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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: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:52AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:52AM (#383068)

    I'm giving Mr. Wolf the 5 mile run

    Temperature dependent. A nice warm/hot day to a human is pretty rough on wolves/dogs. They like their cold climates. If you allowed the humans to compete without wearing clothes, just like the wolves, its pretty easy to determine a temp/dew point where the wolf has no chance at all past 500 meters or so, of course the cheetah is winning that anyway...

    Which brings up the interesting point that lower testosterone people have a stereotype of being better at some things, ditto higher testosterone people, so it should be theoretically possible to design a balanced something, probably resembling a biathlon, that's gender hormone neutral. It sounds like a fun "big data" scientific study to gather performance data to balance a game such that its T neutral. Another idea I have for a balance of high-low T is something like precision javelin tossing, not just who tosses it the furthest but who hits closest to a scarecrow's heart.

    The Olympic officials are fine with trashing all kinds of traditions ranging from venues to events to rules so asking them to "fine tune" some events to null out testosterone isn't all that ridiculous of a request.

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