Brave reporter undergoes inhumane sex test for sports. Brace yourselves.

[singthing]

Here's a blow-by-blow first-person account of what it is like to have the new sports sex test that is being decried as invasive and dehumanising and (in a rather extravagant bending of the facts) a genital inspection etc.

After such a big build-up, prepare to be.... underwhelmed. But please do stop scrolling now if you don't want to read the distressing details:

"I open my mouth and feel the swab brushing the inside of my cheeks for about 20 seconds. The practitioner carefully places the sample in a small plastic bag and then pops it into a sealed envelope. I sign the back of it."

https://archive.ph/kITV9

It is a good alternative and has been suggested by some sports.

Your point that some scientists (which?) think that this test oversimplifies the concept of biological sex could only be relevant if anyone in authority was saying this is a test to determine if someone is a man or a woman in any wider sense. They aren’t.

This is a test to rule out from competing in the women’s category anyone who has benefitted from male puberty advantage.

Competitors with the SRY gene who have CAIS can still compete as women. They are testosterone insensitive and have no male advantage.

For sporting purposes they are “women” and sport doesn’t need to take a position on their social or other legal status.

I’m going to ban myself commenting on a similar mumsnet thread again, as I don’t think it’s a space where people are able to engage in good faith anymore. It’s too obsessive.

This is your reaction when you realize that your arguments are easily refutable and refuted. It’s your way out of the cognitive dissonance of being wrong and wanting to be right. You’ll get there though.

I am just constantly reminded that to some people ‘good faith’ discussion is being able to say something and not be challenged on it even if it is not correct or if there are inconsistencies

To them Good faith does not mean engaging and providing an evidenced view point that is supported with links. So often we see people make claims about ‘good faith’ arguments where they also mean that they can insult and make unfounded accusations about posters individually or as a group because they feel that have a morally superior view point and can attack the people who are merely disagreeing and disagreeing by providing detailed analysis.

I think the closest we've come to inclusive and fair sport is dividing into Open and Female divisions. Anyone who is female can compete in the Female category, or if they prefer, the Open.

The Open division will be stacked full of all the females who prioritise inclusive sport, all the special gender feelings people, all the enbies, all the people with DSD that excluded them from the Female division and lastly but of course not leastly all the bog standard blokes who will win 100% of medals.

It’s certainly true that attempting to bolster your position by saying Mumsnet is an echo chamber is not arguing in good faith.

I'm pretty sure the female #bekinders would vanish from the open category like smoke on the breeze back to the female category where they'd have a shot at winning.

All whilst moaning how MEAN it all was.

Let alone Deadlifter's comment to posters:

People with a wider lens can also see things you’re not seeing - eg. How your views interact with the rise of the far right etc.

Oh wimmin on the mumsnets are now to blame for swastika blokes. Make it make sense

Yes, and yet women on these threads are not allowed to call out obvious posters for what they are, because that's "troll hunting." So their unfounded claims about who we are (transphobes, echo-chamber handmaidens, right-wing fascists) are allowed to stand unless we report (and we have to spend 20 pages arguing against them), but we're not allowed to say "I don't think you are who you say you are." There's an imbalance there. To say the least.

There have been a few threads recently like this. And while women are spending 20 pages deflecting insults and bad faith arguments, we aren't talking about women's rights and issues. Which, I suppose, is the whole point of the exercise.

Remember when the Boston marathon introduced a non-binary category, then after the first race got complaints that men had an unfair advantage and were winning all the prizes, so they should split it into female non-binary and male non-binary? And the people horrified that non-non-binary men were entering the non-binary group because it had a lower qualification bar.

Yes, that was very funny indeed. Odd how even the non binaries knew the difference.

And it all got complicated with accusations that the standards were being exploited:

https://marathonhandbook.com/did-a-runner-exploit-bostons-non-binary-qualifying-standards/

Quote from that article: "What this case reveals, instead, is the difficulty of balancing inclusivity with competitive fairness"

It's not difficult.

It's just seems that people have a difficulty saying no because they have been bullied into believing that competitive sport is a vehicle for the far right...

The next Olympics should aspire to all 8 finalists having a dead heat for gold.

I was right to leave when I did last night; the ability actually to discuss didn't improve.

The only person on this thread who has "lost it" seems to be Deadlifter. I just hope doh may have stopped trying to have the last word and taken dohself off to work or sports training or whatever else doh may have as a priority in doh's life that doesn't involve insulting people who don't immediately agree with whatever unevidenced proposition doh chooses to put forward.

Incidentally, about disappointment in sport because of a hitherto undiscovered condition that prevents someone from competing: I used to know a man who had been chosen to captain the Great Britain team in his sport for the 1940 Olympics. Unfortunately those didn't happen, and after the war he was unfortunately no longer able to compete, or indeed to do his chosen sport at all. So he pulled himself together and went off and became a world expert at something else instead. I imagine he must have been bitterly disappointed, but he didn't allow it to become something he constantly whinged about.

Funny how the complexity always goes one way isn’t it?

It only ever affects women’s sports and never men’s.

I notice, not for the first time, that the word "intersex" is always used when the poor blighters are being employed as a gotcha-tool, even though 1) many of them have said they dislike it because it's inaccurate and 2) many of the people with DSDs have repeatedly asked to be left out of the trans brangling and NOT be used in this way, because their lives are complicated enough already without all that horseshit.

Good point @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime re disappointment at not being able to compete. I think someone upthread mentioned a competitive skier who had a DSD and had been incorrectly raised as a girl. He competed as a woman in skiing events. At some point his genes were tested and it was found that he was a male with a DSD. If I remember correctly, he offered to give back the prizes and medals he had won up to that point because he accepted that he was male and felt bad about cheating women out of prizes.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Schinegger

That man had honour. Something I feel would be a completely closed book to men who knowing they were men deliberately competed in women's sports to steal medals from women who'd earned them.

Remember when Oscar Pistorius wanted to race against able bodied men? As I recall there was lots of rigorous scientific testing and scrutiny of whether his prosthetics would give him an unfair advantage. I don’t recall any consideration of his feelz, or how the men were being mean and non-inclusive, or that he was subsequently banned from ever competing again. Funny that…

I remember that, and the whole controversy! No, as far as I recall, feelz were not entered into the argument as an element to be considered. Isn't that curious...

And that BEFORE Pistorious could enter they had to determine there was no unfair advantage. When no such thing had to happen for the women. IIRC no one asked the women.

Yes @AskingQuestionsAllTheTime- definitely a man with integrity- the same can’t be said for Semenya!

I’ve always imagined it could be a real head-wrecker to discover you aren’t the sex you were told you are, but Schinegger seems to have adapted to the news well and gone on to have a successful and happy life. I daresay he always knew on some level that there was something very different about him. Perhaps it was a relief to finally be able to be himself.

I hope that it was, and that he was happy. He seems to deserve that.

IIRC no one asked the women.

They sort of did. There was the poll about whether to stop sex testing for the Olympics. What they didn't do was listen to the answer.

This is true. Despite being told repeatedly that no one is demanding this or expects it to happen, transactivists continue to bring this up regularly. It really is starting to look as if it's THEM that want this to happen. Even if it's only to be able to say "see we TOLD you so. Those horrible TERFS are making everyone have genital inspections"