Surely there have been other athletes who were in a similar state, but have never had the need to be tested for it.
Natural biological advantages are the whole point of what athletics is about. As long as it’s not artificial and deliberate, there shouldn’t be any controversy.
So (if Murdoch’s monkeys didn’t make this up) she’s an externally female XY with internal testes? It happens. In the USA, she’d probably have had the vestigial testes surgically removed prior to puberty & developed as a sterile female (with the help of hormone supplements).
She may be equivalent to male in the musculature then. Hm.
In my early days of athletics when I went to my first Olympics, in fact the year prior a woman by the name of Ewa Klobukowska, who was a polish athlete who came third in the 64 Olympics in the 100 metres, was actually banned because she failed a sex chromosome test. Even though she passed a visual examination she obviously had confused chromosomes and an extra one. And in fact they declared then that she was a male.
There’s another great example from the 36 Olympics in Berlin where a woman who came second in the 100 metres, another Polish woman, moved to America, changed her name to Stella Walsh, in fact was caught in crossfire in a robbery and she was in her 80s, and when they did the autopsy she actually had no female organs at all but insignificant male testes and penis. That’s called mosaicism.
It seems she ought to be allowed to compete as a man or as a woman. The fact that she has an unusual makeup ought not to disqualify her from sport entirely.
As noted above, there seems to be no evidence that any genetic makeup serves to disqualify you from men’s (actually, “open”) competition.
I think this is an important point. The IAAF needs to reaffirm that the category generally known as the “men’s” events are actually “open” events. There are also “women’s” events, which are for XX chromosome people with a defined maximum testosterone level.
Can we please, please stop using the terms ‘hermaphrodite’ and ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’? They are offensive and inaccurate.
Right, the men’s competition should be the default category–basically an open category as you say. I don’t think it’s controversial to point out that separate women’s competitions exist because women can’t compete with men at the highest level of most (all?) Olympic sports. So, we made a category for women to compete against each other. The women’s category should remain protected so that women have an opportunity to compete against each other.
I understand that sex is not completely binary, but anyone who isn’t waaaay over on the “female” side of the scale should be competing in the men’s (really, open) competition.
If it’s true that she has no ovaries, then how can it also be true that she has the normal amount of female hormones? Isn’t estrogen (mostly) produced by the ovaries? I’ve heard it can also be increased by large deposits of body fat, (although I’ve never understood the mechanism by which this occurs) but she hasn’t got a significant portion of that anyway so . . .
What’s weird (to me) is that the entire story is entirely based on looks. If, for example, Semenya had womanly curves, I think the whole thing would’ve been moot. There’d be many calling for drug testing, as I understand her times have seemingly come out of nowhere, but absolutely none about gender. And that’s odd.
In another thread, it was mentioned that while good, Semenya’s winning time is still below the women’s world record, by a pretty healthy margin. Just another piece of oddness to the story.
But that begs the question: what is the basis for the “scale”? The problem with making it solely a genetic issue (XYs and indeterminates over here, XXs over there) is that genotype does not consistently determine phenotype. For example, in the case of someone who’s XY with androgen insensitivity syndrome, what you’ll often see (perhaps “usually”; IANAD) is hyper-femininity. (Incidentally, this is why I don’t think Semenya has this particular condition, regardless of whatever else may be the case.) Google androgen insensitivity syndrome, and you’ll find lots of (NSFW) examples. All people have both male and female hormones, but in someone with AIS, the male hormones are effectively inert. So they develop female physical characteristics: breasts, wide hips, higher body fat percentage - in short, everything that makes women slower runners, on average. It hardly seems fair to make someone on the extreme female end of a physical scale compete against people on the extreme male end only because they happen to have XY chromosomes.
But on the other hand, if you only consider a physical scale, where is the cutoff? There are probably also XX people with extremely masculine musculatures and abilities - should people with more typically female bodies have to compete against them?
I really don’t know the answer.
Don’t even men have some levels of estrogen, though? not huge amounts, but some, from the testes?
Doesn’t seem at all strange to me. The fact that she didn’t look much like a woman twigged people to the fact that there was, in point of fact, something odd about her biology; and as it turns out, assuming the report is correct, they weren’t wrong. If she “looked” more female, the question would not have arisen, aside from purely routine testing.
The fact that she’s nowhere near the top athlete, even for a female, isn’t odd either: a lot of purely male athletes would be beaten by female athletes - just not, in most cases, the best male athletes.
(Emphasis mine)
And I believe this is why androgen insensitivity works the way it does: the level of testosterone and other androgens in such a person would effectively be zero, so while they might have less estrogens than women, those are the only hormones their bodies use.
News to me. I went to graduate school in the behavioral neurocience of sexual differentiation and those were the scientific terms we used and that is what the very specialized textbooks used as well.
But since there almost never are true hermaphrodites in humans (has there ever been?), is it really accurate?
Seems to me an example of a “euphemism treadmill” in action. I never heard that the term “hemaphrodite” was somehow degrading (but “intersexed” is, apparently, okay) - but it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Because they’re neither male nor female. Therefore they should be ineligible to compete in either category.
Are there not events - gymnastics comes to mind - where being intersex would be an advantage over XY?
Why would gymnastics be advantageous towards intersexed?
Anyway, it’s not like Caster has the speed of a man. She’s still a lot slower than the best male times. I don’t see why letting her compete with the other women is so unfair.