Max testosterone level for trans athletes to be halved

[EmpressOfJurisfiction]

Open access link: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-athletes-face-tougher-entry-rules-in-female-events-wrrmm7vcz?shareToken=49299dde905a975d619c3b6b581b4b38

I am interested in getting to the bottom of it rat, as you well know, but I see you are resorting as usual to dis-ingenuousness and sarcasm, with a bit of faux-naivety thrown in [hmm[

I've asked you on more than one occasion to define exactly how you think people should be categorised for sport. You don't seem to think it should me "men" and "women", you seem to support some sort of testosterone cut-off point, but won't clarify how you think it would work - for example, if a man (who didn't claim to be a woman) got his testosterone level down by taking drugs, could he compete in the women's category? And if not, why not?

But every time anyone asks you to answer a direct question you disappear and come back hours later twittering on again about "fairness" and "inclusion" and all sorts of fluffy, totally non-defined, ways of running sport. It's baffling.

And I have never talked about you - I've simply, often, wondered where you have gone and pondered on what your answers would be to the questions you never seem to see.

Elite sports are about pushing the body to the limits of its possibility. To achieve and exceed records is the peak of aspiration. In the case of women's records it looks increasingly likely that a record will be held by someone who has actually handicapped themselves. How is that awesome?

I've asked you on more than one occasion to define exactly how you think people should be categorised for sport.

Honestly Maryz, I don't know if we're just two people who cannot for the love of God communicate or what, but how you think my answer to this question isn't patently clear is beyond me. I think each sport should be in control of their own entry criteria for trans athletes. Just as they currently are. Haven't I said that a thousand times? Am i really being so cryptic?

I do genuinely apologise if we're somehow just failing to catch each other's drift Maryz, really I do.

What about a man who isn't trans, you ask? Well he would simply be a man. Only trans athletes can compete under the rules for trans athletes. How can you prove they're really trans, is that where this is going? Well seeing as we can't very well read their minds we rather have to go on the evidence. I suppose androgynising one's entire hormonal makeup, sterilising oneself and sacrificing a large chunk of your male physical potential with unpredictable consequences might be some such evidence.

And not to bicker, but you really have dropped my name on a good number of threads I haven't even been posting on. Not recently, granted. But seriously, me not seeing questions?? I will let the word count of my answers to, er, questions, speak for itself.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. Okay with you if I come back hours later? Baffling.

Regarding gymnastics- these are amazing athletes who commit hours & hours of training day after day for years.
Only the women are expected to wear no underwear, trim/wax as "necessary" & glue the high rise (is that the right term for lots of hip on show?) leotards to themselves. Apparently the high leg holes(? There must be a better term) are to provide a long leg line but the men seem to manage in shorts or narrow legged trousers....

They don't have to wear those high leg leotards according to the rules. They can wear full leg length tights either under or over the leotard, and the leotard can have shorts style legs. However, I've never actually seen a female gymnast wearing anything other than the typical high legged leotards.

RatRolyPoly

The bigger problem may be that if at international levels transwomen are seen completing then the expectation is that unregulated unmodified men who dont have dysmorphia but are transwomen under self id will compete too with none of the assessment.

This implies that if someone can get a GRC they can walk straight into women's sport without having to achieve the stringent participation criteria; is that what you mean?

Because that's not right; sports are specifically excluded under the GRA, so they have the right to set "discriminatory" criteria for transwomen that they don't set for other women, even if they have a GRC.

So it won't matter how easy it is to get GRC, it will still be equally as hard to qualify to compete in sports.
No I mean that when we're all watching transwomen at Wimbledon or whatever then the local tennis club is going to have a problem with men declaring they are women (or at least on tuesdays or whatever). What does a local club do? Say no you're clearly a man. Say show me your birth certificate.
And i have no faith at all that the exclusions will be used any way. Equality act exemptions arent used well currently.

Once a governing body gets it wrong a few times then the records for women's sports will be unbreakable by (xx - sigh I hate having to specify) women in the future.

Well look, a transwoman isn't going to walk into sport and set a record right off the bat. They will have been competing their whole life, most likely, and I would expect they would at least be training whilst working to lower their levels and achieve anything else required of them. The criteria placed on them really are quite challenging to achieve, and by all accounts they really do have a huge impact on their performance.

Well Laurel Hubbard may have been competing for their whole life but mostly as a man. LH did pretty much just walk into women's competition & set records...

We're not going to reach a middle ground because there isnt really one. I think we should have sport divided into male humans & female humans. You think we should have mixed sex sport of males/doped (T) females and females/doped (anti T) males.

AssassinatedBeauty yes I said expected but i should have specified not required

So in order to make a minority (trans woman athletes) happy we should put female athletes at a disadvantage? A man transitioning to be a woman would have a physical advantage (more lung capacity, muscle etc) over female athletes born female. There's a reason why most competitive sporting events have separate gendered events. Might as well just have mixed sex competitions for every sport and athletic event

What about a man who isn't trans, you ask? Well he would simply be a man. Only trans athletes can compete under the rules for trans athletes. How can you prove they're really trans, is that where this is going? Well seeing as we can't very well read their minds we rather have to go on the evidence. I suppose androgynising one's entire hormonal makeup, sterilising oneself and sacrificing a large chunk of your male physical potential with unpredictable consequences might be some such evidence.

Except absolutely none of that was necessary to qualify as a woman in the Boston Marathon. No sterilization, no sacrifice of any male physical potential, no adrogynizing of hormonal makeup. Just identifying as a woman. men who had not undergone even one of the things you list identified as women, qualified and took spots from women.

So that's a great answer [baffled]

You have no idea how to divide men from women, you think that all sports organisations should have their own rules but you don't know what they are, and you think that two people with the same bodies (both male) and the same testosterone levels (under 5, let's say) should be split into two different categories on their own say so, with the one who says he's a woman competing with women, and the one who says he's a man competing with men.

Is that correct?

By the way, I can only see that I've mentioned you on half a dozen threads, RatRolyPoly - and on all of them you have been very reticent with specifics. Wishy-washy make up as you go along definitions for woman and man won't work in international sport; nor will they work in any other arena, simply because it's impossible to actually apply ever-changing criteria for anything.

The only thread I've mentioned you on that you weren't posting on was on a continuation thread where you were very present on the original thread. So I'm hardly following you around

I quoted you as saying "... we wholeheartedly reject externally-imposed gender stereotypes and we believe in the immutability of biological sex. We also believe transgender women and men when they tell us they are women or men."

I presume you still stand by that - any man who says he's a woman is a woman, in your view? If so, I do catch your drift, and you and I will never agree, because I will never agree that a man should be allowed to compete with women simply because he says he is one.

Except absolutely none of that was necessary to qualify as a woman in the Boston Marathon. No sterilization, no sacrifice of any male physical potential, no adrogynizing of hormonal makeup. Just identifying as a woman. men who had not undergone even one of the things you list identified as women, qualified and took spots from women.

Exactly! We don't call it Self ID but that's what it is.

The thing is, arguing about testosterone levels in elite sport is irrelevant. If boys like Andrea Yearwood are allowed to compete as girls in high schools and universities, then girls just drop out of sports. They won't get to the elite because they'll just get disheartened.

Sorry - irrelevant is too strong. For now anyway. In a few years' time, when mediocre boys like Yearwood realise they can still win by calling themselves a girl, they will do. And all those girls who would be coming up through the ranks will just stop.

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/43890575

So, according to this BBC report today female athletes like Caster Semenya with high testosterone levels will, from Nov 2918, have to take drugs to lower their levels or compete against men (or move up from sprinting distance to middle or long distance events).

Meanwhile, back at the insanity farm, men can compete against women as long as they lower their testosterone levels to a level that is still higher than most women's.

The only conclusion you can draw from this is that testosterone is the sole reason, according to the powers that be, that men and women should compete separately.... so nothing to do with muscle strength, lung capacity, heart capacity, blood volume, height or weight advantage, longer levers, different pelvic formation etc.

You couldn't make it up.

The BBC headline "Take drugs or race men" does seem remarkably blunt to me!

Seeing that, I have to say I do feel sympathetic towards Caster Semenya and others like her, not that there are many international athletes in that situation! Her characteristics are her characteristics and none of that is her choice. Also, obviously for absolute clarity, Caster Semenya isn't trans.

all those girls who would be coming up through the ranks will just stop

Exactly. Think I said something to this effect earlier in the thread. You don't just turn up in elite sport. You do school sport, university sport, grass roots sport, minor leagues, county leagues, nationals. If you have males in all those progression areas, it won't just be males winning elite competitions in women's categories - the entirety of competitive women's sport, already underfunded and underpromoted, will be destroyed.

Shame on any woman arguing in favour of this.

whoputthecatout

The only conclusion you can draw from this is that testosterone is the sole reason, according to the powers that be, that men and women should compete separately...

If this was the case, why does the lower testosterone level only apply to (international) women's races over 400m, 800m and 1,500m?

What about 60m, 100m , 200m, 110m hurdles, 5000k etc? Males/men are quicker than females/women over those distances, as well.

Yes, the rule has been introduced to counter the advantage that intersex competitors have naturally (and intersex is a totally different matter to transwomen competing against women). But if they thought that the advantage that transwomen have over women was simply down to testosterone, why haven't they reduced the level for all the women's track and field events, and just have done with it?

i'm not sure THAT'S the conclusion .

I mean it's not the case that Caster just happens to be a woman who just 'happens' to have high testosterone. There's a REASON Caster has high testosterone.

Here's the actual rules:

www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/eligibility-regulations-for-female-classifica

They have applied the rules ONLY to 400m, 800m, 1500m/mile events. Other events are not affected. So this looks like a 'Caster Semenya rule' and nothing to do with transgender.

This is about intersex athletes. It seems what happens is Caster (and as I understand it, one or more other athletes) have done well at 800m and other events, so they've said 'we can prove that testosterone is advantageous at specifically these events, so we should reduce the level, but only for these events that we have evidence for'. And they have specifically said 'androgen-sensitive'. So you could have XY intersex women with complete androgen insensitivity with normal male testosterone levels competing with no issue.

Clearly there is a question of 'what is a woman' in terms of intersex - is someone with a vagina, raised female, but with internal testes and androgens a woman or not? It's not something the IOC have chosen to answer, but it's obviously that some intersex people, especially in developing countries, may be male in terms of sporting prowess, build, etc., but assigned female at birth.

Now that opens the door for TRAs to a big extent, because if you allow intersex competitors with who have been subject to androgens their whole life, then you open the door to transgender competitors to do the same. Because what's the difference? Are you going to say that this child who may have had ambiguous genitalia and plastic surgery at birth and assigned female but male biology with XY chromosomes and androgen sensitive is allowed to compete but a child who has normal male genitalia but now identifies as a woman is not? It doesn't make sense.

The logical position is that if you have a Y chromosome then you should be excluded from female sport UNLESS you are androgen-insensitive and always have been. This idea of reducing your natural testosterone doesn't make much sense to me - there's a biological REASON why athletes have elevated testosterone, and for me there's a VERY big difference between hyperandrogenic XX and XY with genital abnormalities.

Unfortunately we don't have the details on these athletes biology - if it says "7.1 in every 1000 elite female athletes in our sport have elevated testosterone levels", the question is WHY, and where there are presumably different causes, then HOW elevated are these levels for each cause. Because from what I can see the testosterone level for PCOS, for example, while elevated, would be under 5 nmol/l anyway. So we are talking about something else. What is it?

Shame on any woman arguing in favour of this.

Yeah, so if I was going to bother giving time of day contributing to this debate any further that would only mean I'd have to tackle this particularly inflammatory comment. And undoubtedly what I'd have to say would get my comment deleted and me kicked off the site, so....

You may as well chat amongst yourselves. Did someone order an echo chamber?

um, well, it's not as if there aren't LOTS of places on the internet to chat, if you don't like the atmosphere here.

If you're driven away by one comment by one poster from a topic you care a lot about then that's a real shame.

Yeah, so if I was going to bother giving time of day contributing to this debate any further that would only mean I'd have to tackle this particularly inflammatory comment.

Tackle away, Rat. It's my genuinely held view.

For what it's worth though, it wasn't a dig at you personally. Now I read back the thread to work out who said what, I can see it appears that way. Sincere apologies if you read it as directed at a singular woman - ie yourself - I should have been more clear that it was a general point.

But feel free to tackle it. It's what I think.

(Have reported myself for poor wording that came off as a personal attack.)

Don't worry Lang, it was probably more me than you! Thanks though. I blame my hair-trigger on just having opened the first of what will be many 1.5k nursery bills

Probably didn't put me in the best frame of mind, sorry about that.

And funnily enough we kind of agree about school sport anyway I think, which makes my flounce even more questionable And because I almost feel like I need to prove it I'm pasting a really long quote from my favourite ever trans thread about what I think about school sport. Don't for a second feel obliged to read it, if by some chance you did!

Perhaps we don't have the best solution for either the very top of the top sporting competitions or the entry level. But that everything in between - all those hundreds of thousands of people competing in leagues and competitions alongside transwomen all the time without issue of incident beyond the usual stuff, that seems to be working okay.

But of course it would work okay, because that's how leagues work. Unless it's a sport with a very small uptake that is, but such a sport would likely have so few transwomen as to make no difference. What I mean is, the structure of leagues purposefully sorts people so that you only come against people/teams against whom you could meaningfully compete. I'm not going to clatter a schoolgirl at the weekend or be run rings around by an Olympian, because the league I am in is appropriate to my standard. The better or stronger I am, the better and stronger my opponents. As I get older I will undoubtedly shuffle down the leagues, thankfully! Or I could get hurt, trying to "punch above my weight" so to speak.

So you see, the pinch points are at the very top, and at school level. At school level because there are not enough competitors in such narrow age bandings in any geographical area (e.g. there are far few 14 year olds in Kent than simply adults in Kent) to be able to have each competing with those ONLY of a similar enough standard. Personally I think trans athletes at this level would be best encouraged into extra-curricular sports, or to delay formal competition until adulthood. I don't think it's too big a thing to ask, not least because they wouldn't have long to wait before adult competition.

The other end of the spectrum is at the top of sport. I think it's acceptable for trans athletes to win some of the time, but if they are winning all of the time, or achieving disproportionate success simply in virtue of being trans, then you know there's an issue with the entry criteria (these are different for each sport by the way). And actually sport will always seek to rectify that situation, because it means they are failing at one of their fundamental aims - that of there being no forgone conclusion. Likewise if people are getting hurt at that level; that indicates too great a disparity of standard and that would 100% be addressed.