RunRagged wrote:
Magical burrito wrote:
Isn´t the issue that a if you want to compete in a competition specifically for women you shoud have to be a woman?
Competing at elite level you would expect that the burden of proof would be on the athlete since it is a class for people that have the potential ability of giving birth. In a human context this coincide with having ovaries and XX chromosomes and having a slight but clear disadvantage in athletics compared to men.
I think it is absurd that it is even a topic of discussion if XY individuals with testes are women in a definition relevant to sports.
You can really care about these individuals because they born in a way that make it hard to fit in.
But that does not mean they should be allowed to compete as women.
I agree that women's athletic competition should be for biologically female people. Meaning those of us born with XX sex chromosomes and ovaries, and without the male-determining SRY gene that's normally located on the Y chromosome.
A lot of guys seem to see women's sports as the category for adult humans they regard as "non men." They believe that women's sports should be for everyone born without a clearly-discernible penis and testes, even including XY persons with differences of male sex development who are otherwise robustly healthy and have obtained all the physical benefits that come from going through male puberty like Caster Semenya and Francine Niyonsaba. Because people with this view distinguish the two sexes by the superficial standards held by many kids and some adults. They think being male always means having a penis and testicles between the legs, and thus they assume anyone born without a dick and balls must be a girl/woman.
By contrast, others think women's sports should be the category for persons who were born with female gonads, female anatomy and female physiology who went through female development and thus who actually are women. Because we define women by standards appropriate to persons with female bodies - and we have some knowledge of the myriad physical differences between the two sexes beyond the obvious ones on the surface level.
Those who believe that women's sports should be "inclusive" of XY DSD athletes and other normally-developed XY athletes so long as both groups claim to have a "female gender identity," and/or they reduce the male levels of T that their testes produce for six months or a year, are redefining women according to sexist male standards. They're reducing female people to a set of ideas and stereotypes in men's heads; measuring us by the predominant male sex hormone, testosterone, which they mistakenly assume plays a similar and equally significant role in females as it does in males; and equating the physical state of being a woman either to being a man with reduced T - or to being a male with internal testes born with an oddly-developed, hard-to-detect or absent penis.
Worse, some of those who believe that women's sports must be inclusive of males are now attempting to erase female people entirely, claiming that we do not exist in material reality at all. Like the poster upthread who insisted, "by definition there is no such thing as a 'biological woman.' "
Since I'm a "biological woman" - scare quotes and all - who some today say there is no such thing as, I realize my view won't be appreciated by all here. But I'll state it anyways.
IMO, neither XY persons with differences of male sex development like Caster Semenya and Francine Niyonsaba, nor normally developed males who now claim to have an opposite-sex gender identity (whether longterm or just for the time being as the policies of WA, the IOC and other sports governing bodies allow), have any place in girls' and women's sports. Starting just days after conception, XX persons who developed to have the potential capacity to fulfill the female role in human reproduction obtained our own very distinctive anatomy and physiology that make us physically different to males in many thousands of ways. We are not just males minus some T.
Big difference between DSD and trans athletes.
For DSD I have never seen a clear definition of biomarkers sufficient to exclude all the people that are claimed to be "obvious."
Precious Roy highlighted on page 1 the myriad ways the DSD athletes can have high T without karyotype abnormalities.
For a while testosterone made the most sense as a simple biomarker to differentiate the classes but then the IAAF botched the study to prove the correlation between T and performance. So, we are kinda stuck now. Need a lot more data.
or... just go back to karyotyping like they did the in 1980s and realize you are excluding a number of XY with CAIS and abnormal karyotype women who pass your "looks" test AND including XX women who produce testosterone!
Roy is right... this is NOT simple or it would've been sorted in the 19802.