Lord Coe wants to protect women's sport

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Hope he is successful in his attempt to become President of the IOC.

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/ioc-paris-imane-khelif-world-athletics-athens-b2646643.html

Double Olympic champion Coe, who is the president of World Athletics, admits he was “uncomfortable” watching the boxing tournament in Paris, where two athletes disqualified from the previous year’s World Championships for allegedly failing gender eligibility criteria – Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting – won gold medals. “It has to be a clear-cut policy and international federations must have some flexibility,” he said. “But it is incumbent on the IOC to create that landscape. It’s a very clear proposition to me – if you do not protect (the female) category, or you are in any way ambivalent about it for whatever reason, then it will not end well for women’s sport. “I come from a sport where that is absolutely sacrosanct.” Asked if the Olympic boxing tournament had made him wince, he replied: “I was uncomfortable.”

What is really annoying me about all this is that here we are, arguing/discussing testosterone, phenotypes, privacy, etc.
Very much like the question "what is a woman?", the question "who should be in women's sport?" only becomes complicated when you try to shoehorn males into the category. The category just breaks.

Why exclude males with PAIS, if extreme cases appear virtually the same as males with CAIS?
Why exclude males with normal testosterone if one nanomol less would get them into the female category?
Why exclude any male who passes convincingly as female, whatever their (entirely irrelevant) serum testosterone level?
Why exclude a male who has been puberty blocked from age 13, but not one who has been blocked from age 12? Phases of puberty are not discrete.

Why ignore the obvious, simple, rational and relevant divider?
Male/female.
All DSDs are sex specific. There will be no edge cases, no unfairness to male athletes if we stick to that dividing line.
Fairness for women athletes is paramount.

There's a difference between it not being worth testing for drugs for recreational matches, and legally allowing drug use in division 2 or in the youth categories.

Coe talked about protecting the womens sport at elite level. Elite level is obviously not defined, but it could mean that boys could openly play with girls in youth tournaments or men in the womens lower teams because they aren't seen as elite.

Yes. And I guess there is no such thing as objective expertise on this. If your principle is 'self ID is the way forward' you're going to approach the evidence on CAIS/PAIS differently from if your principle is 'women's sport is for women'.

What I really want to see is an end to 'ooh this one's a bit butch, must be a bloke!' threads on social media including to our shame Mumsnet. And the only way that stops is a transparent and agreed policy. It's true that the clearest and simplest would be open vs female XX.

This. In bucket loads. I genuinely don't give a shiny shit if someone with a DSD can't compete. I am shit at sports, I'm not insisting you let me join the toddlers because it's not fair I can't compete at my own level.

It's just struck me: individuals with CAIS have internal testes.
(The process that creates testes occurs earlier than the rest of male sexual development, which is driven by the testosterone produced by the testes, and to which individuals with CAIS are insensitive.)

Male differentiation of the ovotestis is triggered by the Sox9 gene. This protein also has an important role in the formation of the skeleton.

I am way out of my depth here, but I can't help thinking that if having CAIS does not inhibit the action of Sox9 and the male embryo therefore develops testes, it shows at least some ability to utilise one androgen, to some degree, for some purposes.
So even without acquiring the external appearance of a male, males with CAIS might acquire other male characteristics like bigger, heavier bones. To which longer, bigger muscles can be attached. That might partly explain a male athletic performance advantage which is not due to the action of testosterone.

Pure conjecture on my part, I have no qualifications whatsoever in this area.
I just find it all fascinating.

I'm not sure - they're male, certainly, with some or all of the normal male advantages in terms of height. I suppose like a boy who'd been put on 'puberty blockers', or, less pleasantly, been castrated, before puberty. In antiquity, weren't eunuchs sometimes employed as guards & so on, with it taken as read that they were bigger and stronger than women?

In e.g. horse racing, the relative performance of stallions, mares/fillies, and geldings etc, driven by their very real physical & sometimes temperamental differences, is very well understood. In the racing community it'd be considered beyond laughable if anyone were to ever attempt to pass these differences off as the product of 'social factors', as has recently been fashionable in parts for humans. And horses are by & large a less dimorphic species than humans.

I am also very uncomfortable with Cole's distinction of elite sport vs the rest. There should be no XY people in women's sports. End of.

To put it bluntly - and I'm not trying to be goady, I just can't think of a better way of phrasing it... if a male (XY) has a DSD which means they aren't competitive in whatever sport's male category, then they need to find a different sport, or hobby, or whatever it is.

I feel like its just another wedge to stop woman only classifications. The easiest position would be to define woman, and stick to it.

But no one seems happy to do this, so we have to have a compromise where there isnt a definition, or lots of definitions that are dependent on situations. Its never solved because theres always an argument to be had about the womans classification.

Its just like public toilets, people will agree that womans toilets are needed, but then say this man should be the exception to the rule because he looks like a woman.

illinivich

Its just like public toilets, people will agree that womans toilets are needed, but then say this man should be the exception to the rule because he looks like a woman.
I know. I find it so strange. People who will argue against inclusion of males based on their appearance in other women's spaces are happy to argue for the inclusion of males in women's sport...based on their appearance. Forgetting that the reason they do look like women on the outside is because of their male-specific DSD.

WookeyHole

To put it bluntly - and I'm not trying to be goady, I just can't think of a better way of phrasing it... if a male (XY) has a DSD which means they aren't competitive in whatever sport's male category, then they need to find a different sport, or hobby, or whatever it is.

My thoughts exactly.
Why does women's sport even come into the equation?
Why are we centring the male at the expense of females in women's sport?
We never talk about the problem of female athletes with DSDs dominating men's sport, why is that? Oh yes, because they don't have an advantage over males, DSD or not.

It took him bloody long enough to speak out.

It may be that it is too little too late, there are a lot of sports bodies and countries for whom winning medals by whatever means is more important cheaper - than developing and supporting women’s sports. They will want the status quo to continue , with the IOC hiding behind the pretence that they are only respecting the wishes of the bodies representing individual sports. The tide is turning, but if they think they can get a few more years out of the current situation then they will be looking for a President who won’t rock the boat.

Yes, that's a point, viques. I have to say I'm not hopeful overall.

But where other women's sports, or women's sport in other countries starts to become profitable, they may change tack.

He either doesn't get it or is not good at clear communication... I don't trust him.

In January this year, Coe said, "I will die in a ditch over the ability of transgender competitors to be involved in participatory sports."'

He also said the science around testosterone was not clear and talked about the transition from male biology to female biology.... he should be better informed. It is inexcusable.

He has known about the DSD issue for years.... he did not act quickly enough, only changing the DSD rules when the court of arbitration in sport force athletics to do so and failed to make it apply across all events.

https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/leading-01gtgefvr0avgejrkdemyqkfyj/episode/53-seb-coe-corruption-gender-and-the-geopolitics-of-01hk15p6y028v0b84hbg6gq4se

Agree, he has done a classic reverse ferret.

Coe on the stump in the Times

https://archive.ph/zJnoD

https://www.thetimes.com/sport/olympics/article/seb-coe-says-boxing-gender-row-would-not-have-happened-on-his-watch-cb87xmg5m

The article mentions the London Aquatic Centre that I'll probably never visit. Apparently, his office overlooks it. I can't help wondering about who's allowed in the women's changing rooms.

PermanentTemporary · 14/11/2024 07:54

OK. Maria Patino was (is) an athlete with CAIS, who therefore had XY chromosomes.

Thanks for your interesting, highly informative post, I didn't know any of that previously.

”it couldn’t have happened in Athletics”

Oh really Seb? Are you forgetting Rio 2016, Womens 800m final, though I can’t quite recall your fury and condemnation at the result, nor your public and vociferous support for Lynsey Sharp and the other women robbed of their medals. And then of course the fiasco of the Paralympic transgender athlete Valentina Petrillo, surely you remember him, after all it was only earlier this year.

Agree @viques and i think is very poor of the interviewer not to have picked up on that.

He'd been in the World Athletics job for less than a year during Rio 2016. It took quite a long time and wasn't always pretty, but the DSD (and also trans) issues have been fairly comprehensively cleared up in top-level athletics (if not at grass roots level) and some of that is undoubtedly down to Coe.

World Athletics has no real jurisdiction over the Paralympics, even in track and field.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2024/12/19/lord-coe-ioc-president-olympic-manifesto/

'Lord Coe: Protecting female category is non-negotiable in my Olympic manifesto'

Come on!

He is saying what he needs to say to get elected.

He did not protect the category before or after Rio 2016.

When the court of arbitration in Sport said that it was proportionate to protect the female category, he did not ensure this protection applied to all events.

When the IOC issued their inclusion criteria in 2021 - he did not speak out.

In 2024, he did not use his influence to protect the female para olympic category.

In January 2024, he said he would die in a ditch to protect the right of trans women to play in the category of their choice in grass roots sports.

He doesn't see women as equals. He doesn't understand the impact these policies on all women and girls. He is a politician, friends with one of the greatest political spin doctors of recent history.

I don't trust him. I want him to stand up, to be honest, to be be unequivocally on the side of women, I want him to say that no sport will be above the law. I want him to call out football. I want him to be a better person.

I would love to be able to read about how he spoke up after the 800m fiasco, about how he agreed that three women beaten by three men had been robbed of their medals and Olympic glory. But I haven’t ever seen a squeak out of him, not then, not now.

@puffyisgood .. i do not share your perspective of seeing the best in the man. Having read tte deliberations and judgement of the court of arbitration in sport and how clesrly they set out the case for the protection of the female ctegory, i simply can not see how anyone thought it was logical to only protect 2 events. The ioc went one step further into this illogical fog when they wrote into their guidelines that if an athlete was determined to have an unfair advantage when the organisation had reviewed all available evidence and proven that advantage, the athlete could move to another event and the onus was on the sporting organisation to prove again that there was an advantage also in that event, in the meantime the athlete could compete until the process had been completed. It also relied on someone objecting...and the IOC forbade anyone from speculating on gender or sex.

This is very far from trustworthy and Coe did not speak out... in 2021 when these guidelines were issued. The Lia Thomas case prompted Swimming to act, Cycling and Athletics followed... but Coe kept an attachment to trans ideology when he shared his thoughts with Alaistair Campbell in Jan 2024 on 'and the rest is politics'.

He rmqined silent during the Paris Olympics and he remains silent on the topic of football.

If he has what it takes to overhaul the IOC, he has to be clear on the meaning of the word female, he has to be clear on what fairness means and he has to be strong enough to stand up to all of those who stand in the way fairness. This role requires integrity and honesty, not shady politics and popular, shallow, headline grabbing soundbites that hide the truth.

It did happen on his watch. He has lied.