appleswan wrote:
I think the last sentence of your post is what I'm referring to - the discussion is NOT seeking to equally define non-women (men). It's very conviently about discussing what women are or should be. And quelle surprise it appears a LOT of people have very strong opinions on it.
See the posters on here announcing they are "defending women's sport". I'd bet my bottom dollar these posters do not usually care at all about feminism and are actually quite antithetical root.
No, many of us defending women's sports are lifelong feminists from way back when who grew up before legislation like the USA's Title IX gave girls and women a fair shot in sports. We're the ones who grew up with no opportunities for school sports because they didn't exist when we were kids. Many of us grew up without even being given the chance to take PE in school.
We all also know exactly what girls and women are. We are human beings who are female. Whereas Caster Semenya is a human being who is male. A male with a DSD that caused Semenya's external genitals not to form properly in utero, but still a male with fully functioning male testes, adult male levels of T and all the athletic advantages that male puberty and T levels confer.
Many of the women who are most adamant about wanting to preserve female sports for females are the ones who remember full well what it was like when American running authorities in the 1960s explicitly prohibited females from amateur road races in the USA, when authorities in the UK banned females from playing football (soccer) and cricket, and when women in the US were banned from all marathons and beaten up for trying to participate in them.
Many of us are the women who fought for the chance to create and compete in female sports in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and who've put enormous time and energy into establishing scholastic and elite-level sports for females over the past 50 years. All while getting educations, building careers, having babies, raising children and dealing with matters of female physiology that someone like Semenya will never ever have to contend with on or off the field - such as menstruation, ovulation, PMDD, pregnancy or fear of pregnancy, maternity, breastfeeding, abortion, miscarriage, the need for birth control, peri-menopause and menopause, a whole host of gynecological issues and diseases from the commonplace (ovarian cysts, fibroids, cramps, heavy vaginal/uterine bleeding, pre-menstrual breast tenderness) to the less so (endometriosis, gynecological cancers, female pelvic organ prolapse, pudendal neuralgia).
Nor has Semenya had to deal with the social consequences of having a female body and female reproductive capacity in a misogynistic world, such as enduring decades of sexual harassment and unwanted advances and creepy perving from men starting at age 11 or so, a lifetime of sex discrimination in academia and the working world, and vulnerability to - and fear of - abuse and violence at the hands of males who are naturally much stronger and faster than us even if we are the same height.
Many of us women who are fighting to preserve female sports are also the feminists who fought and lobbied for years to get the IOC finally to allow women to have an Olympic marathon - something that only happened for the first time in 1984. Some of us were at the 1984 summer Olympics to cheer the first women's marathoners on.
Many of the women fighting for female sports remember the 30+ year era when sex chromosome testing for all athletes competing in the female category in international events was mandatory. Female athletes back then had no problem this - it's just a cheek swab that takes two seconds, after all.
But some athletes competing as females who turned out to have XY chromosomes weren't happy with it, and several of them mounted legal challenges. To appease them, and without consulting any female athletes who hadn't failed the sex chromosome tests, the IAAF and IOC in the mid-late 1990s abandoned mandatory sex chromosome testing for everyone in female events and came up with a number of new policies that bent over backwards to accommodate males with DSDs who wanted to participate in women's sports. This paved the way for athletes like Semenya - and Wambui and Niyonsaba - to enter and clean up in women's events, riding roughshod over the principles of fair play for females that we women had worked so long and hard to put in place.
Once the IOC and IAAF opened up female sports to males with DSDs, the next step was for them to open up female sports to males who claim they have a female "gender identity" - and for other sports bodies like the NCAA and Swim USA to follow suit. Which has led to the situation we're in today:
Just 36 years after women finally got to compete in an Olympic marathon for the first time ever, full-grown males who've gone through male puberty and have adult male bodies in every respect right down their dicks and balls are using spurious claims of "gender identity" to horn in on - and clean up in - a wide array of female sports. This year, a 28-year old male who started claiming to be female at age 20-21 and took up running only a few years ago qualified for the US women's Olympic marathon trials - and was lauded by many for doing so.
Similarly, a male who decided to start competing in female sports senior year of college is now a NCAA Div 2 women's national champion. Another male who decided to compete in female sports senior year of uni age 21 was named the Big Sky Conference's "Female Athlete of the Week" earlier this year. In the UK, a male who started "identifying as" a woman and playing women's cricket in his 30s was named "Female Cricket Player of the Year" whilst he still continued to play on a male team at the same time. In international women's weightlifting, a man in his 40s who comes from a prominent, politically-powerful New Zealand family with a long history of opposing gay rights, and who competed in on the NZ male weightlifting team in his 20s, now routinely trounces female competitors less than half his age and holds many women's international titles.
I am sorry Caster Semenya was born with an inherited medical condition that affected the development of Semenya's external male genitals. Many people are born with inherited medical conditions that are hard to bear, and which limit life options. I have some myself. But getting dealt a raw deal or bad hand by Mother Nature doesn't give boys and men the right to participate in girls' and women's sports.
Female sports are not the consolation prize for males with genital birth defects, small or absent penises, testicles lost to disease or injuries, low testosterone, low sperm count, endocrine disorders, identity issues, self-esteem problems or male-only DSDs like the one Semenya has. And just as female sports aren't for certain subsets of males to take for themselves, female sports are also not for male sports officials, politicians, pundits or posters on social media to give away to some other males either.