SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.""
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 02 2016, @01:45PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 02 2016, @05:07PM
It's what you'd expect from something that's supposed to be binary but is determined by a huge, complex set of cascading reactions under imperfect conditions: a bimodal distribution with two massive peaks at either end and a bathtub-shaped trough in the middle. Basically, think "spectrum" here but with most of the power density at the red and violet ends and very little indeed from yellow-orange to indigo-blue.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday August 03 2016, @03:18AM
As the sibling post says, it is a spectrum that is fuzzy in the middle. At the extreme are the people that are born with both testes and ovaries, very rare.
Generally for the fuzzy cases, surgery is used to make them unfuzzy. Doesn't always work. A few weeks back heard interviews with 2 people. A "man" who had to have a phallus constructed for him as an infant. He identified as female. And a "woman" who had her phallus shrunk, she identified as male. The worse part with her was she was about 8 yrs old when the surgery was done, basically cutting the middle out of her phallus, very painful and very embarrassing when all the Doctors would come around to stare at the unusual case. Both were very resentful about the Doctors decision.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 03 2016, @07:11AM
Back to your later point, on the unintended consequences of interfering at birth, standing from a point of almost total ignorance, but with an open mind very much wanting to have a good long chin-wag with those who have first-hand experience, my view is this:
Comparing:
(a) leaving things as they are, and the child grows up with something slightly freakish about their body; and
(b) mangling the body without concent, and the child grows up with something cosmetically less freakish about their body, later realises that they've been mangled without their concent, and realises that there was something freakish about their body, even if the gender coin-flip came down the right way;
then (a) clearly dominates (b). And that's even if the mangling was in the direction that the individual agrees with as an adult. The ones where the coin-flip falls the wrong way are obviously even clearer cases.
Sure, doctors should fix mechanical problems, but these cases are not ones of mechanical need, their of enforced conformity to a clearly not universal norm. The non-conformity is "bad" because in the past it was considered "bad" and no other reason - which is pure wrongthink. "You've got to do that because everyone does that" is actually the root cause of a wide range of troubles in the world (c.f. brainwashing kids into religion).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves