Caster Semenya on BBC1 now

[Davros]

I had to turn off

On the BBC website today she says she was "born without a uterus or internal testicles".
I think that's a misprint, or the journalist misheard, and it should say "born without a uterus or with internal testicles". But it's a pretty major misprint.

haha.

seriously though, there are two sports categories, male and female.

CS has most of the possible male primary and secondary sexual characteristics and none, none at all, of the female equivalent.

so whilst the male category arguably isn't a perfect match for her it's the best that's available by a very long way.

end of story.

Being able to identify the difference between male and female is the opposite of "hating" difference 😂

So CS has internal testes, but didn't want them removed. I always thought undescended testicles was a cancer risk, so they are always moved to the correct position, or removed. Does that mean theirs are now outside the body in the correct position? 🤔

I presume your post is projecting? Why would you not accept Caster's difference in the male category?

Wow go Emma! When she did the introduction I thought Oh here we go puff piece. But no - she really worked to get the facts clear and get CS to address the reality of the unfairness to female athletes.

I take the point about CS maybe not being an intellectual match for Emma and not having English as a first language (though I'm not 100% sure if that's right as a proportion of South Africans do speak English and I don't know what CS's first language is). But I don't think all (or even many) of EB's guests are as intelligent as her - it's not a requirement – and many don't have English as their first language. And there was a strong vibe of CS just sticking to the same line and refusing to hear any logic or reality.

If you are going to interview CS on WH, you need to make it about women and EB did that.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this wasn't a deliberate phrasing.

it's my understanding that although Caster may not produce sperm (via a penis), that doesn't necessarily mean they don't actually have it in their testicles.

And that sperm can still be extracted medically.

Yes, I think CS's two children are biological children - so whatever method of sperm retrieval, it's there

Thank you for asking this!

I saw a minute of the preview of the interview on bbc and my first thought was that this person was presenting in a very male way or had stopped trying to look feminine from when I last saw them. A very male person seemed to be being interviewed. I am off to google but is it the case that this is a biological man but the penis development went a bit awry in the womb?

Casters chromosomes are XY. Which means Caster is a man. The cursory social/ medical mis diagnosis which identified Caster as a female is one issue, and one which I think many people have sympathy with.

The real issue is that Casters true genetic makeup was known from a relatively early age and deliberately hidden by South African Athletics officials, the Semanya family and eventually Caster himself ,in order to take advantage of Casters identity to run, win medals and make a very comfortable living . They all continue to lie because it is hard to admit that such deceit has taken place on a world wide stage in full view.

I have no sympathy for someone who has cheated female athletes from their places on the winners rostrum, and who has stolen opportunities from promising women athletes from equally limited backgrounds who have been denied financial and training support to achieve their dreams . And who now has the gall to repeatedly state that the reason female athletes didn’t win against a cheat was that they didn’t try hard enough.

Caster Semanya would be an unknown and mediocre club athlete had he run against other men, his success is based on beating female athletes by using the physical advantages of male pubertal development, generated by the testosterone pumped into his body by his male physiology . Those testes were hidden, but they did their job . Height, bone length, lung and heart size, pelvic development, not having to contend with the monthly ligament loosening that makes injury to female athletes more likely during their monthly cycle ………….

Some of you really really hate difference.

Can you expand? What kind of difference do you think we hate?

If I order a bag of apples to make a pie and one of them is an orange and I notice that and don't think the orange should be in my bag of apples and can't use it in my pie, is that "hating difference"? No. It's just that an orange isn't an apple and doesn't belong in the apple category and isn't what I need. It doesn't mean I hate oranges. It doesn't mean I hate the fact that oranges aren't apples. It's just an understanding of reality.

Understanding that a male is not a female is not "hating difference". It is understanding there are situations where there are differences and sometimes it matters. (And sometimes it doesn't. As a PP said, I don't care if CS thinks CS is a woman and I don't hate CS or think CS should be excluded from most situations - I just care that women are not disadvantaged by CS being put in the female sporting category when CS is not female.)

Difference is everywhere. There are different categories of things with real material differences in every aspect of life. You could not survive without understanding these real and important differences. It does not mean you hate difference.

Saying "you hate difference" to shut people down because they understand reality is really exposing yourself as having very poor reasoning ability. Are you really saying accepting all "difference" is key to being a good person? Does that mean we have to let grown men attend nursery with babies if they identify as a baby because they are just a "different" kind of baby? What about letting an able-bodied person be in the paralympics because they're just a "different kind of disabled". What about Rachel Dolezal? If you don't accept she's black, you "hate difference" right? Can you explain?

Yes, and of course this one "Train Harder"

A male person relies on their testes for all hormone production so removing them would have quite significant physiological effects, it'd amount to a castration.

I expect she now has very regular scans/checkups of some sort. I've seen a candid interview with a CAIS individual who I think said that this is what they chose to do, though in their case they took synthetic female hormones as well in order to get a more feminine appearance.

Well no one knows. Because quite reasonably Caster has decided that although he was happy to be photographed topless in male swimming trunks as an adolescent ( this picture is for some reason included in the book) he has not disclosed information of his external genitalia. He says he has a vagina, which may or may not be true, but if he has no uterus then it is a vaginal opening rather than a functional vagina. Whether he has a clitoris, or how his urethra operates is also something that is for him to know.

It was historically recommended that internal testes be removed because of a perceived higher cancer risk. But the reality now is that the overall cancer risk isn’t huge compared to other males and the ability to monitor better with MRI means they don’t need to be removed for this reason.

I don’t blame Semenya for not removing them or suppressing testosterone. If you deliberately suppress your sex hormones it’s only natural to realise you’ll feel shit, which is why so called “gender-affirming care” for trans people is such an abject failure. There’s a whole cohort of males whose testosterone has been suppressed, either medically or surgically, who feel shit with chronic fatigue, lethargy, low mood and are somehow surprised by this outcome. What did they expect? Or what were they told? Of course you’re going to feel shot when you mess it up like this!

Semenya does not have a vagina, despite Semenya’s claim as such. A vagina is a female sex organ that connects the vulva to the cervix. As Semenya is male, Semenya can’t have a vagina. However males with 5 alpha reductase deficiency can have blind ending pouch that can appear to the uninitiated to be vagina-like. This is the remnant of the failure of development of the male external genitalia.

Any which way you look at it, Semenya does not belong in women’s sport.

According to Wikipedia: Affected males exhibit a broad spectrum of presentation including atypical genitalia (ranging from female-appearing to undervirilized male), hypospadias, and isolated micropenis. The internal reproductive structures (vasa deferentia, seminal vesicles, epididymides and ejaculatory ducts) are normal but testes are usually undescended and prostate hypoplasia is common.

Female appearing does not suggest to me that men with 5ARD develop female genitalia but that there is an absence of male genitalia which looks female.

Yes, it’s most likely that Semenya is equating vagina with vulva. Semenya thinks that because his external genitalia mimic that of a female vulva, it means he has a “vagina” like “other women”. It’s well known that lots of people use the word vagina when they mean vulva, even actual vagina/vulva-owners🤨.

The real insult to women is that cheating athletes like Caster (and the other two men who took the medals in the Rio Womens 800 m) need to be exposed, just as with the transwomen who are trying to argue that their feelings makes them female athletes despite the obvious truth shown by their post male puberty bodies.

We have sex based sports categories in most sports for very good reasons. Female athletes should have the right to compete against their peers so the winner is the person who performs best on the day, not the one with a chromosomal advantage in every cell of their body.

The more light that is shone on this issue the better before we wake up one day and realise that womens sports categories have been turned into a platform for mediocre male athletes, that female sporting records and achievements have been trashed for all time, and that young female athletes will be discouraged from even bothering to train since they know that as far as women are concerned the race is lost before the starting gun fires if male bodied athletes are allowed in the starting blocks.

@MushroomQueen - I read recently that the sex chromosomes determine sex, they don't define it. I confess I'm not too sure of the significance of those two terms in every day life, though.

The bbc article headline caught my attention.

Here's someone who is not afraid to be different as long as they can win against the people they've targeted.

cs sounded very ashamed of being a man different from other men.

Is caster currently allowed to compete? I thought he had been banned from women's sports

The relationship between chromosomes and sex can be complex with DSDs, as it is not just about the chromosomes (which can come in various patterns that are not just XY or XX) but also about the way the body's hormones are picked up and lead to male or female development. The production of sperm or eggs is a key factor (or developing the organs to do that, even if they don't do that).

This is why you can't just say XY always = male and XX always = female. That is true in the vast majority of cases but not always.

This is one of the reasons DSDs have been co-opted into (IMO specious) TRA arguments. Some people with a DSD really are incorrectly "assigned" a sex at birth based on appearance, which is not their true sex. That is nothing like being transgender, but it's used as a "gotcha". It also means that you can be male without being XY and female without being XX, and that is also used to undermine arguments that biological sex is a reality.

This was on the radio at work, I need to listen again on BBC sounds.
Train harder....

No Caster can no longer compete as a woman (but could compete with the others who also have XY chromosomes). Fathering 2 kids (albeit through several attempts at AI is what swings it for me).

There was a ruling in 2019.

Caster doesn't appear to like Seb Coe these days (TBF I'm not sure they were buddies before this).

Behind every cheating male there seems to be a coach who is determined to get medals at any cost.