology for swimming. They are not, they are the 0.02%. A one size fits all rule is not good enough imo and a case by case analysis should be done.

What is absolutely vile though is the way Semenya is portrayed. She does not deserve that and this case by case analysis should be done by experts and the people involved in the sport. Not the media.

Well instead of men's and women's competitions you could have women's competitions- for the 49.99%- and Open competitions - for the 49.99+0.02%. Of course this would effectively exclude the 0.02% from top level competition, but it would be more fair for the 49.99%.