If "she" is a woman...

[Guest]

I don't know how many of you read the story about the South African runner Caster Semenya being asked to prove that she's a woman, but if "she" is a woman, maybe I'm straight...

http://www.advocate.com/uploadedImages/ADVOCATE/EDITORIAL/NEWS/20090819/Caster_SemenyaX390.jpg

[MsGuy]

Unfortunately it will be a few weeks before the test results are back. In the meantime, don't do anything too drastic.

[BewareofNick]

I don't suppose anyone thought about checking to see if she had a vagina or a penis? I mean, I'm sure there are all kinds of tests that can be done, but wouldn't a visual test at least be a good start? Maybe check for an adam's apple?

[+ Axiom2001]

I don't suppose anyone thought about checking to see if she had a vagina or a penis? I mean, I'm sure there are all kinds of tests that can be done, but wouldn't a visual test at least be a good start? Maybe check for an adam's apple?

 

 

 

Agreed! Agreed! Agreed! But it is unfortunate that "her" gender is even being questioned!

What a bizarre, friggin' world in which all of us live!!!!

[AdamSmith]

Where’s the Rulebook for Sex Verification?

 

NYT

By ALICE DREGER

Published: August 21, 2009

 

The only thing we know for sure about Caster Semenya, the world-champion sprinter from South Africa, is that she gets to live the rest of her life under a cloud of suspicion regarding her sex. Now that officials for track and field’s world governing body are investigating her sex, at best Semenya will face an asterisk in every biography and a question in every potential lover’s mind. At worst, she will perpetually be subjected to jeers and jokes.

 

The I.A.A.F.’s process for determining whether Caster Semenya, second from left, is a woman will involve at least a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist and a psychologist.

 

Why? Because the track organization, the I.A.A.F., has not sorted out the rules for the sport of sex typing. Worse yet, the sport’s officials are playing by unstated, shifting standards.

 

To be fair, the biology of sex is a lot more complicated than the average fan believes. Many think you can simply look at a person’s “sex chromosomes.” If the person has XY chromosomes, you declare him a man. If XX, she’s a woman. Right?

 

Wrong. A little biology: On the Y chromosome, a gene called SRY usually makes a fetus grow as male. It turns out, though, that SRY can show up on an X, turning an XX fetus essentially male. And if the SRY gene does not work on the Y, the fetus develops essentially female.

 

Even a XY fetus with a functioning SRY can essentially develop female. In the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, the ability of cells to “hear” the masculinizing hormones known as androgens is lacking. That means the genitals and the rest of the external body look female-typical, except that these women lack body hair (which depends on androgen-sensitivity).

 

Women with complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome are less “masculinized” in their muscles and brains than the average woman, because the average woman makes and “hears” some androgens. Want to tell women with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome they have to compete as men, just because they have a Y chromosome? That makes no sense.

 

So, some say, just look at genitals. Forget the genes — pull down the jeans! The I.A.A.F. asks drug-testers to do this. But because male and female genitals start from the same stuff, a person can have something between a penis and a clitoris, and still legitimately be thought of as a man or a woman.

 

Moreover, a person can look male-typical on the outside but be female-typical on the inside, or vice versa. A few years ago, I got a call from Matthew, a 19-year-old who was born looking obviously male, was raised a boy, and had a girlfriend and a male-typical life. Then he found out, by way of some medical problems, that he had ovaries and a uterus.

 

Matthew had an extreme form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. His adrenal glands made so many androgens, even though he had XX chromosomes and ovaries, his body developed to look male-typical. In fact, his body is mostly male-typical, including his muscle development and his self identity.

 

O.K., you say, if chromosomes and genitals do not work, how about hormones? We might assume that it is hormones that really matter in terms of whether someone has an athletic advantage.

 

Well, women and men make the same hormones, just in different quantities, on average. The average man has more androgens than the average woman. But, to state the obvious, the average female athlete is not the average woman. In some sports, she is likely to have naturally high levels of androgens. That is probably part of why she has succeeded athletically.

 

By the way, that is also why she is often flat-chested, boyish looking and may have a bigger-than-average clitoris. High levels of androgens can do all that.

 

Sure, in certain sports, a woman with naturally high levels of androgens has an advantage. But is it an unfair advantage? I don’t think so. Some men naturally have higher levels of androgens than other men. Is that unfair?

 

Consider an analogy: Men on average are taller than women. But do we stop women from competing if a male-typical height gives them an advantage over shorter women? Can we imagine a Michele Phelps or a Patricia Ewing being told, “You’re too tall to compete as a woman”? So why would we want to tell some women, “You naturally have too high a level of androgens to compete as a woman”? There seems to be nothing wrong with this kind of natural advantage.

 

So where do we draw the line between men and women athletes? I don’t know. The fact is, sex is messy. This is demonstrated in the I.A.A.F.’s process for determining whether Semenya is in fact a woman. The organization has called upon a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, a psychologist and so forth.

 

Sex is so messy that, at the end of the day, these doctors are not going to be able to run a test that will answer the question. Science can and will inform their decision, but they are going to have to decide which of the dozens of characteristics of sex matter to them.

 

In the end, their decision will be like the consensus regarding how many points are awarded for a touchdown and a field goal — it will be a sporting decision, not a natural one, about how we choose to play the game of sex.

 

These officials should — finally — come up with a clear set of rules for sex typing, one open to scientific review, one that will allow athletes like Semenya, in the privacy of their own doctors’ offices, to find out, before publicly competing, whether they will be allowed to win in the crazy sport of sex. I bet that’s a sport no one ever told Semenya she would have to play.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html

[KMEM]

AS-

 

Great article. It certainly made me think. As is usual, the real problem is "politics", not science, isn't it?

 

Best regards,

KMEM

[+ glutes]

Stella the high speed fella...

 

We've been here before

 

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/08/21/article-1208012-06201261000005DC-382_233x423.jpg

 

By GUY WALTERS dailymail.co.uk

 

Stella the fella: Stella Walsh won a silver medal at the 1936 Olympics - but was later found to be a man

 

The victory of Caster Semenya in the women's 800 metres final is not the first time an athlete of questionable gender has struck gold in Berlin's Olympic Stadium.

 

During the 1936 Olympic Games, all three medal winners in the women's 100 metres looked more butch than their male counterparts.

 

The winner was American Helen Stephens, whose features were so masculine and voice so deep that one British female athlete openly queried how she was even allowed into the women's section of the Olympic village.

 

The silver medal was won by Stella Walsh, a Polish sprinter whose true gender was only discovered when he/she was gunned down in the crossfire of a bank robbery in Ohio in 1980.

 

The autopsy revealed that her nickname of 'Stella the Fella' was well deserved: she was found to have male genitalia.

 

Meanwhile, there was little doubt that one of the German competitors in the women's high jump had something hidden her shorts.

 

Dora Ratjen, whose real name was Hermann, was deliberately entered into the female event by the Nazis to ensure an unfair advantage that would bring glory to the Reich.

 

The ruse was suspected, even though he is said to have bound his genitals tightly to conceal them.

 

'I thought something was a bit funny,' recalled one athlete, 'because she had a deep voice and snored in her sleep. What's more, she also had to shave her face.'

 

Unfortunately for the Nazis, Ratjen came only fourth, and retired from female athletics to pursue the more masculine career of running a pub.

 

Famously, it was the Eastern Bloc that would take 'gender-bending' into new realms after the war.

 

Tamara and Irina Press, two sisters in the Soviet team of the 1960s, won five Olympic shot and discus medals between them, and set 26 new world records.

 

But as soon as the gender test was introduced, they disappeared from international competition.

[MsGuy]

The lady's friends and family are pissed her gender is being questioned.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,541280,00.html?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a16:g4:r3:c0.000000:b0:z0

[+ glutes]

Man or woman? A hermaphrodite!

 

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2631482/Runner-is-a-hermaphrodite.html

[uwsman2]

No, intersexual...

 

Hermaphrodite is an old-fashioned pejorative word that only the sensationalist press should use. She is an intersexual, somebody whose internal sexual development was somehow misdirected through genetic dysfunction during gestation, as a result of which she has aspects of both genders within her body. In other words, she is living proof that the categories and classifications that we casually embrace are conventional ways of looking at a world that is much more complex -- the line between male and female is not solid and unbridgeable. Recently in the U.S. intersexuals have been organizing as a civil rights movement. Although they are a tiny fraction of a percent of the population, in absolute numbers there are enough people to make up a small civil rights movement, which has already been lobbying the medical profession for several years to change the way they are spoken of and, more importantly, to change the attitudes of doctors who think that an intersexual newborn must suffer a surgical intervention before he or she is old enough to consent knowledgeably.

[Guest greatness]

Thanks

 

Thank you for clarifying an important term.

 

Hermaphrodite is an old-fashioned pejorative word that only the sensationalist press should use. She is an intersexual, somebody whose internal sexual development was somehow misdirected through genetic dysfunction during gestation, as a result of which she has aspects of both genders within her body. In other words, she is living proof that the categories and classifications that we casually embrace are conventional ways of looking at a world that is much more complex -- the line between male and female is not solid and unbridgeable. Recently in the U.S. intersexuals have been organizing as a civil rights movement. Although they are a tiny fraction of a percent of the population, in absolute numbers there are enough people to make up a small civil rights movement, which has already been lobbying the medical profession for several years to change the way they are spoken of and, more importantly, to change the attitudes of doctors who think that an intersexual newborn must suffer a surgical intervention before he or she is old enough to consent knowledgeably.

[+ glutes]

So now that has been all cleared up, should this 'individual' play on Mens or Womens sport competition?

[uwsman2]

the binary sports world vs the real world

 

This is a big problem, actually. Is the person a woman with some incidental masculine features, or a man with some of the external manifestations of a woman? From all the comments of her family and herself, her gender identity is clearly female, and she has been raised as a woman. I suspect the results of this testing are news to her.

 

There is a precedent for this confusion, not a complete analogy but interesting nonetheless, in the case of Renee Richards, nee Richard Raskind. Raskind was a fairly good tennis player who competed in tournaments professionally. But Raskind was diagnosed with gender dysphoria and transitioned to female, then wanted to compete at Forest Hills in the US Open as a woman. The officials there sought to bar her, on the grounds that her competition as a woman would be unfair because, despite the transition, she had a male frame and lung capacity and reach and stamina. She went to court and won an order from the NY trial court to allow her to compete as a woman. The judge held that after the transition and the legal name change she was a woman, and thus had a right to compete in the women's competition, otherwise there would be unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex under NY's Human Rights Law. This case dates from the 1970s, and was an unusual decision for its time. Did the court make the correct decision? That is certainly open to debate.

 

The problem in this newer case is that the sports competition world classifies using the binary of male and female and is not set up to deal with the transsexual or the intersexual, where the sexes are blended in some sense. With whom should she compete? A reasonable subject to debate...

[+ glutes]

Caster is being given wide coverage in South Africa, 'she' (as the press describes her) is now in hiding. What a shame.

In speaking with a SA friend, why all of a sudden has 'her' sex become a issue when 'she' has been in many other competitions?

 

http://www.iol.co.za/

[jakobsen]

I have to chime in and say how much I admire her family for making the decision to register her birth and raise her as a girl. In most third world countries, for example, China, she would have been raised a boy (or a girl trapped in a boy's body)--because it is "convenient" to do so.

[uwsman2]

highly doubtful

 

I think it's highly doubtful that any newborn would be raised as a boy unless external genitalia were distinctly male. The default position on intersexual newborns, usually presenting as having unusually small genitalia if male or unusually large genitalia if female, is surgical intervention to make the male female or to cut down the female's genitalia. As an increasing number of these people testify, the results can be lifelong psychological damage.

[+ glutes]

For a follow-up, the gender test results will be kept confidential:

 

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=6&click_id=4&art_id=nw20091119123705911C456922