Nevermind, not worth it.
So how are you supposed to frame it as not to be male-centric? Women are slower? Men are faster? Men are abnormally fast whereas women are the norm? I don’t think there is a way to make it neutral in this sense.
There is no good neutral way to phrase it, when you only comment on one gender. “Men have an advantage” would be taking femaleness as the norm or base level. (I’d probably go with something like, “Men are generally faster than the average and women are generally slower.”) I never said it was wrong, per se, simply telling of the attitude of the speaker (i.e., that he chose the male-centric rather than female-centric option).
Maybe he simple chose the “non-restricted category centric” option. It’s telling of your attitude that you consider competition open to any human as pertaining to just one sex.
Did you even read the thread? The original quote was specifically about women having a disadvantage. The very word disadvantage implies that it’s against a given standard, which in this case is men.
People: stop and think instead of just parroting the same words you always use. And please, for the sake of everybody, actually take the time to read the thread before you hop in and start mouthing off.
I just wanted to mention that there are medical conditions that could cause a typical female to have unusually high testosterone levels. Polycystic ovary syndrome is probably the most common, but some problem with the adrenal gland or a hormone-producing tumor are also possibilities. Testosterone levels of around 150 ng/dl would be consistent with any of these conditions.
Please show me where, either in the OP or its link, the word ‘disadvantage’ appears.
If you can do so, I will apologize sincerely.
If you cannot, the following seems remarkably snarky and inappropriate:
Yeah, I just went back and reread it and was wondering if it was just me. I also see no reference to women being at a disadvantage.
I can’t help but think it sounds snarky even if the OP is right about that one thing. There are nicer ways of putting things, you know…
Seems an open and shut issue to me. Assuming we find that having a sex seperation in competition is important, there must be some test to determine who falls into what sex, or people will game the system. This need not be an invidious test, as the issue is merely who is what sex for purposes of competition.
However, assuming that having such a test is deemed too invasive or insulting, the only other option is to avoid having seperation by sex. Naturally, female athletes would be overall disadvantaged by this, as female athletes tend, on average, to be slower and weaker than male athletes (assuming of course that “female” means what most people assume it means).
The only issue is: is providing female athletes the platform to achieve fame worth it to them to undergo the alleged humiliations of being tested to determine if they are, in point of fact, women?
There is an easy way to make the choice personal: throw open the ‘male’ side of the competition to all commers. If a person who self-identifies as “female” dislikes undergoing the testing, allow them to freely compete, without testing, with the “male” athletes.
Right, for example if someone where to say:
They are a proper female centric poster. On the other hand, if they said:
Then they have fallen victim to society’s male centric philosophy.
Or something like that.
My opinion is if the person has a vagina they compete with the women. If the person has a penis they compete with the men. If they have both or their parts can not be identified as one or the other by a layman then have them compete with the men.
Yes some people may end up with a genetic advantage over another woman. Genetics has a lot to do with most of the top athletes in the world. Some people are just lucky and found they had genes best suited for a sport of their choosing. Those people with vagina that have inter-sexed advantages are ‘lucky’ when it comes to competitive athletics.
If we find purely genetic females can no longer compete with a field of inter-sexed females or men start having sex changes purely to win in women’s athletics then we should reevaluate.
And, FWIW, women with these conditions **are **allowed to compete as women, despite the advantage the extra testosterone gives.
I’d like my apology now, please. The relevant bit is the first thing I quote and my reply to it.
1.) You and others keep saying that people “will” game the system if we don’t have testing. But I have yet to see anyone demonstrate, conclusively or otherwise, that this is the case. Nor have I seen anyone refute my counter-argument, which is that if people were going to cheat, they would have been doing so before mandatory gender verification was instituted, and we would have seen a statistically significant number of athletes stop competing, instead of the small handful who actually stopped.
2.) Do you think it isn’t discriminatory to only test women? And out of the women, to only test high-performing women who don’t fit into standard ideas of what women are “supposed to” look like? Why not test men? There could be intersexed men who are at a disadvantage when compared to their peers who would actually fall more accurately under the women’s category.
Even the athletic agencies who currently do testing disagree with you. I have to say, your post seems to demonstrate a certain level of confusion about the true complexities of assigning sex. If it were all about dangly bits, there would be no question that Semenya is a woman.
That was treis’s comment that you quoted. I thought you said “disadvantage” was in the OP.
Anyway, did anyone else hear about how they’ve given Caster a makeover?
I didn’t see anything wrong with the testing but the whole, “Look, she’s really a girl” thing is giving me a weird vibe. Like, “Look, she can conform!”
It was “the OP” in the sense that it was the first post in that particular thread of discussion–i.e., it was the word that sparked my comment and the debate that followed. This **entire thread’s **OP was made by me, and was not relevant to this particular issue.
Still waiting on my apology from Xema, by the by.
Whoa. That is kind of creepy. I’d be interested to see the reactions of everyone here who said that she looked too mannish to be a “real” woman.
I think you’re going to be waiting for a while because OP means opening post here.
This totally wins the thread.
Yes, it does, but I never said that the word “disadvantage” was in my OP. It would be pretty stupid if it were, since the whole point of that discussion was that I thought the use of the word “disadvantage” in connection with being female was telling as to the attitude of the speaker. So, giving **Xema **the benefit of the doubt, I assumed that they must have meant “show me that someone else said this and it started this line of discussion.”
Well, I can’t speak for Xema, but that was post 65. I assumed you meant the first post, not the sixty-fifth.
Either way, telling people to stop mouthing off is definitely needlessly rude and snarky.
Yes, it was snarky, and I apologize for that… or I would, if Xema could be bothered to post here again. However, I’m sure you understand the frustration of people coming in mid-argument and chastising you in such a way that makes it clear that they either didn’t read the rest of the thread, or they merely skimmed it and missed the relevant parts.
Because of the way quoted posts are linked, it is not that hard to follow a particular line of discussion back to its origin. For example, the very exchange we’re talking about right now:
I easily followed the chain back to pull those two posts out, so that you can see what is obvious when I quote it here: that I gave Xema exactly what was asked for.
(Sorry - this thread dropped off my radar for a while.)
I hereby tender my apology. Unfortunately, it’s a somewhat limited one. I took your reference to the “original quote” as a reference to the OP, just as Freudian Slit said. It did not contain the word “disadvantaged”, and thus my post.