“My testicles don’t make me less of a woman,” ~ Caster Semenya

Utter bollocks! It takes cajones to say that. Is she getting testy, or is she nuts? The balls are in her court.

My post has nothing to do with Semenya. I was just responding to a comment on "women with balls."

I think Leviticus is referring to meeting Mildred not Caster.

By all means present your detailed medical evidence.

That is not an unreasonable position, one also shared by many people on this site as well as outside. There are two problems when it comes to how that stance is wielded for policy making:

1) The distinction matters for mating and other proximate private acts between two consenting individuals, not for sports, not for pretty much anything in the real world (with some rare exceptions like selective service). Sports cares about performance and WA, however imperfectly, tries to define eligibility criteria based on neutralizing significant performance advantages across category subgroups (cis, trans, and intersex women), which is what this debate is about in the real world, not about testicular possession or lack thereof like the gamete supremacists here like to believe.

2) “Female” is not a policy panacea because sex is not binary. People here don’t like to hear it, but there is little disagreement on that among scientists and doctors. What the trans- and intersex-averse end up doing when pressed is to come up with an arbitrary line demarcating which phenotypical or genotypical set of traits land on which side of the line (and apologizing for or dismissing the very rare combinations that challenge their categorization), but those are just opinions, and there no consensus on such opinions, and nobody cares about that carefully crafted line in the real world.

Fantastic post.

I think you have summed up the crux of the issue beautifully.

I still stand firm in my position that all of the efforts to define the line between male and female or advantage-having vs. advantage-not-having is, frankly, just a waste of time.

When presented with such a debate, it is preferable to seek the most simple solution. If we have two competition categories, let the individual athletes pick which category most closely matches their identities. No need to then determine if they have more testosterone, or bone density, or heart stroke volume, or ate more sodium last week. Just let them run.

Re "My testicles don't make me less of a woman": This is like when I see that Trump's quoted something. You always know it's not going to be the actual direct quote.

Unfortunately, in both cases it will be accurate. They don't hold back.

Sex is binary, and it's only very recently that a subset of scientists and doctors have been led astray by faulty arguments carted into medicine and biology from academics pushing peudoscience in the name of social justice. Anomalies in sexual development and phenotype are not evidence of additional sexes or the existence of a sex spectrum. Similarly, people with Down Syndrome aren't a different species or an indicator that the number of human chromosomes exists on a spectrum.

After thread after thread you fail to understand that sports categories are not based on what someone thinks they are or wishes they were but on actual physical characteristics: height, weight, age. And sex.

You are a propagandist for a sociological theory; you are definitely not a sportsman. Perhaps you "identify" as one but that would merely prove my point.

I really do have sympathy for her but it's just not right that she be allowed to compete. It's also not fair to her that she's in this position- this wasn't her choice.

But, realistically, if her parents chose to raise her as a boy she wouldn't hold a lot of high school records.

My personal feeling is that transgender should give up their right to compete- they made this choice.

In Semenya's case, everyone are victims- she and the women she competes against.

This is the race that changed the rules:

en.m.wikipedia.org

Athletics_at_the_2016_Summer_Olympics_%E2%80%93_Women%27s_800_metres

Open link

A women’s global championship dominated by biologic males. If it continued unabated, it would basically spell the end of biologic females reaching professional levels in the protected events (400, 800, and 1500).

The only way that biologic females could hope to compete is through doping. The one female to beat Semenya using such means: Savinova, was given a four year ban and had her titles stripped, even though she had a fraction of the testosterone of Semenya, et al.

I hope you are a troll. Because I would hate to think that you are that crazy.

That says it. And Caster is right: testicles do not make Caster less of a woman, because Caster is not a woman at all. Caster is simply not developed into the man that the chromosomes indicate. This is not Caster's fault. But it doesn't mean Caster can pick and choose how society must regard the data.

So... recap: One cannot be less of a woman (or more for that matter), if one is not a woman at all.

Is your “personal feeling” that homosexuality is also a choice? How do you know?

Followers of the binary cult are making it harder to justify the exclusion of Semenya from the women's competition.

If sex is binary, the only way we can exclude Semenya from the women's competition is to prove that Semenya is a man.

If sex is bimodal, then we don't need to prove that Semenya is a man. We only need to prove that Semenya is not like other women and has significant difference related to athletic performance.

But the Cultural Warriors are interested in something other than the fairness in women's sports. So they keep fighting their culture war.

"Followers of the binary cult"

Only one side believes in a gendered 'soul' capable of transubstantiating into the 'wrong' body. That is religious nut/cult behaviour.

"If sex is binary, the only way we can exclude Semenya from the women's competition is to prove that Semenya is a man."

Already proven due to the fact that Semenya has a DSD that only affects males. Ergo, Semenya shouldn't be allowed to compete with women. Simple isn't it?

"If sex is bimodal"

It's not. Happy to help.

You're clearly the same poster who anonymously posts on every gender thread because you're desperately trying to make 'gamete supremacists' a thing. It's not a thing. It will never be a thing.

You can tell the people here that you personally believe 'sex isn't binary' until the cows come home as far as I'm concerned; but it's another thing to falsely claim that scientists agree with you on it. Sex characteristics, as I'm sure you are well aware of, are not 'sex' and as such, do not muddy the waters at all when it comes to how many sexes there are. There are two. A malformed penis here, an extra chromosome there, or a hairy chin hither do not a third gamete make. So please, share your opinion far and wide, but don't claim ownership of biological consensus, because it has literally never been on the side of those of you who believe in mystical gender souls.

World Athletics is in the business of administering the sports of track and field. They are not in the business of people's reproductive health.

They are interested in people's ability to compete in track and field. They are not interested in people's ability to produce their offspring.

But for some people, human beings exist for the sole purpose of reproduction. So they are not interested in anything else.