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posted by janrinok on Monday August 01 2016, @11:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the did-you-just-assume-my-gender? dept.

In The Guardian there is a discussion on the participation of transgender people in the Olympic Games, primarily looking at Caster Semenya. Semenya, a South African middle-distance runner, was subjected to gender testing in 2009, but has been cleared to participate in the Olympic Games beginning in a few days time.

"It's a ticking timebomb," Daniel Mothowagae says quietly on a winter's night in Johannesburg as he anticipates the furore that is likely to explode when Caster Semenya runs in the Olympic Games. Apart from being described by many athletics specialists as an almost certain winner of the women's 800m in Rio, Semenya will suffer again as she is made to personify the complex issues surrounding sex verification in sport."

"The debate around hyperandrogenism is as poignant as it is thorny. In simplistic summary it asks us to decide whose rights need to be protected most. Is it the small minority of women whose exceedingly high testosterone levels, which their bodies produce naturally, categorise them as intersex athletes? Should their human rights be ring-fenced so that, as is the case now following an overturned legal ruling, they are free to compete as women without being forced to take medication that suppresses their testosterone? Or should the overwhelming majority of female athletes be protected – so they are not disadvantaged unfairly against faster and stronger intersex competitors?"

""She is proof of the benefit of testosterone to intersex athletes," Tucker argues. "Having had the restriction removed she is now about six seconds faster than she had been the last two years.""

"The Cas panel defined the crucial factor as being whether intersex athletes would have sufficient advantages to outweigh any female characteristics and make them comparable to male-performance levels. "

"Three months ago Tucker conducted a fascinating interview with Joanna Harper – who describes herself as "a scientist first, an athlete second and a transgender person third." Harper made the startling claim that we might see "an all-intersex podium in the 800 in Rio and I wouldn't be surprised to see as many as five intersex women in the eight-person final.""


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @08:35AM (#383030)

    We are slowly approaching the point where professional sports is the only job that doesn't have gender equality. And yet, the reasoning put forward by those defending the current rules are the exact same as what has been used to argue against gender equality in every type of job for the last 50 years.

    Professional sports is also among the most public jobs, being on TV all the time. They should go in front rather than trailing behind everybody else, if politicians really want to show us that gender equality is the way forward.

    "But then only men will be able to compete", I hear people scream. Yes, I already addressed that above, see "exact same as what has been used to argue against gender equality in every type of job for the last 50 years". Everybody else was forced to find a solution. Let the Olympics and the politicians find a solution.

    A suggesting could be to use weight classes. Because the problem is not actually hormones, it's the amount of muscle mass. A person with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome could have XY testicles, tongs of testosterone and yet be weaker than any woman competing in the Olympics.

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  • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:53PM

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:53PM (#383226)

    Everyone elses solution has been gender based quotas, which is what the female teams are.