It’s ■■■■■■■ nonsense and some of you ■■■■■ think it’s OK.
5 Likes
I don’t think it’s okay.
I do think it’s difficult, but it’s not okay.
(Terrible article, btw).
If someone is the…I dunno, plucking numbers here, 100th best male and after transitioning they’re the 5th best female, then something’s wrong.
She might be female but her body is still male.
A middle ground needs to be found, and jumping up and down and screaming at each other isn’t going to find a solution.
10 Likes
I watch that South Africa 800 metre runner and reckon she would be a great running halfback in the NFL.
Just as those East German ladies had obvious physical advantages in the 1970’s, I wonder about where you draw the line in terms of transgender peoples. Tough question.
1 Like
Caster Semenya is a different case. The cyclist in the post a few above was born a male, has all male sexual characteristics, lived as a male for much of his life, until one day he decided to, or felt compelled to, inform the world that he was a trans female. And for some reason that I don’t understand, he’s been allowed to compete as a woman. For those who maintain that there’s a distinction between sex and gender, his gender may be female but his sex is male. The first transgender sports person, the tennis player Richard Raskind who became Renee Richards, at least had the surgery, and still wasn’t much of a tennis player anyway.
Caster Semenya, from what I can gather, is a genuine hermaphrodite or intersex person. She’s had no surgery. There’s not much I can find online, but I believe she has female genitalia but also internal testes, and her testosterone is at male levels. She is genuine. There’s no “identifying as” going on with her. She presents a very difficult case, but she is not in the same class as that cyclist or that Mouncey person who wants to play AFLW. Frankly I think her life must be very difficult.
1 Like
Couldn’t we simply delineate based on the individuals’s hips?
They would be either child-bearing or ball-bearing.
3 Likes
I saw Semenya compete live at Diamond League in Zurich this year. Just looks and runs like a bloke.
Just like this lady from the Munich Olympics
1 Like
A philosophy for life, right there.
Good post, btw.
2 Likes
Calling women athletes ‘blokes’ doesn’t help.
There is no exact way to say who has biological advantages in athletes who are trans as so many hormones are generally sex related and mimicked in high performance systems.
They are testing those levels to try and establish a baseline but I think its pretty tough.
In elite sports, I don’t know the answer. I would like it to be simple but its far from it. Unfortunately something like sport is like water to some people - I’d fear their health without it.
3 Likes
I know that. The point I was making was that unlike most other transgender athletes, she is not pretending to be something she isn’t.
1 Like
Its not pretending, you twat.
3 Likes
Oh. Of course not.
Yep, agree with that.
Not sure the East Germans ladies knew what they were taking was illegal. Unlike the Chinese Swimmers. And I know it is different, but the effect on opponents is somewhat similiar.
When my youngest son was about 9 and he signed up to play local footy, he was taller than everyone else by at least 8 inches and weighed about 80 kgs. He would get the ball and run down the ground and he would bounce the ball and his opponents would bounce off him. Umpires just gave them free kicks for his “tackles”. It was not fair to the little kids, but not fair to my boy as well. He gave up footy and played basketball.
I was just reading an article from the New Yorker from a couple of years ago which pointed out that there are all sorts of natural genetic advantages that can help an athlete. There was a family of skiers from Finland who had about 40% more red blood cells in their blood than everyone else, and as a result had far more stamina than their opponents and won all the events. They also had extremely red faces. Your son is a less extreme case, but it’s the same sort of thing. When I was at school there was one boy who hit puberty a year or so ahead of everyone else and won everything that year. By year 12 he was still a good athlete, but no longer dominant.
It’s a vexed issue, but I would have thought whether you actually still have Testes producing Testosterone would be a logical cut off point.
Where does that leave people like Caster Semenya then?
Logically??
Without internal Testes.
You sure about that?
wut?
Caster has internal testes
Soooo confused now.