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?

Most transvestigators are MRAs and conspiracy theorists - it's quite the rabbit hole.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg54kd/a-wild-investigation-of-transvestigators-the-people-who-think-celebs-are-all-trans

@toomanytrees to answer your questions about body composition, it’s a combination of genetic selection and training. Athletes tend to be small-chested because girls with large breasts tend not to progress in athletics because even with the best sports bras it’s uncomfortable and detrimental to performance. Combine this with body fat percentages typically 15% or lower (compared to 30% for a non-obese non-athlete) and it’s hardly surprising that they are small chested.

Muscularity is another issue. Sprinters and throwers are typically very muscular as it is a power sport so theyl do heavy weight training in addition to track work. However even endurance athletes appear extremely muscular due to their lower body fat percentage - the low body fat greatly increases the appearance of muscularity. This is particularly apparent at the end of a race where we will often see extreme vascularity (veins ‘popping out’). Photos of highly vascularised athletes are often used to imply doping etc whereas in fact it is just a normal post-race phenomenon.

Finally, many people, including I suspect many contributors to this thread, are simply unused to seeking athletic female bodies. They assume that what is in fact normal is the result of drugs, or that athletes must be ‘other’ hence the accusations of actually being males with DSDs.

What is depressing is that while there are several obvious candidates for doping suspicion in athletics at the moment, yet again we see black athletes being accused of cheating simply based on their appearance. It’s a trope that has been around for as long as black people have been permitted to compete and is CONSTANTLY levelled at black athletes in all disciplines. If you don’t recognise it as racist then I’m afraid there’s no helping you.

Why is racism being raised on a thread about male v female competition? Black women do not look more masculine than White women, obviously!

The fact that most male 46 XY DSD elite athletes that we know about (eg Margaret Wambui and Francine Niyonsaba) are Black is most likely down to social factors such as the greater prevalence, in White-majority countries, of interventions before puberty (gonadectomy and oestrogen administration). (I'm more in the 'if it's not broke, don't fix it' camp, but then I feel the same way about giving anti-androgens to young athletes.)

Wambui and Niyonsaba look masculine because they are male, not because they are Black.

As for the young woman whose performance inspired the thread, we can't find out just by 'research on the Internet' whether she (or anyone else) is male, because WA keeps medical information about DSD competitors confidential, as it jolly well ought to. To that extent, the thread is pointless. But it did bring out some interesting information about the regulations, so thanks, OP.

Yes @NerrSnerr I thought the recent GB selection for the Olympic marathon was very interesting in that context!

Anyway... Yes @PermanentTemporary agree with your assessment. The nature of the questioning has been very unpleasant and I say that as a fully signed up member of team terf.

They are allowed, who is telling you otherwise?

I don't think they are now @MrGHardy. The rule change catches them. What are you referring to?

The IAAF are telling me otherwise. Transwomen who have gone through male puberty are not allowed to complete in elite female competitions. So they can take part in non elite competitions, and I guess perhaps in the future someone who transitioned as a child and took puberty blockers might compete, but at the moment you're not going to see transwomen competing in major championships.

100%. Racist to the core and in true MN style the thread and racist posts remain.

@MrGHardy who is telling you they can compete?

This is the World athletics policy

worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=c50f2178-3759-4d1c-8fbc-370f6aef4370.pdf&urlslug=C3.5%20–%20Eligibility%20Regulations%20Transgender%20Athletes%20–%20effective%2031%20March%202023

tiny sample but here are a couple of pictures of Caster S standing on diverse podiums. spot the correlation between ethnicity and femininity (hint: there isn't one).

Black women are feminine,

well, all women are feminine. but anyway it's really disingenuous the way TRA's conflate gender criticism with racism. plenty of white women have attracted comments about their possible gender (see examples below). Of course a compulsory one-off cheek swab in an athlete's first top level meeting would remove almost all the whispers.

Being GC isn't racist.
But the disproportionate scrutiny of black athletes is.

almost nobody on these forums does that. maybe a few knuckle draggers on 4chan and the like. Caster Semenya & friends have been rightly called out for being male. false accusations are very rare indeed.

If there have been false accusations @Betweenthe2 can point them out, hopefully. I tried looking, but it's hard to Google.

I'm a bit confused by this comment. This thread is an example of a 5 foot 3 black woman being accused of being male because she excelled and has short hair.

It's only one example though. It also contains examples of white women who were also accused, black women who were accused and turned out to be male, and photos showing that Caster Semenya looks like a bloke and female black athletes don't (so what's all this nonsense about European beauty standards?)

I agree that we shouldn't be speculating about individuals at all, because that's private medical information.

My bad, you were speaking solely about athletics. There are still plenty of sports where they use a testosterone limit.

Caster is a bloke surely? No denying that.