Some people just wanna watch the wold burn...enter the leftist agenda and Caster Semenya

toobad wrote:

celery wrote:

The whole point of my original post was to criticize the way leftist journalist use intersectionality to obscure actual discussion of the interesting and relevant aspects of this issue. If you took the time to read my post closely (and the article I linked to), you'd probably realize you agree with me.

Your assumption here is wrong. I did read your post. But the mere fact that your logic seems reasonable is unfortunately overshadowed by your ranting vitriol about fascism and whatnot.

Anytime someone resorts to insults and name-calling, it is a hint that their ability to reason is poor. Now, it may not be true--you may have great reasoning skills--but they are hidden behind the poor tactics of throwing emotion and insult into your post.

Here is some guidance: try to err on the side of understating (*) your case, of avoiding insults and ad hominem attacks, of generously assuming your opponent has goodwill and good intent, and cleaving closely to logic and reason. Remember that your real audience is not your opponent, whose mind may be made up beyond all sway, but the greater cloud of witnesses surrounding you.

(*) This may at first seem odd, but if you can leave some points for these witnesses to discover on their own, they may enjoy it and become more engaged in the debate or the issue.

toobad wrote:

celery wrote:

The whole point of my original post was to criticize the way leftist journalist use intersectionality to obscure actual discussion of the interesting and relevant aspects of this issue. If you took the time to read my post closely (and the article I linked to), you'd probably realize you agree with me.

Your assumption here is wrong. I did read your post. But the mere fact that your logic seems reasonable is unfortunately overshadowed by your ranting vitriol about fascism and whatnot.

Anytime someone resorts to insults and name-calling, it is a hint that their ability to reason is poor. Now, it may not be true--you may have great reasoning skills--but they are hidden behind the poor tactics of throwing emotion and insult into your post.

Here is some guidance: try to err on the side of understating (*) your case, of avoiding insults and ad hominem attacks, of generously assuming your opponent has goodwill and good intent, and cleaving closely to logic and reason. Remember that your real audience is not your opponent, whose mind may be made up beyond all sway, but the greater cloud of witnesses surrounding you.

(*) This may at first seem odd, but if you can leave some points for these witnesses to discover on their own, they may enjoy it and become more engaged in the debate or the issue.

GD wrote:

toobad wrote:

Your assumption here is wrong. I did read your post. But the mere fact that your logic seems reasonable is unfortunately overshadowed by your ranting vitriol about fascism and whatnot.

Anytime someone resorts to insults and name-calling, it is a hint that their ability to reason is poor. Now, it may not be true--you may have great reasoning skills--but they are hidden behind the poor tactics of throwing emotion and insult into your post.

Here is some guidance: try to err on the side of understating (*) your case, of avoiding insults and ad hominem attacks, of generously assuming your opponent has goodwill and good intent, and cleaving closely to logic and reason. Remember that your real audience is not your opponent, whose mind may be made up beyond all sway, but the greater cloud of witnesses surrounding you.

(*) This may at first seem odd, but if you can leave some points for these witnesses to discover on their own, they may enjoy it and become more engaged in the debate or the issue.

__________________________________

Lefty feminist here. I agree with Celery about the CS situation, the tendency of the article to sidestep the real issue (how do we deal with a non-binary gender in a binary, gender-segregated athletics structure?), and the fact that these particular obfuscating arguments are associated with the political left. It would probably be more effective to attack the arguments and not attack the left, but I don't think it's accurate to call these ad hominem attacks. Many of Celery's criticisms are valid. That said, Celery confuses some strands of philosophical and political thought, as TERF pointed out on page 1 of this thread. In fact, I see a lot of value in Marx, post structuralism, and Judith Butler; but I don't cart these thinkers out, dogmatically, as if their works are religious texts capable of discrediting all science (they're probably capable of discrediting some science).

The main mistake Celery makes has to do with intersectionality, which broadly refers to the fact that all people have multiple, intersecting group memberships/identities, each of which is linked to various levels of political, social, and economic privilege. Different categories/identities become more or less important and more or less privileged depending upon one's social context. The problem with articles like this one, and with many of the social constructionist arguments about gender being used to back CS's participation in women's competition is that they don't actually use an intersectional lens. Instead, they search out the alleged victim's most oppressed attribute and use this as the basis to claim authority over the truth. The left has a huge problem with this tactic right now. In the CS situation, it's absolutely true that she has been subjected to sexist and racist nonsense, and that some of this has to do with white, Western beauty standards. It's also true that the very thing that triggered this hate--her intersex condition--is a huge privilege/advantage in sports. In athletics, biological sex matters more for gender parity in sport more than any other physical/physiological attribute. To this end, gender identity, race, and economics are less important than genotype (XX, XY, or something else). To me, this shows that intersectionality matters a lot. Intersectionality allows us to cut through all of the nonsense arguments on both sides to figure out what factors are most important in this particular situation, and for athletics more broadly. It's really odd that people claiming to advance a social constructionist, non-binary view of gender are so hellbent on fitting a non-binary person into inadequate categories.

I could go on and on, but I'll end with this. The fact that leftist arguments are being used as an illogical, ideological weapon in the CS debate does not mean that they do not have analytical purchase elsewhere.

toobad wrote:

celery wrote:

The whole point of my original post was to criticize the way leftist journalist use intersectionality to obscure actual discussion of the interesting and relevant aspects of this issue. If you took the time to read my post closely (and the article I linked to), you'd probably realize you agree with me.

Your assumption here is wrong. I did read your post. But the mere fact that your logic seems reasonable is unfortunately overshadowed by your ranting vitriol about fascism and whatnot.

Anytime someone resorts to insults and name-calling, it is a hint that their ability to reason is poor. Now, it may not be true--you may have great reasoning skills--but they are hidden behind the poor tactics of throwing emotion and insult into your post.

Here is some guidance: try to err on the side of understating (*) your case, of avoiding insults and ad hominem attacks, of generously assuming your opponent has goodwill and good intent, and cleaving closely to logic and reason. Remember that your real audience is not your opponent, whose mind may be made up beyond all sway, but the greater cloud of witnesses surrounding you.

(*) This may at first seem odd, but if you can leave some points for these witnesses to discover on their own, they may enjoy it and become more engaged in the debate or the issue.

celery wrote:

I'm often political on these boards. I didn't used to be. I used to come here to only discus running. But the left and their agenda wouldn't leave well enough alone. Their intersectional, oppressor/oppressed theory of white privilege nonsense has invaded the sport I love. It's slowly dying. Here is an article posted on letsrun's main page that revisits the issue where the spearhead of leftist fascism into our sport first began.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/18/the-unequal-battle-privilege-genes-gender-and-power

Here's my favorite examples of nonsense from the article, followed by my commentary in parentheses.

"In seeking to define the boundaries of womanhood – our genetics, our apparel, our most intimate parts and experiences – women are being policed. Worryingly, the very rules designed to protect us are becoming our oppressors."

(Here we have the constant drum beat of oppression, totally detached from any precise demonstration of who is being oppressed and in what way they are wronged.)

"Usain Bolt is almost 2m tall and, combined with lightning fast leg turnover, obliterated the competition through three Olympic cycles. But no one complained that his presence in the competition made for an uneven playing field. So why should gender be singled out for regulation?"

(Umm, maybe because sports are divided into M/F categories. Unless you want to just get rid of those categories, we'll see how that works out for women. But if we did eliminated M/F categories, the left would have something else over which to claim oppression, so I guess its win/win for them.)

"The IAAF must show that female athletes with higher total T [testosterone] have a performance difference that approximates what male athletes typically have over female athletes; not that female athletes with higher T have any competitive advantage over their peers. In other words, it has to be a big performance difference, which CAS put in the 10-12% range. What the study found is nothing near this."

(Let me translate that for you; If a person with a Y chromosome who also has a disorder of sexual development, is not at least 10% stronger (like a normally developed man) than normal women who have no Y chromosome, then we will pretend the Y chromosome doesn't help that person perform better than XX women.)

"I remember being surprised at the certainty with which those around me discussed her gender, based on her appearance. If Semenya was white, with long hair and make-up, would there have been the same amount of outcry?"

(If Anna Kessel -the writer of this article- can't tell that Caster looks VERY masculine compared to other women, I'm not certain the visual part of Anna's brain is fully developed.)

"Msimang says there is yet to be a genuine groundswell of movement towards championing women’s equality in sport."

(Equality in sport, WTF are you talking about? Sports by it's very nature a way to measure who is athletically better than who.)

"One of the reasons I got into this is because I really hated the way that stories of Muslim women in sport were written about,” she explains. “They’re all written by a white guy. There’s very little understanding of the geopolitical context, that Muslim women are not a monolith.”

(Only in the muddled mind of an intersectional feminist, could muslim and Hypoandrogenism have anything to do with each other.)

"in Canada the women’s professional ice hockey league are not paid, despite it being a national sport. They receive a food stipend and their travel expenses, and that’s it. “I was appalled when I found this out. We like to tout ourselves as developed nations, the UK, Canada, Australia. But the struggles of women in sport are universally exactly the same whether that’s the Matildas fighting for equal pay, the Danish women’s team, England’s Lionesses.”

(And yet the article conveniently leaves out the part where XX women loose out on prize money to an intersex athlete.)

This is only a sampling of the nonsense in this article. Nearly every paragraph is filled with lefty buzzwords and convoluted logic. The article visits every unrelated topic possible (race, class, colonialism, sexism, hijabs, etc.) in order to confuse the real questions pertaining to Castor's situation. The only purpose of intersectionality is that you can completely disregard logic and throw every scrap of supposed oppression into one big pot, and get people such as those on the CAS court to rule in your favor. The CAS court's only motivation (if it isn't already taken over by leftist) is to say "we're not racist, we're not sexist, we're not colonialists, we're not the privileged oppressors."

I understand that Caster is intersex, so her case is not as clear cut as if a transgender man wants to compete against women. However, the theme of my post is that with the non-logic of intersectionality that seems to rule the CAS decisions, its just a matter of time before trans men are taking women's medals. Caster is the canary in the coal mine.

SAD.

sdafads wrote:

celery wrote:

I could be wrong, I've search for this before without finding the information, but I don't think you can be XX and develop normal male parts.

First google hit on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome

. These are people that will test XX (not XY, or XXY) on a genetic test despite having a dick. And yes a lot (but not all of them) have SRY that was mixed in somewhere. Point is simply we can't go XX = female, XY = male. You can keep adding rules (XX except if SRY or XY except when SRY not prescent) but a lot of these cases aren't going to show up until well into a persons career.

As far as using the eyeball test, there are a lot of woman I have to give a second look at to tell if they are males or females. I bet most of them test as females by any reasonable definition. This also tends to get racist in a hurry as people tend to ascribe certain characteristics to black woman and not asian/white. That is sort of the point of the article.

And note I am not saying they should be competing against woman. I am just saying it isn't some clear line. Things like the male guy who is transisition to a female (i.e. clearly physically a male at this point) are a lot clearly. But we are not seeing cases like that at the national/olympic level.

celery wrote:

Exactly. You can keep adding rules, study the various biological possibilities, and come up with a solution. But we all need to realize that the CAS court set up the ground rules to predetermine the outcome. Read again the quote from the article regarding the burden of proof put on the IAAF by the CAS court; "The IAAF must show that female athletes with higher total T [testosterone] have a performance difference that approximates what male athletes typically have over female athletes; not that female athletes with higher T have any competitive advantage over their peers. In other words, it has to be a big performance difference, which CAS put in the 10-12% range. What the study found is nothing near this."

It was predetermined by the CAS court, that they would ignore the evidence of advantage that CS had over the competitors. Why is the CAS court not interested in the evidence? The answer is they are influence by leftist ideology. Plain and simple.

As for XX males, the wikipedia link says "In 90% of these individuals the syndrome is caused by unequal crossing over between X and Y chromosomes during meiosis in the father, and results in the X chromosome containing the SRY gene, as opposed to the Y chromosome where it is normally found." This is what I mean in my other post about karyotyping and genetic testing. It is now not difficult to detect the SYR genes present in an individual. Also from wikipedia "A completely male phenotype usually develops in the presence of the SRY gene... In the remaining 10%, X inactivation spreads to include a portion of the SRY gene, resulting in incomplete masculinization. Masculinization of SRY-negative XX males is dependent upon which genes have mutations and at what point in development these mutations occur."

So is the biology a little complicated? Sure. Is it more complicated than the typical things the medical industry deals with on a regular basis? Not at all.

In a sane world, a combination of genetic factors and hormone levels would be decided upon to determine if an intersex person could compete with normal females. I wish we lived in a sane world. Sadly, one of the great sources of insanity at the present time is the ideology of leftism.