RunRagged wrote:
yes and no.... wrote:
We agree on much more than we disagree on here. For instance, we both agree Semenya is actually a man biologically. We start to disagree on things like Semenya's symptoms being like that of a woman due to the reduction of Testosterone because you seem to be saying well if she wants to be treated like a woman then the symptoms should be considered to that of a woman. But she's not a woman, we both know that. Her symptoms are that of a man going through "andropause", but it's not a gradual transtition over many years. It's happening in a matter of months.
Maybe these athletes are unaware of the increased risk of depression and suicide when testosterone levels plummet, but I certainly am not. I've been subjected to them, unknowingly at the time, when taking accutane as a teenager.
1. My Response vs Yours to Semenya's Complaints About The Effects of Taking Estrogen To Reduce The Male-Level Testosterone That Semenya's Testes Produce
I'm not saying that the unpleasant symptoms Semenya experienced on oral estrogen (BC pills) are "like that of a woman." Clearly, Semenya's body didn't react well to the synthetic or mare-derived estrogen in the BC pills Semenya took largely because Semenya is a biological male. (I say "largely" because exogenous hormones of any kind manufactured by pharmaceutical companies can screw up a person even if said hormones are same-sex, versus cross-sex.)
BC pills are designed to provide female bodies with the amount of estrogen that a female human has when pregnant, because pregnancy - real or pharmaceutically faked - tells the ovaries to shut down and not to produce any more eggs. Males are not designed or meant to be pregnant or to have pregnancy-levels of estrogen in their bodies - ever. So Semenya should NOT have been taking estrogen designed to mimic pregnancy in the first place.
If I had to guess, the abdominal pain Semenya is said to have experienced while on Big Pharma estrogen was Semenya's internal testes saying, "WTF? It's bad enough that a defect of nature caused us to be locked inside you, but the pharmacological abuse you're now subjecting us to really is a bridge too far."
I'm also not trying to underplay the ill effects males experience when their is testosterone is reduced, whether gradually or suddenly. As a heterosexual woman who's had more than a few boyfriends/partners over the course of a long life, and who's given birth to and raised now-grown sons, I really do get how important T is to guys.
Also, when I was a girl, a close adult relative of mine had cancer that required removal of his testicles, which was really horrific for him; and more recently someone I know well with terminal prostate cancer took Lupron and suffered immensely as a result. Plus, I used to work in journalism, and over the course of several decades had the opportunity to interview a number of male combat veterans from both the Vietnam and Iraq wars who all had their dicks and balls blown off. . . So I'm familiar with how crucial T is to male wellbeing.
(If you're not familiar with Lupron, it's a GnRH modulator that in males greatly reduces or entirely eliminates the testicles' ability to produce testosterone.)
And BTW, ovaries also produce testosterone, so women who've had to have their ovaries removed or have gone through menopause are affected by reductions in our natural T-levels too. I personally had a condition that caused me to take Estratest - a combination of estrogen and testosterone - for a number of years.
But what I am saying is that since Semenya is claiming to be a woman and thinks it's Semenya's "human right" to compete as and against women with Semenya's womanhood unquestioned and Semenya's "womanly" physiology entirely unaltered, then when Semenya argues that the IAAF is discriminating against Semenya "as a woman" based on Semenya's right to "run free" as a woman in Semenya's natural state as a woman, the comparator Semenya uses should be women and female physiology, not men and male physiology.
In other words, when speaking of norms, treatments and symptoms that Semenya finds acceptable or unbearable for Semenya to deal with as a woman, Semenya should be comparing Semenya's self to women, not men. Because Semenya's entire case is based on the constantly asserted claim (false though it is) that Semenya "was born a woman, is a woman, will die as a woman" - and that the idea that Semenya is "a biological male" as the IAAF alleges is just plain "nonsense, fiction." (CAS decision, p. 19)
I and many other women feel deeply insulted when biological males like Semenya who claim to be women - "all women" and "100% natural female women" - turn around and whinge that it would be a violation of their human rights as women and "born females" for them to experience any of the physical sensations, pains and disadvantages - hot flushes, night sweats, abdominal pain, weight gain, running slower than males, etc. - that biological females are taught to suck up without a word of complaint because said physical experiences are just part and parcel of being female.
BTW, many aspects of physiology that are normal and routine for one sex would strike members of the other sex as intolerable. For example, many young women who are on T today because they believe they're transgender experience enormous distress when they discover that injecting male levels of T will mean developing male-pattern baldness. Biological males, of course, don't like it when their hairlines recede or their locks fall out. Guys like the actors Yul Brenner, Bruce Willis and Vin Diesel and the musician/rock stars Brian Eno, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel and Michael Stipe probably didn't exactly jump for joy when their hair fell out. But these fellas - and every other guy out there whose hair has thinned or departed - is expected to take it on the chin and adjust to going bald because baldness is a normal, natural occurrence that happens to males on account of male biology. By contrast, many trans-identified females on T who find they are going bald are now taking to the internet to decry the terrible injustice being done to them due to the T they're choosing to take. "No one told me!" they say, claiming baldness is an affront to their dignity and an abrogation of their human rights.
Ridiculous, right? And offensive to actual biological males, right? I mean, what idiots! And how dare they?
So please try to show some understanding for how ridiculous, deeply offensive and exasperating it is for many of us biological women to hear Semenya's complaints about the hot flushes, night sweats, abdominal pain, nausea and slower running times poor poor Caster experienced when taking BC pills.
Sorry, but this world-renowned, much-lauded "female athlete" who loves to take the podium as one of the world's top-dog women runners and has become mega-famous and mega-rich for doing so simply would not be able to deal for a moment with ordinary female experiences such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause and PMS. And no way Caster could cope for an effing second with the symptoms of common female conditions that women put up with as a matter of course like endometriosis, ovarian cysts, uterine fibroids, chronic UTIs, mastitis, yeast infections, uterine prolapse, pelvic inflammatory disease, pudendal neuralgia, childbirth injuries, cervical cancer, breast cancer. . .