Surprisingly clear news article from Australia re XY humans competing at Olympics in female sports

[StealthSpinach]

I was extremely surprised to see such a clear, well articulated article in an Australian newspaper.

I was not surprised to see TWAW from IOC representatives.

I truly hope the article writers (named on the website) do not get abuse and vitriol - although I doubt that will be the case, unfortunately.

I do hope the writers publish any abuse they do receive.

If any females are physically or otherwise hurt by males (XY/DSD inclusive), I hope every TWAW IOC official endorsing their inclusion is held responsible.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/sport/olympics/paris-olympics-2024-xy-factor-puts-games-in-turmoil/news-story/11e7a22a6514709eb1d538eebeceb0ac

What could the results of the fight tomorrow be?

Is the media waiting to see if the XY person wins?

Or if the XY person throws doesn’t win the match (see - the XY person didn’t even win, what are all you XX people complaining about?)

Or if the female is injured or worse?

Will the IOC police the words the press use then?

I do think that this era of activism around transgender athletes and people in general will be reviewed in the light of pseudoscience and how activists managed to convince so many people and organisations based on the principles of philosophical belief and no solid evidence. History will not look kindly back on this because how can it? How can the inclusion of a sub group that has such high risk to the group being coerced into including that group be considered righteous, except by believers of that philosophical principle?

And when the answers are clear as to who ultimately it benefits, it is never female people as a collective that benefit.

So.... who exactly does the inclusion of male athletes with medical conditions and philosophical beliefs benefit? The answer is clearly not the female half of the world's population in my mind.

However, I am open to anyone who can articulate a coherent and evidenced argument as to the benefits. If anyone has those arguments please post them.

Caster Semenya is on record as having a DSD that only affects males:

https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/CAS_Award_-redacted-_Semenya_ASA_IAAF.pdf

We don't know whether or not Caster has fathered children or the state of his testes.. That's the speculation

That's true.

Although I'm pretty certain I read about another man who had the same DSD, who did father children. They had to extract sperm under a procedure, rather than in the 'normal way'.

But no, we don't know if they are biologically Semenya's children. But if I was a betting woman, I'd wager that they are.

So would I, but neither of those potential pieces of information are in the public domain, or relevant to whether he should be in female competition. He's male, end of.

Blimey.

I just got to the part where Pape changed the direction of her thoughts which were initially in agreeable that Semenya shouldn't be racing against female athletes!

“During my studies, we read a book written by a feminist biologist called Anne Fausto-Sterling,” Pape said.
“It's about the complexity of biological sex and how our ideas about sex as a strict binary have become reflected in science. Fausto-Sterling used the case of sport as her opening example.
“She explained how the actions of sports governing bodies in fact reveal the complexity of biological sex, even though their various interventions are aimed at trying to obscure it,” she continued.
“I realised that in 2009, when I competed against Caster Semenya, I had an opportunity to learn something, but back then I had no idea that there was this history of previous efforts to regulate who gets to compete as a female athlete.

Fausto-Sterling! Who famously has confessed to making up sex categories as a joke?

FFS. The ONLY regulation about who could compete as a female before the IOC removed sex testing was to be female!

Here is the background.

www.nature.com/articles/gim2000258.pdf?origin=ppub&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100045542&CJEVENT=f4d4c8630a0411ed831b01a80a1c0e11

Summary

A desire to protect female athletes from unfair competition and to reduce public innuendoes about the sexual identity of trained female athletes resulted in on-site sexverification at the Olympic Games and other competitions beginning in the 1960s. These good intentions resulted at first in demeaning public scrutiny in "nude parades." Attempts at less invasive approaches resulted in scientifically invalid methods using buccal cells for Barr bodies and later PCR-based analyses of Y-specific DNA. These approaches stigmatized females with such conditions as androgen insensitivity, XY mosaicism, and
5-a-reductase-deficiency. Although laboratory-based sex de-
termination caused clear scientific and ethical injustices to fe- male athletes, and the IAAF discontinued the process, the IOC continued to defend their policy. Following the 1996 Centen- nial Olympic Games in Atlanta, strong voices arose from the IOC World Congress on Women and Sport, the Women's Sports Foundation, and the Athletes Commission of the IOC. These organizations reiterated to the IOC that chromosomal- based gender testing is irrelevant, costly, and highly discrimi- nating; that it has caused unknown numbers of female athletes emotional and social injury; and that on-site blanket gender verification via genetic screening at Olympic Games should be abolished. Its unnecessary cost was stated by those responsible for screening in Atlanta in 1996. In the summer of 1999, the IOC conditionally rescinded its 30-year requirement for on- site gender screening of all women entered in female-only events at the Olympic Games, starting with Sydney in 2000.We applaud the IOC's revision and its intent to protect the rights and privacy of female competitors and to maintain its stan- dards of fairness for all athletes. We endorse the continued education of athletes, sports governors, medical delegates, and team physicians concerning the biological complexities of sex differentiation. Since blanket, lab-based screening for gender and fair play is both medically unsound and functionally as well as ethically inconsistent, we hope that the policy stated for the Millennial Games in Sydney will remain.

It is only because of these male athletes that sex testing by way of swabs was stopped. No thought has been given to the symmetry of what these groups argued for. They argued for the rights and dignity of male people with little thought of how female athletes felt.

These are the authors back in 2000

Louis J.Elsas,MD',
Arne Ljungqvist,MD',
Malcolm A.Ferguson-Smith,MA,FRCP
JoeLeigh Simpson,MD',
Myron Genel,MD,
AlisonS.Carlson,BA
ElizabethFerris,MBBS',
Albert de la Chapelle,MD,PhD
Anke A. Ehrhardt, phD

Yes. Males with 5ARD have been recorded in the past as having been able to provide viable sperm and father a child.

True.

There are things we definitely don't know - we don't know that these boxers are male and although we know that Caster Semenya has children, we don't know (and nor should we) how those children came to exist. It's easy to overstate what we know in upsetting circumstances.

The list of identified DSDs is long but finite. It should not be difficult at all for the IOC to make regulations about which DSDs do not bar entry to female events, without hanging individual athletes like CS out to dry with their medical history in the public domain.

And the link between trans campaigners and 'intersex' is about bodily autonomy, not a desire for surgery. The history of imposed surgery on people with DSDs really us abhorrent (should read Middlesex again).

Madeleine Pape's interview was really interesting. So is her work, ive been skimming a few papers. She's not wrong that focusing on eg facial appearance as a proxy for sex, as in tech protocols defined by a very small group of Caucasian and Asian-dominated, make dominated people, could be a recipe for racial and sexual exclusion (remember the Apple health apps that didn't include a menstrual tracker?) But as always, I come down to the fact that sex and sexed reproduction remains a reality and trying to pretend it isn't disadvantages women.

More from Madeleine Pape

"Pape began to form friendships with women who had high testosterone, which forced her to ask herself, ‘Was I willing to recognise my friends as women outside of sport, yet deny them the right to compete alongside me?’"

"She realised that the answer was no, and by 2015 her views had evolved so dramatically that she testified in support of Indian athlete Dutee Chand, when she appealed against World Athletics’ (formerly the International Athletics Associations Federation) set of rules that rendered her ineligible to compete on the track as a woman, due to her naturally high testosterone."

Hardly the action of an impartial person who is responsible for influencing and setting international sports policy at the highest level.

There's lots of nuances to these stories, there is the obvious possibility that they are simply trans in which case rules are in place to deal with the scenario (it's up to the individual sports though not the IOC) but there's also a range of DSD situations where male puberty may not have happened, or happened fully, may have been raised female from birth etc for which rules are in place too. I don't know what category these boxers are, but the rules don't seem to be fit for purpose in these cases

Of course there is danger in racial profiling. Hence in the past, ALL female athletes were tested for eligibility for the Olympics.

The argument that those athletes are subject to indignities, loss of privacy and danger of medical intervention should be addressed by going back to these simple tests. Where needed, if a female athlete has a chromosomal DSD but is a female person with ovaries and not testes, that may require further testing.

However, in all these arguments that have been used, the harm and indignities for female athletes needs to also be balanced. I have not seen anywhere that these original activists considered that in depth. It was all based on philosophical belief that if someone was told they were female at birth, then that is all that is needed to be included.

It was and it still is so fucked up to dismiss female athletes the way they have been dismissed.

And the link between trans campaigners and 'intersex' is about bodily autonomy, not a desire for surgery. The history of imposed surgery on people with DSDs really us abhorrent (should read Middlesex again).

The open letter that the Intersex Society, I think it was, published online was about surgery.

I think it was GIRES who targeted them relentlessly to form an alliance. They wanted them to go on a programme like Panorama as a unified front. The society refused, but the targeting did not stop.

They eventually published an open letter online detailing the issue. Including, if memories serves me, copies of the actual letters sent by GIRES.

They wanted to campaign for genital surgery, together, in case that's not clear.

Obviously, not something that the society would agree to.

Oh I see. Because the fastest 800m mens is way faster than the women's. But you meant the men competing against women.

Well, I guess I am saying that they are men competing against women.

There is nothing different between Caster Semenya and another male in sporting performance potential. Genital differences do not make a male athlete less able to perform at the same level as other male athletes. Or do you have found evidence that shows there is a difference?

Semenya has testosterone levels in the normal range. So, why is Semenya’s performance lauded? Why isn’t that Rio race considered to be won ‘by a man’, except for compelled language that some people (and organisations such as MN) feel they should use to obfuscate that the established word used for a male person is ‘man’.

in what way is Semenya ‘not a man’?

Back in the late 90s early 2000's, when I was at university with a very prominent journalism program that accounted for a large part of the student body. I lived with many of them in my first year and had classes with a lot of them too.

These were not people who were ever likely to fight against big institutional narratives. Most of them weren't creative thinkers, they didn't particularly have a lot of deep insight into issues, and they absolutely "identified" with institutions like the national broadcaster and certain political parties. They were also resolutely middle class kids with university educated parents.

Many of them went on to work for the national broadcaster.

Exactly, it took so long for me to reach this point - that they're actually men - not "special women" - just because of the confusing language, and others just looking at the headlines briefly will have the same issue.

We do know that the boxers failed sex verification tests. Only a male would fail.

We do know that someone with a male DSD is male.
There should be no regulations which do not bar entry for males in female competition, DSD or no. It's the female category.

Caster Semenya put himself and his condition in the public domain by mounting a legal challenge to the testosterone limiting regime he was supposed to follow.
That's how we know he has a male DSD.

Sex testing does not come down to facial features. It's a DNA test using cells collected from the inside of the cheek.

In other words....

"shut up and stop asking (not very) difficult questions, you annoying cis-women"

You have to laugh at the faux innocence.
😝🤣🤣

For years, the story was that CS was a woman who had a disorder causing high T and looked a bit manly. And that any advantage in sports wasn’t her fault. I think a lot of us believed that and were shocked to find out that CS is a male with a male DSD.
The unfortunate word “intersex” has muddied the waters badly too.

Language is so important. Hence the other side's attempts to enforce it.

Oh @NotBadConsidering ... we know they are not women - that should be enough to exclude them from the women's competition.

No woman or man will fail the sex test. The XY or XX one. Gender is not a scientific test, it's a make up word for feelings. There are two males already banned in boxing for being male. But the Olympics is different, they are allowing men to pretend to be women, and allowing the men to compete without a sex test.