Another athletics one

[Worldgonecrazy]

I don’t often watch sport but yesterday caught a few minutes of the indoor athletics. There was one athlete in a women’s event who looked VERY male and won by a significant margin. Anyone else see the same thing?

Look at images of Fatima Whitbread in her competition days...it is fairly obvious that people would comment...and they did.

No subject should be off limits. It would be weird and hypocritical to think things but not discuss the reasons why.

But there was no need for this thread. The OP based this thread purely on the athletes looks and did absolutely no research into her background (which is clearly documented online). She is obviously a biological woman and I think the OP knew that all along.

I was responding to the pp who said this questioning is due to men in female sport.... its clearly not.

Its women not accepting other women's body shapes.

I never questioned that Fatima might be a man, which is what you re saying you did.

There is the use of drugs' in sport to gain muscle but thats a completely different issue.

Did you spot a cock and balls in her tight fitting shorts?

It is not about not " accepting" - it is about the visual incongruity of clear exceptions to a general rule.

I think you are being disingenuous for the sake of making a point about "lack of acceptance".

What did you make of Caster Semenya and the continual observations and comments about the clear incongruity - or did you not think there was anything incongruous about Semenya at all?

I think you are arguing in bad faith; trying to somehow 'shame' others for discussing certain issues.

No i am not, why did you think Fatima might be a man? did you think she'd had had surgery?

Cheating in sport and esp men in female sport is terrible for women and sporting participation in general.

I just don't get that just because a woman doesn't fit the stereotype of an athlete, she must be questioned.

What a barrier put up by women against the larger woman from taking part in exercise & competitive sport.

The top competing women in individual events will all have world anti-doping biological passports nowadays, and if there were actual issues then they would be on the World Athletics' radar because their hormone levels would have been flagged.

Nikki Hiltz is well-known to identify as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. Nikki is an extremely prominent figure in the athletics world. Deyenne has been around for years, she's a 60m specialist really though and has been a bit of a "nearly woman" in major championships over 100m, although got silver at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Both are regularly blood and urine tested by WADA.

If you bother to look on either athletes' instagram, you will see that both are clearly biologically female in physique.

World Athletics have banned trans women from female competitions, but they still allow XY males with DSDs, who have gone through male puberty, to compete, provided that they suppress their testosterone levels. It should be acceptable to debate whether this is fair to the female competitors, and whether it's healthy for young people to be encouraged to take anti-androgens for long periods.

It's less acceptable to speculate about whether a specific competitor is one of those males, because that information is kept confidential.

Everybody thought she looked like a man. If you don't know this, then you are being very dishonest and it is impossible to have a genuine discussion with someone who is wilfully pretending otherwise for the sake of making some other tangential point about female stereotypes.

You said Fatima Whitbread is, and certainly was, unusually masculine looking and built in a way that few, if any, other women are

So instead of celebrating a successful female athlete & role model, who had an extremely hard start in life.... the story was she looks like a man (who has obviously had surgery!)

No wonder so few women take part in sport.

I think her story is both despairing and inspiring, and she's a great human being.......but none of that has anything to do with the fact that people thought she looked like a man...and not just because she had short hair and didn't wear make-up etc- but because of her obvious physique and masculine facial features. No-one has suggested she had surgery.

Whitbread is a fabulous woman and rightly celebrated. But people didn't speculate about her looks just to bring her down for not conforming to feminine gender norms - they suspected cheating. And the best way to quell suspicion is to have really good transparent anti-cheating rules.

Nowadays, some sports allow men ('trans women') to compete in the women's classification. And World Athletics allows 46 XY DSD males to compete against females, and keeps it secret. Some speculation is inevitable.

It's not just about sex. If only the IOC had treated fairness in women's sports more seriously in the 80s (and been less worried about offending the Soviet Bloc), a lot of East German swimmers would have been spared terrible health consequences.

i very much admired Fatima as an athlete, all the more so for having read a little about her life story, but understand why people questioned whether she might have been doping given the changes to her appearance over time. she never once tested positive but did look different when younger.

We all change as we mature & in order to be competitive at world level, FW would have needed to spend huge amounts of time in the gym, high protein diets and whatever else was allowable at the time.

Take one look at Chris Hoy as a younger man and then at the 2012 Olympics.

Doping of course is completely different to suggesting she is a man, which is what i think is an awful thing to have done and also what the OP has done with athletes at this years WC too.

There was a thread a while talking about evidence racism linking being GC.
I would say a group of white women speculating that a black women is a man because she does't fit European beauty standards is pretty racist, wouldn't you?

well, it could be. there's definitely a homophobic version, someone like Mauresmo in tennis in her day got a fair few 'man' jibes, not least from a couple of her fellow players. Martina got even more, as already pointed out on this thread.

but for the avoidance of doubt, whether someone is male or not is cut and dried. someone like Caster Semenya gets called male because it's true rather than because of race.

as I said above, I don't really think that anyone sensible, who really knows what to look for, would ever allow ethnicity to confuse them re: sex.

I don't really think that anyone sensible, who really knows what to look for, would ever allow ethnicity to confuse them re: sex.

Yet here we are ...

There's no need to worry. I am frequently told "you can always tell."

There is nasty whiff of misogynoir about this thread, too.

Oh, you again 🙄

This.

it is extraordinary that the sex of a muscular 5’3” black woman gets called into question when she sets a world record, whereas a muscular 6’ white woman setting a world record at the same event (the second in two weeks) is not even commented on.

There has been a concerted attempt on this thread to stop women talking about the appearance of athletes who compete in the women's category. The "be kind" argument has been deployed and when that didn't work, accusations of racism were leveled. I think discussion of an elite athlete's appearance is perfectly legitimate.

Different sports select for different body types. Are these born or made? Why do these women have such small (or seemingly non existent) breasts? Is it (extreme)diet, exercise or genetics? Is there a long term impact on the health? Just because tests haven't found doping, doesn't mean there hasn't been doping: it is an ever evolving competition. It is naive to think that just because there are rules they won't be broken.

Masculine and feminine in this context are simply descriptors of body type without an inherent value judgment. Elite female athletes seem to have more masculine body types for example percentage body fat, muscle mass, etc. It is a legitimate question to ask how it is achieved.

@toomanytrees There is discussing about the impact of training on a woman's body, or different body types for sport, and there is questioning whether someone is a woman because you don't think she looks feminine enough. That's a different thing.

As for stopping women talking - nobody has done that. I considered reporting this thread and wouldn't object to others doing so, but for me I thought I would rather comment about views that TRAs would consider the epitome of gender critical views, that I disagree with despite being gender critical. I think it should be perfectly possible to oppose male people in women's sport without picking on individuals.

@toomanytrees doping is rife in athletics, not as bad as cycling and triathlon but still a big problem- especially with WADA shutting down the South Africa lab. The OP wasn't considering drugs at all when starting this thread- it's obviously purely about gender.

If it was about doping then there are plenty of other athletes around at the moment whose results and improvements are more concerning (a couple of brits spring to mind but they're white and petite so not open to MN scrutiny)