Frustrating article in Sunday Times about Semenya

[mcduffy]

For some reason my app won't let me comment but a few people have corrected him that CS is male, with a DSD that only affects males.

Caster Semenya: It is right to insist runner suppresses hormones

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f5bd5bf8-28b7-11ee-b1db-1689eb0f258e?shareToken=989965662d455b8a518a1346ed7c5ef7

I thought that was relatively clear, as these things go.

the results showed that Semenya was a DSD (difference in sex development) athlete who had internal testes and produced testosterone at typically male levels.

And making the comparison with the intrusiveness drug testing, which I've not seen before in the press.

And I agree with the structure of his argument, which is that Semenya should be treated the same as transgender males.

It's just that neither should be permitted to compete, testosterone reduction or no. He didn't attempt to address why that should be permitted, but I'm fairly content with him just making the "same as transgender" argument.

I cant see the comments, but thanks for the share token. Absolutely maddening!

"All three are DSD athletes who naturally produce male-level testosterone." BECAUSE THEY ARE MEN.

As for "Women with internal testes...", good lord! If journalists would simply say 'these athletes are male', the public might have a chance to understand wtf is happening. The resultant uproar would cause this things to unravel much more quickly than it is. Yet still we have this sickening pretence that it's about trying to accommodate women with DSDs in women's sports.

Odd article. It seems like he’s trying to compromise between lies and the truth. Why not mention the Y chromosome as well as the testes and the typical male levels of testosterone?

Why say that conducting a “sex test” was wrong - presumably they just ran a DNA test on a cheek swab?

And why have male athletes in female sports at all, whether they suppress their testosterone or not?

It’s David Walsh. Spent the first part of his career trying his best to point out Lance Armstrong’s cheating using extra testosterone, spent the most recent part of his career pretending testosterone doesn’t matter if males who want us to think they’re women have too much of it. He clearly hates women.

That David Walsh? Well that's strange. I thought he was all about the truth.
I can guess what's changed.

What a very muddled argument, it must be uncomfortable perched on that fence. Only in the last couple of paragraphs does he vaguely acknowledge that it isn’t just about the T it’s about the inherent advantage that the athletes with this particular DSD have over female athletes because they have been through male puberty, though he doesn’t in fact actually say that outright. You could reduce the T to nothing and those advantages still remain. And does not mention that these are male bodied athletes, male, not female, who should not be included in female events because every cell in their bodies says they are men. And still calls CS she. Use they rather than she if you really have to, but I would expect a journalist to be more careful with the truth.

I am interested in the statistic he has unearthed, I wish I knew from where :

DSD occurrence in the general population 1 in 20,000

DSD occurrence in elite women’s athletics 7 in 1,000

If this is true then National and International athletic governing bodies need to get their act together fast before Paris.

I am interested in the statistic he has unearthed, I wish I knew from where :

DSD occurrence in the general population 1 in 20,000

DSD occurrence in elite women’s athletics 7 in 1,000

I think he has misrepresented this article:

https://www.gimjournal.org/article/S1098-3600(21)00234-3/pdf

which I and a few others have posted before. The incidence of CAIS is 1 in 20,000 in the general population (probably) which isn’t what Semenya has. When they did testing at the sequential Olympics they found a consistent rate of males around the 1 in 423 rate, which would be 2 per 1000 roughly.

But then they stopped testing. We know there were at least 3 in Rio🙄. So it could well be higher now.

Sorry to clarify, the 1 in 423 rate was all types of male 46XY DSDs including CAIS, PAIS, 5ARD. See tables 1 and 2 in link.

david Walsh is a full on supporter of TW in women’s sports

<a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/2021.06.27-182757/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/debates-over-laurel-hubbards-olympic-games-inclusion-must-accept-that-she-has-earned-right-to-compete-z2c7fzcc7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://archive.ph/2021.06.27-182757/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/debates-over-laurel-hubbards-olympic-games-inclusion-must-accept-that-she-has-earned-right-to-compete-z2c7fzcc7

A lot of people - especially men with sweet f a to lose - really really really want there to be a fair way for males to compete with women, which is how you get muddle like this, but there just isn’t. No matter how progressive you are, no matter how left wing, no matter how kind and compassionate- they will simply always be stronger than us, and shove out a deserving female every time they compete.

There is simply no way to make space for tw in women’s sports without ruining it for women.

To compete at 800m, Semenya and other DSD athletes again needed to take a contraceptive pill that brought their testosterone level into the female range.
Semenya challenged this at CAS and lost. She then went before a Swiss federal panel and lost again. Something Christina Kiss, chairwoman of that panel, said in her summing-up struck me as getting to the heart of things: “It is impossible to implement some rights without restricting others.”

I feel sorry for athletes who aren’t eligible to compete in the female category. If only there was another category they could compete in.

He is friends with Pippa the cyclist and that has compromised his judgement. Like most of the people who make these kinds of laboured articles, he doesn't want someone he likes to suffer, same as many tying themselves in knots have a "trans child" - instead of examining the cultural and social issues with a clear head, they morph into "how could we wave a magic wand and solve all of the problems for my friend" mode. It's blinkered and a bit unbecoming of a senior journalist, but there we go.

DSD occurrence in the general population 1 in 20,000. DSD occurrence in elite women’s athletics 7 in 1,000

I think it's also important to point out that they appear to be more common among populations living in sub saharan Africa.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27754965/#:~:text=Conclusions%3A%20DSD%20is%20not%20an,the%20third%20most%20common%20disorder.

One of the points that I think is sometimes neglected here is that Caster Semenya and other Black African athletes with a DSD often have a huge amount of support at home because their fellow citizens feel that black women athletes' appearance and physiology are judged by standards set for white people - especially men.

I also think there are some supporters of transgender women in women's sports (like David Walsh) who deliberately confuse the subject, knowing that many people believe there are racist undercurrents to decisions about testosterone levels for competing in women's sport. They know that many of their readers are very sincere people who are strongly opposed to all forms of discrimination but who don't know much about DSDs. There was an article in The Athletic about Barbra Bambra last year where it was clear that some posters assumed the article was about a transgender athlete, not a person with a DSD.

And for what it's worth, I thought Walsh's example of the testing that athletes in major sports have to do was missing the point. It IS onerous - Adam Peaty spoke about it recently and the ex footballer Rio Ferdinand faced a temporary ban when it was judged that he deliberately missed a test - but all athletes have to do it. No-one has an advantage.

This seems to be a very tiny start to a little reverse ferret. He's finally noticed all the glaring problems with men in women's sport so is agonisingly acknowledging the elephant in the room without speaking about it. And thus has written an incoherent ramble .

Thankyou , that article is an interesting read . I can understand how the crass, undignified and intrusive “testing” that was done historically led to a distaste for the process and has undoubtably left a legacy of caution that still prevails. But things have moved on since then, and even since the article was first published in 2000, testing can be completed and verified in a far less intrusive , and hopefully more accurate way.

In addition I expect that with improved training and sports science understanding most national sports governing bodies are very conscious of the physiology of their athletes and are probably well aware of their genetic makeup and implications for performance ,even if they choose to ignore or minimise it. I think it is also probably safe to say that few female athletes appearing on the track or field at national and international level would be surprised by the results of a randomised genetic test.

Attitudes towards cheating from drug use have rightly hardened, and surely as increased realisation of the ways some athletes own genetic anomalies are being condoned as a more subtle method of cheating is grasped and understood, then this too will be widely condemned.

I thought it was interesting that in an anonymous survey of female athletes during the Atlanta Games in 1996 , 94% of the female athletes said they were not made anxious by testing, and 82% said it should continue. I wonder what those percentages would look like today.

And the median age of presentation was 10 months. So no more surprises when teenage female athletes suddenly appear on the world stage with no one previously realising they were genetic males.

Caster Semenya and other Black African athletes with a DSD often have a huge amount of support at home because their fellow citizens feel that black women athletes' appearance and physiology are judged by standards set for white people - especially men.

I know Semenya got a lot of support at home but this reasoning sounds doubtful. I don’t believe African people think that African women look like men, or that Semenya somehow stands in for female black women.

These male athletes don’t look female by anyone’s standards. When people roll out tropes about “judging black women’s appearance and physiology” with respect to male athletes it sounds wildly racist. How is saying stuff like that about Caster Semenya (who is male and quite obviously so) not the same as saying that black women look like men?

I think this angle is probably being played up by savvy African movers and shakers to simultaneously exploit Western racism and Western fear of being racist.

"Contraceptive" pill. Snort.

Presumably referring to the fact that the anti-androgen pills prescribed to, e.g., women with PCOS also double up as contraception. But really, whom is he kidding.

crass, undignified and intrusive

Shame it never apparently occurred to anyone how crass, undignified and instrusive the results would be for women if they stopped sex testing...

DarkDayForMN

If you look at coverage in South Africa, it is very much presented as a controversy about racism, not sex.

https://www.iol.co.za/sport/athletics/actions-against-caster-semenya-an-injustice-and-violation-of-human-rights-f1a53a8b-114f-4484-8988-3d449a9e8d5a

Caster Semenya is treated as a star and features in celebrity articles, the same way as Jessica Ennis Hill or Rebecca Adlington do here.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/celeb-news/breaking-caster-semenya-daughter-turns-four-photos-11-july-2023/

Black women athletes DO get negative comments about their appearance. Serena Williams often pointed this out. Even here yesterday, somebody asked if Wendi Renard, French footballer, was a biological woman (she is).

I just think it's important to understand why there is a difference in how Semenya is viewed on this board and in her own country.

It seems pretty reasonable that the average person in South Africa isn't any more savvy about the medical aspects of DSDs than the average person in the UK or US.

I think quite a lot of people, maybe most, are just really at sea with that kind of discussion. Not only d they don't know the right answers, they don't know the right questions.

It means there is a lot of scope for the media to shape opinion, and those who influence the media to shape opinion.

As far as the article, to me it seems like this guy is possibly not understanding that a dsd is not "intersex" in the way many people believe. So he's still thinking there must be a solution.

Oh I think Mr Walsh, if his is the article you are referencing, well knows the physiology that someone with a particular DSD that only applies to men , and a transwoman have in common, and it is nothing to do with the kindly coverall of non existent “intersex”.

His agenda is about allowing male bodies to participate in women’s sporting events, and the way he does that is to smudge the edges, use ambiguous and downright misleading language , ignore the biology and scoot over anything which might sound as though male bodies could possibly have an advantage over female bodies.

Read the other article of his above about “shy” middle aged Lauren Hubbard, who despite his crippling shyness muscled his way into the NZ womens weightlifting team , knowing this cost a woman her rightful place as an Olympian, then has the cheek to “shyly” admit that he knew he never had a chance of winning gold, or any medal, but, it is implied, just wanted to be recognised as a female weightlifter, despite already having had a bite at the cherry in his previously unsuccessful career as a male weightlifter.

Nothing in the article about his age, when age for women in a strength event like weightlifting would be a huge and very limiting element as they approach middle age and the menopause . Nothing about the young woman whose place in the training and support programme he stole and who then missed out on her chance to show the world what she could do, plus the opportunity to earn valuable sponsorship and to eventually tell her Olympian story to her children and grandchildren. Nothing about the inherent unfairness of a body that has been through male puberty and still, despite his age, maintains that muscle mass and strength.