Dutee Chand

[OrchidInTheSun]

After my recent suspension, I'm reluctant to talk about male genitals as it seems they are rather a bone of contention so I shall endeavour to avoid discussion of them in this thread.

I was prompted by an article that came up on facebook celebrating Chand as being openly gay. Chand has hyperandrogen, similar to Semenya as far as I understand.

Will that mean Chand will also be forced to reduce testosterone to compete in international competitions? I can't find any coverage about it at all.

Chand has hyperandrogen, similar to Semenya as far as I understand

They don’t have hyperandrogenism which means “too much” androgens. They are both biologically male and have normal levels of testosterone for men.

Does Chand have the same DSD as Semenya then? I wasn't sure as the name hasn't come up in all the coverage of Semenya and the other 800m athletes.

bone of contention

Sorry, childish I know

Does Chand have the same DSD as Semenya then?

I don’t know, I’m not sure if it’s the same but they’re both XY and androgen sensitive so both fall under the testosterone-lowering restrictions for 800m.

Personally I don’t think they beyond in the women’s races at all.

As I recall, what is widely thought to be at issue (not known, because obviously both individuals' medical records are quite rightly confidential). Is following.

There are two conditions. An individual with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome produces testosterone (due to internal testes, but doesn't fully process it. They look phenotypically female until puberty at which point they develop a more muscular build than most women. An individual with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome has raised T levels (again due to internal testes, but is (as the name suggests) unable to metabolise it and lays down typically female musculature even after puberty.

It's thought that what happened with Chand is the following. Semenya had been found to have raised T levels due to PAIS (again, this is a case of the press making a best guess based on published rulings) and the IOC made her take androgen suppressants, following which decision her times and performances put her round about typical for elite female athletes.

Chand, who it is thought suffers from CAIS took the IOC to court arguing that it was an infringement of her human rights to make her take medication which was not medically necessary and which in her case did not confer any competitive advantage (because CAIS rather than PAIS). She won, and restrictions were lifted, not only for her but for athletes, including Semenya and two other runners thought to have PAIS , just in time for the Rio Olympics, with results we all witnessed.

I feel incredibly sorry for intersex athletes who genuinely had no way of knowing until late in their careers (when they reached a sufficiently elite level to be subject to testing regimes) that this was a problem).

The trouble is their experience and rulings surrounding their very rare and difficult situation are now being weaponised as case law by trans athletes who have been through a male puberty but want to participate in women's sports. When the evidence suggests (especially the latest study from the Karolinska Institute, Wiik et al 2019) that they retain male advantages.

So we have a choice (one of those pesky binary choices): make sport inclusive of intersex individuals but destroy women's sports in the process, or make sport fair to women but sadly exclude intersex individuals (through no fault of their own). Which is very sad because this situation has not been created by intersex individuals - they're getting shafted by the extremists within the trans movement just as much as genotypically standard women are.

Yes I believe Chand is insensitive to androgens so gets no advantage from high levels of testosterone. So not the same as Semenya.

www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jun/18/caster-semenya-iaaf-athletics-guinea-pig

Semenya has 5 alpha reductase deficiency.

The funny thing about CAIS is that individuals with it are over represented in the Olympics. Suggesting that there are further XY advantages not just related to androgen sensitivity.

In the general population CAIS affects about 1 in every 20000 individuals, in Olympic sport (when chromosome testing was routinely done) 1 in 400 athletes competing as women had this condition.

Be interesting to know why: does it come done to basic phenotype features of being generally taller and leaner than biological women, the lack of hormonal changes, not having to train with periods, inherent differences in muscle fibres?

ScapaFlo... yeah, me too.

Sorry, as you were...

Thanks for the explanations Barbara & Mythical. Certainly Duttee Chand’s best times are well below the leading women sprinters.

I do think she has been through a lot because of her gender and sexual orientation. I think this is partly because of the difference between South Africa and India in terms of the status of athletics. Caster Semenya has huge institutional and public support which Chand has not.

I think some TRAs deliberately introduce debates about DSD to muddy the waters. It appeals to our inbuilt wish for fairness as people do not choose to have a DSD. However, I am feeling more optimistic as it does look as if the evidence about the effects of DSDs and transgender status is becoming clearer. And threads like Lemongingercake’s photos are fantastically helpful for those of us who don’t understand all the science. Definitely a case of a picture painting a 1000 words

Yes, thank you, that's very interesting. It seems to m that you have to have a blanket rule about testosterone levels though. If Chand gets no advantage, it won't hurt her to reduce them will it?

Yeah, I was under the impression that Chand hasn’t had a ‘male puberty’ and doesn’t benefit from their bodies testosterone testosterone production. Not like Semenya at all.

The IOC needs different rules for different DSDs.

How would that work though DuMonde? I think they should reduce the level to 2nmol across the board. Most women don't produce more than that.

And it does seem that there must be some physiological advantage given the extraordinarily high number of DSD athletes in women's sports (not men's, note, just women's). It seems pretty clear we don't entirely understand the effects of high levels of T on human development.

Yes, thank you, that's very interesting. It seems to m that you have to have a blanket rule about testosterone levels though. If Chand gets no advantage, it won't hurt her to reduce them will it?

The recent IAAF guidelines for the 800m race (that Semenya appealed against) outlined that the testosterone lowering rules are for XY DSD athletes who are sensitive to androgens. So not any XX DSD athletes and not CAIS.

Ah okay, thanks for clarifying.

I rest my case that there must be some sort of advantage even without going through male puberty otherwise athletes with DSD wouldn't be so over-represented in women's sport.

Accurate facts here

Semenya officially for sure has 5-ARD-type 2, normally functioning testes and XY chromosomes

Chand also has XY chromosomes and testes but there is no official document on her intersex disorder, however it is stated to be AIS.

Most athletes with AIS have partial, not complete AIS, and it's likely Chand does too.

Athlete with C/PAIS do not produce female levels of oestrogen so will have less body fat and may be taller than normal women, since oestrogen fuses bones during puberty.

No athlete with PAIS will gain the full male benefit of testosterone, which Caster Semenya, and male athletes in general , do.

So you are unlikely to end up with PAIS athletes dominating to the extent of 1-2-3 as in the 800m with 5-ARD. Of course PAIS is a continuum and the P part is not quantifiable, so some people with PAIS are just slightly under virilised males, and not in any sense female.

So there is potential for people with cases of PAIS that would normally subjectively be deemed 'male' to end up in women's sport, and such athletes would essentially be no different from transgender athletes in that they would have been born with penises.

I am not sure if it is possible to 100% determine that androgen insensitivity is complete or merely partial, but my understanding of the situation is that for CAIS there is infertility and the testes are likely to become cancerous.

Also with CAIS there is no possible gender assignment other than female - you don't process testosterone at all, and because the testosterone cannot be used, it ends up being converted into oestrogen and resulting in breasts etc. This is the same process by which oestrogen is produced in normal women in that the ovaries synthesise hormones which are converted into testosterone and then into oestrogen. Chemically speaking oestrogen (or rather its most potent form, estradiol) is just a single reaction, with an enzyme found in many parts of the body, away from testosterone.

So it is for example medically possible that someone with CAIS or PAIS might remove their testes, but they would not necessarily do so, and if they did it might result in needing to take oestrogen supplements as the removal of the source of testosterone results in low oestrogen.

There are some people who insist that women with CAIS are actually men, which is simply wrong in that even though they have testes, they do not process testosterone at all, so whatever effects testosterone has on the brain(and it does) does not happen to women.

I'm pretty sure that Dutee Chand has PAIS and there is some possibility that testosterone has influenced her sexuality, but that same possibility might apply also to women with with ovaries who have high testosterone levels, so there isn't a 'she likes women so she must be a man' gotcha here.

I think that women with PAIS are overrepresented in sport but I am not sure that they should be excluded.

As far as Semenya goes it is quite complicated in that Semenya probably performs exactly as well as a man would, BUT there are far more men in the world and it seems that CS is not good enough to win with female.circulating levels of testosterone.

I would say:

5-ard-2 - normal testes, normal T - compete as male
17β-HSD III - testes don't convert precursor into T properly, so T could be very low resulting in female phenotype - probably compete as male, but perhaps if it can be shown that the athlete's body is not virilised then they could compete subject to 2nmol/l T
CAIS - should be allowed to compete as female without restriction
PAIS - ? see virilisation arguments above and T below 5 nmol/l

Essentially in any case where an athlete has been born with testicular tissue and processes androgens then there needs to be a process whereby those who are virilised are excluded from female sport and those who are not virilised can compete. This should apply also to trans, so that those with normal male bodies such as Rachel McKinnon can never compete as female

Dutee Chand is an Indian 100m runner, who this year broke the women's national record, and also holds the national record for 60m. Chand has Hyperandrogenism, and is only allowed to compete against women, because of the stupid, bonkers rules set by the IAAF, which prevent athletes having these conditions competing in the 400m, 800m and 1500m - every other event is OK.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutee_Chand

"I think that women with PAIS are overrepresented in sport but I am not sure that they should be excluded."

They should be excluded from women's sport. Anyone with 46 XY DSD should be excluded from women's sport.

I’m not an expert by any means but I’m open to the idea that CAIS might not have the advantage that PAIS has (although there is some evidence that CAIS people are taller on average than XX women, so more research might well produce evidence that PAIS people should be excluded from the women’s category).

I think the men’s category should be renamed as ‘open’ though, so that XY people who have female legal status can be easily included.

I’ve found Noel Plum’s arguments about intersex and trans athletes useful because he’s less emotive than I am about the subject (my immediate instinct is that anyone with a Y chromosome should fuck off).

Plum argues that it’s male puberty that causes the advantage - I worry that rules about that could result in the unintended consequence of more paediatric transition (not that I believe a child who is given a GNHRa to prevent natural puberty will row up to be an elite athlete, I just worry about the potential generation of unofficia; experiments that will be required to prove that).

Oops - ‘evidence that both PAIS and CAIS people should be excluded from the women’s category’

"They should be excluded from women's sport. Anyone with 46 XY DSD should be excluded from women's sport."

Chromosomes aren't they key, testicles are.

You can be XX and have testicles, so any argument that is based on chromosomes is misguided IMO.

If you have a genetic disorder that means you were born without testes then I don't see any overwhelming fairness need to say 'you cannot compete'.

It seems clear to me that Caster Semenya does not belong because 5-ARD does not reduce testosterone, but that does not mean we have to exclude every intersex person just on the basis of chromosomes, especially when their body appears to be female.

Thanks ShootsFruits - that is very helpful but really complicated!

Can you explain why only the 400, 800 and 1500m are included in the new rules? Is there any biological reason or is just that's where the biggest cluster of 5-ARD-type 2 athletes are likely to be found?

Costs. The IOC couldn’t afford court cases for all categories so they started with the ones that have been most affected.

Ah okay, makes sense 👍