Down goes Semenya!!!

it's not just test that makes men run faster

With respect, your post ignores the qualifier that I put in caps, in the hopes that nobody would miss it: for the purposes of the subject of this thread, that is the participation in organized athletic competitions.

You are voicing your opinions without considering the application thereof. Your starting point is the determination of gender in the abstract, but what you miss is that the meaning of “male” and “female” are application-specific, or contextual, and change according to changed application or context.

None of your opinions relate specifically to the subject of this thread—for instance, if the IAAF defines male as above 5 and female as 5 and below, then for their purposes he is male as long as he is above 5, and your opinion has no utility or relevance.

And to characterize my speech as malicious is just awesome. It has never yet happened, but I would love for somebody to do just this sort of thing where it would damage my reputation, because I would be tempted to sue for disparagement. The idea that you would impute to me an intent is abhorrent.

You need to produce factual supporting evidence to make a case, and you have none—precisely because there IS none. To the extent that I harbor any ill will toward Semenya, it is only secondary. If I have ever said something like I hope he passes out before the race begins, it is because of my will to see the remainder of the athletes competing in an environment that is fair to them; it has nothing to do with Semenya himself.

In fact, my suggestion years ago was for the other athletes in the race to all boycott, and not run a race in which Semenya was competing. My suggestion was directed not at Semenya, but to other athletes.

You clearly have an agenda and much bias, but it is clearly not the agenda of those who believe in the principles of clean, fair, and honorable competition. The fact that you present it here is IMO evidence of a control mechanism, the effort to control the dialogue and to frame the issue as you wish.

I’m not buying it. This thread is not about how to treat Semenya interpersonally, should you ever meet him. It is not about Semenya’s personal struggle with identity. It is not about the law of succession or union. It is not even about the topic of “intersex”. It is about why and how we organize the social behavior of organized athletic competition. I submit that your contributions would be more valuable if you would join the existing discussion, rather than trying to start one of your own.

Finally, like I said—I would be in favor of a third competitive category for such individuals, if it was economical to do so. It might be, I have no idea, but my sense is that it is not. Of course one can always argue that it is hardly economical to have the 2 categories as they currently exist, and that argument has some merit, and in one way could be considered to support the further uneconomic act of establishing a 3rd category—but that is a policy question that I haven’t heard discussed in this thread, and which has been dealt only a glancing blow.

wtfwtf wrote:

wtfunny wrote:

...

You've just argued that Semenya should have to run as a male, because of her T levels, and use the women's bathroom because she's a woman. That seems somewhat indefensible, imo.

That's the normal argument that 90% of the world is going to make and believe, and is easily the most defensible one.

It is just the goofy trolls here, the ones that want to drag sociology in and insist on saying "he" because they want to argue nutty sociological points instead of physicality that actually affects competition, for god only knows what reason.

+1

Finally the IAAF finds some backbone on this travesty. How does a person who has a Y chromosome, testes that produce testosterone and overt secondary male characteristics, no uterus or ovaries, is married to a woman and dresses like a man both on and off the track get to compete as a woman in internatioanal track & field and make millions of dollars doing it? Semenya has perpetrated the greatest fraud in all of sports history. Womens athletics has become a mockery which I have stopped watching and following. Had Semenya been a white Russain or American I do not believe this side show would have been allowed to continue. We rail against PEDS but extreme political correctness causes silence on this form of cheating. It is time to stop this and put womens athletics back on a reasonably level plying field.

Racket wrote:

Didn't read the whole thread. I assume it's just the usual garbage, e.g. referring to Semenya as a "he," intersex is fake news, tall basketball players, and throwing events.

Sprintgeezer wrote:

I’m not buying it. This thread is not about how to treat Semenya interpersonally, should you ever meet him.

lol

Fair Play wrote:

Finally the IAAF finds some backbone on this travesty. How does a person who has a Y chromosome, testes that produce testosterone and overt secondary male characteristics, no uterus or ovaries, is married to a woman and dresses like a man both on and off the track get to compete as a woman in internatioanal track & field and make millions of dollars doing it? Semenya has perpetrated the greatest fraud in all of sports history. Womens athletics has become a mockery which I have stopped watching and following. Had Semenya been a white Russain or American I do not believe this side show would have been allowed to continue. We rail against PEDS but extreme political correctness causes silence on this form of cheating. It is time to stop this and put womens athletics back on a reasonably level plying field.

Pro tip : If your defense of higher testosterone benefiting women in running events is "Oh, well, I mean, come on... isn't it obvious! Everyone knows it" then it probably won't hold up in a court of arbitration that rules on fair participation.

In my opinion, the intersex "issue" in sports can't be solved in terms of hormone level capping, creating a third heat or category, or whatever else. I believe this will come down to : is it a human right to participate in sport at the highest level.

This 400m to 1500m ruling is a possible indication there are elite female throwers, 100m, 200m and 100mH female athletes whom may have T-levels relatively close to Semenya's T-levels. Semenya will hire skilled lawyers. This isn't over.

By changing the requirements on the testosterone level they should in turn reset every world record associated with the events the restrictions are in place for because Caster was not the first hypoandrogenism athlete to run the events and past records may have been set by women just like her.

One thing to keep in mind here in terms of advantages that Semenya has, is that the high-T levels were present during puberty, resulting in a phenotypic male (other than the surgical alterations at birth). If you were to boost the T-levels for other competitors to his current levels, those women would still lack the "infrastructural" advantages of bone density, muscle mass, hip morphology, shoulder development, etc.. that Semenya acquired during puberty. It would be like turbocharging a VW beetle to compete against a Maserati. They might be faster than they were, but still not as durable and powerful as the phenotypic male that Semenya clearly is.

Does a male have the "Human Right" to compete in female competitions?

If Semenya is allowed to compete in the women’s division, what’s to stop all elite men as identifying as women for easier competition? If you allow this, it slowly degrades the division between men’s and women’s sports that exists for good reason. Making sure everyone “feels good” actually would result in the opposite from the intended effect - taken to its logical conclusion, only men will be able to participate in sports.

It’s not about any one person. It’s about fairness. If Semenya is allowed to compete as a woman, why shouldn’t any above-average high school boy be able to compete in the women’s Olympics? From there, what if I want to identify as being a woman from an obscure African country just so I get to go the Olympics? This leads to absurd results. Social justice needs to be tempered when it comes to fairness in sport.

Black On Blonde wrote:

Are you a mong? wrote:

She identifies as a woman

She does?

The answer of course is obvious. She identifies as a woman when it suits.

I also wonder when Caster identifies as a woman? In most pictures with her wife she clearly identifies as a man, you can just google there are many examples, like this one.

For example - I worked with a woman (he wasn't intersex) who dressed in suits, used initials for his name, and we had to identify him as a him. He had rather larger breasts which were noticeable even in the suits he always wore. In any event, here you have Caster who dresses as a male which would usually mean she wishes to identify as a male, yet???

I get it, we now live in a time where people can be gender fluid, she can be a male when she wants and a female when she wants - but since she clearly doesn't mind looking and acting like a male, so why can't she race with men? Why when it comes to racing is it so damn important that she identify as female but at no other time? I feel like this is all one big joke she's playing on everyone making everyone look like fools. Everyone. The people who defend her look just as foolish as the people who are against her. It's all one big joke on everyone.

I think most of the posts on here agree with the ruling:

She definitely should not be allowed to compete with women who aren't intersex; if Wambui and Niyonsaba are also intersex, none of these women should be allowed to compete.

I agree with a previous poster: it sucks but racing is not a right.

Pop that P wrote:

I think most of the posts on here agree with the ruling:

She definitely should not be allowed to compete with women who aren't intersex; if Wambui and Niyonsaba are also intersex, none of these women should be allowed to compete.

I agree with a previous poster: it sucks but racing is not a right.

I don not know if racing is a right or not. I see many people trying to tackle a relatively easy problem of "men have no right in a woman's race" and then declaring victory when they proudly proclaim "Get that weirdo out of here!" This of course completely misses the much more difficult question of intersex athletes.

Most of the posts? We could have ten frat guys sitting in a room and changing their OP name a dozen times. Whenever a poster on Letsrun pretends to speak for the majority, that is my first impression. I am eager to see the legal arguments put forward by Caster Semenya's attorneys. You speak for only yourself.

This is not just about the "Big 3". The top 1/3 of participants in the 2011 and/or 2013 World Championships had free testosterone levels averaging 7.08 nmol/l. The new limit would be 5.00 nmol/l. This is talking about kicking out a very large percentage of current competitors. Can you all correctly pick out the top 1/3 of the 67 female competitors from 2011/2013 WCs who were above the new limit?

Pop that P wrote:

I think most of the posts on here agree with the ruling:

She definitely should not be allowed to compete with women who aren't intersex; if Wambui and Niyonsaba are also intersex, none of these women should be allowed to compete.

I agree with a previous poster: it sucks but racing is not a right.

According to a statistic I saw, Track and Field athletes are 140 times more likely to be intersex than the general population. Doesn't surprise me that many other women will be effected by this ruling.

Wake the f up people wrote:

This is not just about the "Big 3". The top 1/3 of participants in the 2011 and/or 2013 World Championships had free testosterone levels averaging 7.08 nmol/l. The new limit would be 5.00 nmol/l. This is talking about kicking out a very large percentage of current competitors.

Can you all correctly pick out the top 1/3 of the 67 female competitors from 2011/2013 WCs who were above the new limit?

Pop that P wrote:

I think most of the posts on here agree with the ruling:

She definitely should not be allowed to compete with women who aren't intersex; if Wambui and Niyonsaba are also intersex, none of these women should be allowed to compete.

I agree with a previous poster: it sucks but racing is not a right.

Racket wrote:

[quote]Fair Play wrote:

In my opinion, the intersex "issue" in sports can't be solved in terms of creating a third heat or category, or whatever else

Why? They rightly belong there I suppose.

George213 wrote:

Racket wrote:

[quote]Fair Play wrote:

In my opinion, the intersex "issue" in sports can't be solved in terms of creating a third heat or category, or whatever else

Why? They rightly belong there I suppose.

I think it covers up the bigger issue which in my opinion is the human right to compete in sport at the highest level. I think it will be very difficult to tackle and I certainly do not know the answer.