Another athletics thread

[gwnn]

Brings back memories of another Berlin sports event some 70 years ago:

 

http://tinyurl.com/m9s8vh

 

amateur video where you can hear her voice:

 

 

Hmm.

[helene_t]

Lol, s/he needs to be assessed by a whole range of experts. Say s/he turns out to have female genitials but male hormone levels, or ambigious in both respects, what's ya gonna say? I doubt IOC has a technical definition of what it means to be female.

[Al_U_Card]

How about: "If natural childbirth is possible, its a woman."

[hotShot]

IIRC they are doing a chromosome test. A woman must be XX, not xxy or xy.

[PassedOut]

Lol, s/he needs to be assessed by a whole range of experts. Say s/he turns out to have female genitials but male hormone levels, or ambigious in both respects, what's ya gonna say? I doubt IOC has a technical definition of what it means to be female.

IIRC they are doing a chromosome test. A woman must be XX, not xxy or xy.

As Helene said, this determination is not so simple. Here is an interesting piece by Alice Dreger on the matter: Where’s the Rulebook for Sex Verification?

 

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.

Life is so messy! But that's one of the things that makes life such a great adventure.

[gwnn]

http://eurosport.yahoo.com/11092009/58/rep...maphrodite.html

 

I should have made this like a prediction thread. Apparently they would never take her title away but maybe they will ask her not to come back.

[Jlall]

male

[helene_t]

Maybe it's just because I don't take sports seriously, but ... get real. It must already be quite a burden in many way to be a hermafrodite. Why make her life more troublesome with all those sex tests and discussion about whether she can continue to participate in female events.

 

OK, four earlier cases have been asked to stop their career, but in the meantime things has moved forward. Transsexuals are now allowed to participate in the category of the assigned sex from two years after surgery. I think this case is similar: Biologically it is a borderline case but her birth certificate says she is female and that is not something that was made up in order to give her an advantage at sports.

[onoway]

It is unfortunate in the extreme that this wasn't addressed, if at all, before the championships. It has to be dreadful to have this sort of thing become the topic of gossip about you.

 

That said, one comment made some sense..if a woman was caught knowingly taking testosterone, she would be stripped of her medals and banned. This seems cruel and unnecessary in this case but if the tests show an clear excess of the testosterone levels normally found in women (whatever that might be) then future competition in women's events should be banned. It should be unnecessary to have all this noise and nonsense about whether a person is male/female, simply a decision re the levels of certain hormones or whatever which affect this type of performance. Arbitrary, yes. But otherwise why even bother having the events separate at all?

 

Just think, in a few short weeks, there will finally be a definitive description of what is woman. As determined by a sports organization. What a strange world.

[helene_t]

That said, one comment  made some sense..if a woman was caught knowingly taking testosterone, she would be stripped of her medals and banned. This seems cruel and unnecessary in this case but if the tests show an clear excess of the testosterone levels normally found in women (whatever that might be) then future competition in women's events should be banned.

Natural production of sex hormones or other performance-enhancing compounds is not doping. A man with an abnormally high natural testosterone level would not be banned either, even if it gave him an "unfair" advantage. (I don't really understand why these issues should be "fair" in the first place. Should bridge players with abnormal IQs be banned? Visual intelligence is on average higher in men than in women. Should a woman with visual intelligence outside the normal female range be asked to compete in open bridge events? Of course not. A gorilla would not be admitted to a weight-lifting competition for humans. But a man with a muscle volume more typical for a male gorilla than a man would be admitted).

 

But of course some definition of what it means to be male/female in the contest of sport competition must be agreed on. I think an anatomic criterion is more practical than one based on hormone levels. After all, hormone levels are not constant.

[vuroth]

Maybe it's just because I don't take sports seriously, but ... get real. It must already be quite a burden in many way to be a hermafrodite. Why make her life more troublesome with all those sex tests and discussion about whether she can continue to participate in female events.

 

OK, four earlier cases have been asked to stop their career, but in the meantime things has moved forward. Transsexuals are now allowed to participate in the category of the assigned sex from two years after surgery. I think this case is similar: Biologically it is a borderline case but her birth certificate says she is female and that is not something that was made up in order to give her an advantage at sports.

There's no easy answer, but the entire breadth of women's athletics is based on giving them a safe haven wherein they have an even playing field. If their only option were to compete in a fully open competition, many female athletes would simply cease to be.