ESPN: "Caster Semenya listed to run at worlds in Oregon" (5000m)

Almost all universities in US have several male students able to make World Championship (and even record) under women standards. The same applies to Semenya, Niyonsaba etc. Not a big deal.

Ovett did. Aouita did. Webb did. Coe could have,as his road race results suggest, but had no interest in it. Of course none of these guys were world-class over 400m.

Caster shouldn't be there because he's a man and I say this as a doctor.

South Africa is sex cheating.

You are not a doctor. You probably never watched an episode of ER.

Caster is a woman with a condition. She should not compete against women without that same condition.

Sha'Carri not running so you need to take up the fight in this one? You sure know how to pick em.

I’m so glad Mu is the current champion, because people ignorant of track and the facts on DSD runners are always claiming this is just about “white European beauty standards” and “these cis women don’t fit European ideals of femininity” and “white women were just mad at losing to black women.” When you point out that a dark skinned Black woman of African heritage is the current champion - well, as we know, it’s not a logical argument to start with so they stay with their nonsense, but at least they look dumb. As if African women are men: what a racist argument it is.

The condition that Semenya has, 5-ARD type 2, is an enzyme deficiency that occurs in both sexes that impairs the ability to convert T into DHT.

DHT plays an important role in male sex development, causing the penises and prostates of male fetuses to develop properly and causing males to develop beards and male-typical body hair in adolescence and adulthood. But DHT plays no role whatsoever in female sex development during the fetal stage in utero or at any other time of life.

As as result, 5-ARD is disorder of sex development (DSD) exclusively in males. In females, 5-ARD has no appreciable impact in any way.

If Semenya fit the definition of woman given in dictionaries and used in biology and medicine - an adult human female - Semenya might well have this same condition, but it would not be a DSD. 5-ARD is only a DSD in males. Women with 5-ARD generally go their whole lives completely unaware they have the condition.

Correction - Semenya is a MAN with a condition.

Probably the reason why she wears the male speed suit.

The DSD athlete that we know are:

Caster

Niyonsaba

Wambui

Mboma

Masilingi

Seyni

Chand

Ajok (?)

All of them are from Africa except for Chand, who is from India.

Are there really no European or American DSD athletes? Why?

I am surely missing some names here.

If she had never been able to compete ok I can see it. But to let he rrun like they did THEN change things, that simply sucks.

Have some class let the girl run.

That’s because no child in a first world country with healthcare would get past puberty without being diagnosed. Once there was no period (if not earlier), the child would be taken to the doctor and tested. It is only people from remote rural regions without much access to healthcare, (and with unscrupulous sporting agents, coaches and federations) willing to exploit them who end up making it to elite sports without being tested. In the past, it has been Europeans as well.

The women losing out on medals in track are not largely white European women, it’s more often African/African descended women. Mboma beat a Black woman (Thomas) for silver and another Black woman (SAFP) was 4th at the Olympics.

Ok, they get tested in first world countries. Then what? They decide not to play sports? There has to be a few Americans and Europeans, but it does seem way less common of a condition outside Africa

The vast, vast majority are diagnosed before the age of 6.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Disorders of sex development: timing of diagnosis and management in a single large tertiary center

We describe the phenotypic spectrum and timing of diagnosis and management in a large series of patients with disorders of sexual development (DSD) treated in a single pediatric tertiary center.DSD patients who had visited ou...

Link:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5...

Of course they are diagnosed, but they don’t hide under a rock after diagnosis. They surely play sports like every other kid and statistically speaking, they probably do quite well in women sports.

The kinds of XY DSDs that are an issue in elite women's track & field today occur all around the world.

But some, such as Caster Semenya's DSD, are inherited in a manner known as autosomal recessive - meaning affected persons have to inherit a two copies of the same gene mutation, or two different mutations of the same gene, one from each parent. Therefore, conditions like Semenya's tend to cluster and appear in higher than usual rates in certain populations where there's a great deal of consanguinity. This comes about because of intermarriage over many generations amongst people who all come from and live in remote, isolated areas with very little immigration in. But it also comes about because of girls and young women being raped by their fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, grand dads. There's a lot of that in sub-Saharan Africa, unfortunately.

The main reason so many XY DSD athletes solely from certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa have been flooding into women's sports is mainly politics and cultural attitudes. Other countries like Dominican Republic, Papua New Guinea, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan have high rates of Semenya's DSD, but none of those countries seem to be interested in exploiting these youngsters by training them as athletes and entering them into girls' and women's international competition as a way to game the system, get easy gold and glory, and flip the bird at European-based sports governing bodies like WA.

Another reason African countries are using XY DSD athltes like Mboma, Masilingi and star soccer player Barbra Banda (and many others) to game the system is because they can get away with it because those countries have low rates of birth registrations and high rates of political and government corruption. Since none of these athletes got birth certificates as children, it's easy to get away with the party line that they were all "assigned female at birth" and "raised as girls" and no one ever noticed that they never got periods like actual girls. There are no birth registry records to destroy - and school and local govt records can be altered with a cheap bribe.

India is a country with high rates of DSDs, low rates of birth registrations, and lots of very poor people without access to medical care growing up. Indian girls' junior athletics - and especially track & field - always has a lot of XY DSD athletes coming up the ranks. But Indian govt and sports officials think it's wrong to put these athletes on the world state and pretend they are women, so Indian sports authorities keep an eagle eye out for them and - and when they are discovered and diagnosed as XY DSD they get kicked out of women's and girls' sports pronto. Dutee Chand was not at all supported by Indian sports authorities. In fact, her lawsuit against the IAAF was also against the Indian national athletic federation. India doesn't treat Chand like a big national hero the way SA does with Semenya.

The last two Europeans known to be XY with DSDs to compete in elite level international women's sports were women's World Cup alpine ski champion Erika (now Erik) Schinegger of Austria and Maria Jose Martinez Patino.

Schinegger, who has a DSD similar to Semenya's, was booted out of skiing shortly before the 1968 Winter Olympics by Austrian sports officials, and decided to bow out gracefully. He had surgery to "fix" his genital anomalies and went on to marry a woman with whom he fathered a daughter with no medical assistance. There's a good documentary about him on YouTube. He's a very decent, likable guy.

Martinez Patino, who has AIS (sounds like pretty extensive AIS, but it might not be CAIS - the records are unclear) sued the IAAF and won the right to compete in women's sports. The loophole Martinez Patino's lawsuit created allowing athletes with one kind of XY DSD to compete in women's events has been opened up wider and wider to allow in athletes with a host of other, very different kinds of XY DSDs.

Martinez Patino - who has served as a consultant to the IAAF and IOC on eligibility in women's competition - is an interesting case. On the one hand, MP says a main reason MP belongs in women's sports is because MP posses "femininity" and "a sure sense of womanliness" and MP's "womanhood" has been tested. On the other hand, MP doesn't think that other athletes with other XY DSDs are so womanly. MP testified against Chand in Chand's lawsuit against the IAAF and Indians sports authorities. Just goes to show there is no solidarity and unanimity in "the DSD community." No real community to speak of either. Not surprising since DSDs comprise 40 or so very different conditions.

The last time that the IOC did mandatory genetic testing on athletes seeking eligibility in women's events was at the 1996 summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. 8 athletes were found to be XY, DSD - but all were given clearance to compete. Six of them had already had their testes removed - which means their DSDs had already been diagnosed and "treated." (I say "treated" because in DSDs, as in most conditions, it's really not a good idea to remove healthy organs - and gonads are really vital organs. Most people with DSDs who keep their gonads do better over the course of their lives in terms of physical health, mental health and intimate relationships than those who undergo gonad removal.)

I imagine there are a lot of XY athletes with CAIS in women's elite sports. Because they can't use the T their testes produce, it gets converted to estrogen and they develop an outwardly female phenotype. They have some advantages over XX female athletes - XY CAIS persons are usually taller and narrower in the hips, plus no cycles, hormone fluctuations, periods, PMS, PMDD, pregnancies, gynecological problems. But if CAIS athletes were the only XY DSD athletes allowed into women's sports, a lot of people would be okay with that. It's all the athletes with other XY DSDs like 5-ARD - most of whom can father children - that are the bone of contention in women's sports, not athletes with CAIS.

There are. US just never revealed them. Brittany Grinder ring a bell?

Out of 550 cases in the study, five have AIS and one has 3BHSD. The other are conditions not covered by the WA's DSD rule. (Not sure if all five are relevant, since it does not give a breakdown between CAIS and PAIS.) Most are people with either Turner or Klinefelter syndrome. Five people with AIS got their diagnosis between zero and 15 years old with a median of 7.7.