It is arbitrary because 1. She is not doping, 2. Why is the line being drawn at hormones?
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IAAF to argue that Caster Semenya should classified as a “biological male" at CAS (Update: Semenya loses case) [See Staff Post]
- Thread starter Blue Lou
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It is arbitrary because 1. She is not doping, 2. Why is the line being drawn at hormones?
Largely, the IAAF has let her and many other trans athletes and intersex athletes complete as long as the meet the rules. If they finally ruled against her despite letting her compete after the original case 10 years ago, something must be up.
Of course, all athletes have a severe advantage above the common people.
I can train all I want but I will never win at running or such.
To me, it comes around competing. Imo men and women are separated because of the muscle issue. That's the main difference. That mostly comes from testosterone.
Why not look what most females in specific sports have for testosterone levels and set a limit there sport by sport. That in my mind is fair.
But don't exclude her, just put her in a different category. Put her in testosterone level she probably belongs and that is probably with the men, although she is a woman.
Why not cancel this distinction about gender in sports, if you separate the men from the women because of the muscle issue and testosterone level. Why not get directly to the source and use the testosterone levels for judging where someone competes and cut all this confusion. Unless the sport is also dealing with weight like boxing. Then you can combine weight and testosterone levels.
I can train all I want but I will never win at running or such.
To me, it comes around competing. Imo men and women are separated because of the muscle issue. That's the main difference. That mostly comes from testosterone.
Why not look what most females in specific sports have for testosterone levels and set a limit there sport by sport. That in my mind is fair.
But don't exclude her, just put her in a different category. Put her in testosterone level she probably belongs and that is probably with the men, although she is a woman.
Why not cancel this distinction about gender in sports, if you separate the men from the women because of the muscle issue and testosterone level. Why not get directly to the source and use the testosterone levels for judging where someone competes and cut all this confusion. Unless the sport is also dealing with weight like boxing. Then you can combine weight and testosterone levels.
Because they bring the greatest benefits in physical sports events.
The line is drawn there because steroid sex hormones are the reason we have gendered sports in the first place It's not arbitrary, and we already require trans women to adjust their hormones before being able to compete. This is done because the testes produce massive amounts of testosterone. On the flip side, TRT is required as lifetime treatment for cis men who've had to remove one or both due to testicular cancer.
See my post on the prior page. Splitting by testosterone level will get you a gender split. Men have 10x the level women do on average.
What is so bad about a gender split? Also, there would not be any problem with testosterone if this is what you use to select who gets to compete where. This would solve these extremely rare cases very easily. You can still compete against people of your own testosterone level. And you don't have to reduce your own natural testosterone level (like she would need to do now to compete). In effect, this will mean that in 99.9% cases there will be a gender split in sports but it will in other cases give an elegant and fair way of other people outside this range to compete.
Although we come at weird things here. Phelps would never be so good if he hadn't had the gene makeup like he has. So, in essence, this athlete has another gene benefit that is natural and in that sense she should have no problem to compete. It is different I think is because the sporting regulations set testosterone levels before she competed, no?
A gender split and a testosterone split will get you the exact same groups for 99,99% of the population was my point. They're functionally identical.
That's true but it will give her an extra option to compete with men. Or can she do that already?
And do we know if the testosterone level was already set before she was competing?
Women typically don't have testosterone that high. It's likely that she has a DSD that is causing her to produce that much testosterone. It has even been speculated that Caster has internal testes that are causing her to produce that amount of testosterone. She may have gotten them removed, but if she hasn't she needs to so she won't get testicular cancer.
I'm a little confused by the reaction I guess. If you're going to ban most trans folk from competing (which most of the internet seems to be okay with normally) then this is how you do it, it's the only fair way. You can't be like "We're gonna ban trans people on hormones from competing, but not this cisgender women with equally high amounts".
I hope most people against this are also against banning people on hormone treatment in general, because if you're not, you're a hypocrite. Let trans people compete
I hope most people against this are also against banning people on hormone treatment in general, because if you're not, you're a hypocrite. Let trans people compete
We could also argue that her advantage is way too big. Shaq being tall and strong or Phelps having bigger wing span that people usually have are advantages, but nothing that makes them too "OP"
Her advantage could be as much as 7 seconds. That is freaking huge in 800m run.
This is just utter bullshit. This have nothing to with her being black. Those Eastern European women's were and still are joke and how they weren't caught, because it was so clear they were doping and everyone criticized them.
Exactly this. Thank you.
Swiss Supreme Court
Did she sue in Switzerland or do they have jurisdiction over the IAAF? The IAAF is headquartered in Monaco. I'm just curious why it's the Swiss court and not South Africa or Monaco.
UPDATE.
Semenya's lawyers claim that the Swiss Supreme Court has suspended the CAS decision.
Good news. It is completely ridiculous to expect her to take medication that could have serious adverse effects on her physical and mental health just because she has natural genetic advantages. If we're banning athletes for that, we need to be consistent and ban the bevy of other extreme genetic disadvantages that a very small number of people might have in a given sport.
OP
OP
