Poor Semenya

[RumNotRun]

https://news.sky.com/story/if-women-must-stop-competing-so-be-it-semenyas-rallying-cry-over-olympics-transgender-athlete-ban-13525463

He's fighting for women's dignity apparently. The article says nothing about the children he's fathered, whilst being a woman of course.

It is so fucking ignorant isn't it? Does this poster actually know any African women? Or even just view African content? All the Black women I know with African heritage are either practicing Christian or Muslim and wouldn't be seen dead topless in public! The only women I know who might are white South African who might maybe go topless on a beach.

It's like she's basing her ideas on Victorian photographs taken to "interest" a certain type of gentleman and thinking that defines 20th and 21st century Africa, a continent thousands of miles across and wide with many different nations and cultures within.

I have a third nipple. Am I intertitty?

Absolutely it wouldn't cover complex biology. That's why it's being suggested to you as a starting point.

Yeah, I have experience of quite a bit of Africa, especially the southern part (I'm not going to specify, this is an anonymous forum). I'm not talking a ten days safari in Kenya and a week on the beach in Senegal. I'm talking long periods in a couple of countries, multiple visits to several others, experience of urban and rural areas, over the span of more than 20 years. I've read a fair bit of anthropology and sociology, and have African friends who would be very surprised by the implication that I'm racist.

I've witnessed parts of a couple of the traditional ceremonies that I've mentioned, and have discussed traditional practices with friends for whom they are part of their culture. So yes, I'm fairly well-equipped to discuss the social mores around bare breasts on the beach in Durban.

Perhaps get off your high horse and probe a little before jumping to conclusions.

Edited for SPAG.

Wasn’t that those fast trains to London with the buffet car?

Yes the PR and spin were very throtough in the early days. In fairness, it was probably outside of CS's control once he started winning high profile races. The phrase 'woman with naturally high testosterone' was a very effective sneaky lie for many years and you still hear people in the media repeating it. But as you say Datun, the fact that CS himself started eventually talking about his testicles eventually made things clear. They tried the same with Imane Khaleif, the Algerian boxer who also has the DSD 5ARD (suspected, not confimred but XY chromosomes documented in his court case) who was allowed to assault women in the last Olympics, but that didnt last long as most people, including the IOC, had wised up by then.

The actual scandal is how men with DSDs born in disadvantaged areas are targeted by unscrupulous people who know that they can make a quick buck by putting these men in competitive female situations, before it all implodes and then they are long gone. Then the exploited men have to discuss their testicles in public whilst trying to maintain that they are 'women with naturally high testosterone' and face all kind of uncomfortable scrutiny, court cases and bans, which must be hard, whatever we think of their ethics, and they may not always have had a full understanding of what was going on in their bodies (and may have been lied to).

I'm not even sure we can say that the scouting aspect is racist, as, in Khaleifs case at least, the scouts and his trainers and the people putting him forward on elite female boxing were all Algerian. In CS's case, I am guessing it would have been a mixture of black and white SAs initially exploiting him. But he clearly chose to keep going, unlike others, so that is on him now.

The phrase 'woman with naturally high testosterone' is just such utter bollocks btw (literally!) as having testicles, wherever they reside, and being born male gives even men with low testosterone issues an order of magnitude higher level of circulating testosterone than even a woman with top of the range levels of testosterone for females. Females just dont have the endocrine system to produce anything like the lowest amount of testosterone found in a man. Not to mention that its the irreversible effect of testosterone during male puberty that makes the difference anyway and is why we have sex categories in sports.

Im back!

I get it - you’ve convinced me 🙇‍♀️

I hope that's genuine and, if so, fair play!

If the embryo has a SRY gene (only found on the Y chromosome)

Is that quite true, @Brainworm ? I thought it would possible for the SRY to be translocated to another chromosome.

[I am not a geneticist, but I do edit a shit load of medical textbooks]

Thank you for clarifying that. It is frustrating to have to argue with simplistic statements about X and Y chromosomes when actually one completely agrees with the point they are trying to make about men not belonging in women's sports. In practice, women with total androgen insensitivity are quite rare and statistically unlikely to qualify as elite athletes - but it is good to have the relevant DSD facts fully elucidated.

Or was that interclitty? 🤔

Once bitten, twice shy - I was very open and positive when I thought you were admitting that you only have opinions and haven't actually researched the facts , only to find that you changed the post and made it into another argument😒

But they don't call me Pollyanna for nothing so I hope you really have looked at the evidence that was posted, applied your own critical thinking to it, and freely decided 'D'j'know what? now I've seen the evidence, I think they're right!'

And better still, had the backbone to come back and say so
👏

Yes I agree - a big thank you to Brainworm for her detailed explanation about how sex differentiation occurs in embryos.
Maybe it would be useful on the Break It Down thread?

I now have 'I'm a Müllerian duct, you're a Wolffian duct' going around my head to the tune of 'I'm a pink toothbrush....'😁

edited for punctuation

This is an incredibly useful resource https://theparadoxinstitute.org/articles/sex-development-charts

Shows in easy to understand pictures both how normal male and female (mutually exclusive) developmemtal pathways happen, and also what happens with all the various DSDs when that goes wrong. SRY gene on the y chromosome is the norm, and will be the case in 99% of male births, but yes you can have the SRY gene translocated to the X chromosome, and that result in a male development pathway, and you can have it inactive due to mutation, resulting in female pathway, or downstream mutatuons meaning its male.signallung doesn't work properly. But in all cases, you can only develop as either a male or a female. Even exceedingly rare (like 2 or 3 recorded, ever) cases of moscicism where there are some cells with different chromosome makeup, instead of the norm of same in all cells, end up with either a male or a female, often inferrile and these are all.non standard DSD conditions.

These children are not fathered from Caster’s sperm - how would sperm form in her internal testes and get out as she has no prostate, vas deferens or penis? I really hate the intersex nastiness here - it’s ableist and is a gift to TRAs. Loads of SM posts claiming Caster is trans - she has. DSD - she has female external genitalia and was observed and recorded as female at birth. She was brought up a girl and sees herself as a woman- the male puberty could have led to persecution and I’m sure would have done in other times and places.

Yes this. Thank you.

Blueskiesnotgrey explains in a previous post how it can be done at fertility clinics. That doesn't mean that CS has had this procedure done but it is possible to assist men with 5-ARD to father children

Gonads is the name for the organs which produce either eggs or sperm. In women the gonads are called ovaries and in men they are called testes or testicles.

Here you go:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1477513122003655#:~:text=Males%20with%205%CE%B1%2Dreductase%20deficiency%20experience%20oligospermia%20or%20azoospermia%2C%20which,fertility%20problems%20in%20the%20future.

Its perfectly possible, likely even, using Assisted Reproduction techniques that have been available for decades (multiple), that CS, or any male with the DSD 5ARD (5α-reductase deficiency), could father their own biological children. In CS case I would say it is even more likely to be the case given that CS a) has documented nornal male testosterone levels b) is known to live and present very much as a man in a conventional-looking marriage to a heterosexual woman (her words, in interview) c) has been shown to me very macro and proud of not being like 'weak girls' d) has the money for very expensive fertility clinics and multiple rounds of treatment.

All of which is nobodies business but theirs and has nothing to do with males in woman's sports. But he has put all this speculation out there by continuing to campaign to be allowed to race in women's athletics, whilst getting married and having children.

That’s not quite all you said though. If it was the comment wouldn’t have been deleted.

It astounds me how people come out with this absolute nonsense, through uneducated assumptions, without doing even a modicum of research or a simple Google.

Use you critical thinking people!!

Scientists and doctors FULLY understand the biological basis of all this, down to individual molecules and point mutations, and modern clinics can operate on babies in the womb and perform gene therapy, so extractin a single sperm from a male with 5ARD is likely to be almost trivial, in many cases. You do realise that not all sperm comes out the conventional route through the tip of the penis right? Same way that women undergoing IVF dont get pregnant in the conventional way.

In response to a photograph showing the 15 year old Caster Semenya in a very obviously boys pair of swimming shirts and a bare chest (page 2), PP claimed that women in Africa don’t have their breasts covered.

Thankfully PP has realised how eye wateringly awful and incorrect that claim was and apparently have requested that it be withdrawn.

How do you know what letters they have after their name? Sadly, even people with letters after their name can be biased, prejudiced or just plain wrong.

I would think that he has ambiguous genitalia. So the scrotum looks very like labia and a micropenis.

I meant not always covering breasts in rural places but typed a sweeping statement in haste

what I was trying to say is you can’t always simply apply western standards of femininity to determine sex

yes I got it removed because what I typed was offensive and short sighted and I didn’t want people to be offended

but there we go - page 17 and you are still going on about it.. 🤷