Caster Semenya's case to be taken to ECHR

[OhHolyJesus]

This is going to be very interesting.

twitter.com/caster800m/status/1364881945759522816?s=21

Not regardless of other peoples rights on any of those grounds though.

Imaginé being raised your whole life as a woman and girl, training hard enough to compete at a professional level and then having the whole world thinking that your sex and gender are a matter for them to debate.

None of you lot get to decide wether Semenya is woman enough.

Those of you insisting they will complain to the press if they don’t refer to her as a man should be ashamed of yourselves.
I can only imagine how much you would revel in the same public humiliation.

There’s a real person in the middle of this

Her opinion matters... unlike yours.

But that article is referring to "rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention". You need to locate the right or freedom to participate in a particular sport category first.

There’s a real person in the middle of this

There are lots of real people in the middle of this. Every woman Semenya competes against is also a real person. They all have to be considered.

That wasn't a comment on merits but on eligibility under relevant provisions. Here, discrimination on either sex or other status would seem to be relevant. Rights aren't absolute but subject to other considerations and permissible restrictions.

@HerrenaHarridan

Imaginé being raised your whole life as a woman and girl, training hard enough to compete at a professional level and then having the whole world thinking that your sex and gender are a matter for them to debate.

None of you lot get to decide wether Semenya is woman enough.

Those of you insisting they will complain to the press if they don’t refer to her as a man should be ashamed of yourselves.
I can only imagine how much you would revel in the same public humiliation.

There’s a real person in the middle of this

Her opinion matters... unlike yours.

Imagine being raised your whole life as a woman and girl, training hard enough to compete at a professional level and then have the whole world watch as you are defeated time and time again by someone whose genetic makeup gives them an unfair advantage that you can never hope to beat because it gives them physical characteristics including bone length, pelvic floor configuration, heart size and lung capacity that women do not possess.

Seymenya chooses to compete in women’s sports. Chooses to further a career at the expense of women with normal levels of testosterone. And as a result chooses to accept the worlds scrutiny.

Semenya was not raised as a female. When attending their Christian (might’ve been Catholic, can’t recall) school, Semenya wore the boy’s uniform of button down oxford and trousers. Girls at the school were assigned a uniform of a skirt.

Semenya on left: i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/08/21/article-1208227-0622E334000005DC-724_468x604.jpg

One of Semenya’s teachers came forward and reported that Semenya was treated as and referred to as male at the school.

Do you really believe a female student in that environment— a traditional parochial school in SA in the 90s— could’ve demanded wearing the male uniform and her request granted?

The myth that Semenya was “raised female” is a carefully constructed one, long upheld by the SA sports orgs and media. It isn’t true.

Yea there is a real person in the middle of this, lots of real people in fact. All of them real as far as I'm aware.

Some of them are liars and cheats. Some aren't.

Here's a real person, post-race interview from 2016.

Drug testing is very intrusive should that stop too?

Yes. Let''s make people eligible for elite sporting events based only on what they say - that way we can be inclusive.

Rolls eyes

@NecessaryScene1

But that article is referring to "rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention". You need to locate the right or freedom to participate in a particular sport category first.

Article I imposes an obligation on member states to "secure to everyone within their jurisdiction the rights and freedoms defined in section I of this Convention.

Section I contains articles 2 to 18.

Always useful to have details about the case under discussion. An article here gives quite a bit, both background and current:
www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/olympics/caster-semenya-takes-case-to-european-court-of-human-rights-in-final-effort-to-return-to-800m/ar-BB1e0Iks

' “Caster asks the Court to find that Switzerland has failed in its positive obligations to protect her against the violation of her rights under the European Convention on Human Rights,” her lawyers said.'

Interesting to note that there have been previous sports cases before the court:

' It’s unclear if the human rights court would be able to hear Semenya’s case before the delayed Tokyo Olympics, which might be her last. The games are set to open on July 23. Previous sports cases that have gone to the European Court of Human Rights have taken years to be decided." '

HerrenaHarridan

I suggest that you read up about Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui.
They have a few things in common. They all competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics. They all competed in the women's 800m. They all had podium places to receive medals.
They all had the same 46XY DSD, which means that they all went through a MALE puberty.
Finally, the opinion of every person commenting here matters every bit as much as that of Caster Semenya.

I'm curious if people think those with 46, XY disorders should also be prevented from using women's toilets/changing rooms etc, and if this includes everyone with such a disorder including Swyers Syndrome, who do not go through normal male puberty, usually have female appearing genitalia and are most often raised and identify as girls despite their chromosones?

"None of you lot get to decide wether Semenya is woman enough." (sic)

You're absolutely right. Science gets to decide.

JJ1968, why does this also have to become a thread about who uses what toilet?

As always, the issue comes down to what is meant by female/woman, and what SHOULD be meant by female/woman.

If the true factual meaning is used as the defining factor for female sports categories, then upbringing is irrelevant, presentation is irrelevant, pronouns are irrelevant, identity is irrelevant, clothes worn at school is irrelevant, what your family thought you were is irrelevant, even what is on your birth certificate is not the ultimate factor and should be subject to challenge where there is evidence that it may not be in accordance with biological sex . How one has always thought of oneself is irrelevant. The age at which one discovered one's condition is irrelevant.

And hormone levels are irrelevant too. A woman with undetectable oestrogen is exactly as female as a woman with high oestrogen, no more, no less. And a man with higher oestrogen than either remains 100% male. The same applies to testosterone. You cannot measure a hormone and conclude a person is 'more male' or 'more female'. What categorises a person as male or female is an entirely different criterion.

Female is understood to mean the sex class that has developed along one of two distinct types of evolved reproductive anatomy: ovaries and not testes. These are the primary sex organs, the gonads.
The secondary implications that flow from being the sex that has testes vs the sex that has ovaries are profound.

If female is distilled back to its actual biological meaning and all misconceptions are stripped away (ones personal beliefs, or identity, or sense of self, or upbringing, or superficial appearance, or hormone levels) then the category is clear. We have allowed vestiges of other, false ideas to remain influential in the category of what it means to be female, and that's a mistake.

If ever there was a time for clarity about what female actually means and why we provide different categories for the sexes, the time is now.

jj1968 - another attempted derail????

I’d just ignore it, andy.

Talk about sport, please, or bore off, jj. I can’t be doing with your details today.

*derails.

I found Ross Tucker's podcasts useful to understand CS case. Tucker was part of the initial team of experts argueing for CS so his first podcast on the subject is skewed by his position on that legal team.

play.acast.com/s/realscienceofsport/the-caster-semenya-decision-explained

However his second podcast after the verdict is quite different in tone. Anyone who has spent any time reading and listening to RT should know he is evidence based all the way. World Athletics basically fucked up. The won the moral arguement that XY athletes should not compete with XX athletes but were asked by the Court to provide evidence, and that's where they failed. They could only provide evdence for a limited number of events which is why CS was still eligible to compete in womens athletics is she moved up or down distances.

play.acast.com/s/realscienceofsport/thecaseofcaster-whyprincipletrumpedbadevidence-herfuture-whatitmeansforthefutureofwomenssport

Here's a real person, post-race interview from 2016

That's heartbreaking. I suppose eventually other countries will need to enter their own xy athletes into these events in order to be able to compete and some events will become so dominated by xy people that there will be no place for women at all even at the lower levels. I wonder at what point women will resign themselves to the fact that to compete fairly they will need to (once again) create new categories for xx people.

WeareJackie I find Ross tucker is so good on this and also someone who bent over backwards to be inclusive and ‘bekind’ but found that wasn’t enough. He has argued long & patiently with TRA on twitter and at first I think he thought he could set out the science and a compromise could be reached. Then he realised it was impossible.

As reached on the also highly contentious Shamima Begum case today in the Supreme Court: the individual rights and freedoms of one person do not trump the rights, needs and interests of everyone else.

And women and their resources aren't something belonging to the male sex, conditionally on loan to women only if and when male people don't need them. This kind of misogyny is unacceptable.

@Sophoclesthefox

I’d just ignore it, andy.

Talk about sport, please, or bore off, jj. I can’t be doing with your details today.

I don't really think it's much of a derail, it cuts to the heart of whether Semanya and other athletes with similar conditions are women or not, and whether it is humane to prevent them from taking part in women's sports or using women's spaces. Since several posters seem quite adament she is a man, and should be excluded from women's sport on that basis, then it seems quite pertinent to ask if this means she should be considered a man for all purposes - and if not why not?

Surely at the heart of this debate is whether intersex people have the right to determine their own sex.