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It offers no illumination or insight into either event. You may as well compare an Olympic men’s figure skater to a England Rugby forward.
The comparison was of male and female athletes in the same discipline.
Males are, as a result of those pesky immutable facts, physically very different to women. Bone structure, ability to gain muscle mass and stuff like that. In the same event, women's times are slower, heights are lower, performance is lower powered. Because, you know, science.
Saying "I'm a woman now" and taking the medals, knowing it's primarily because of the physical advantages that male puberty has bestowed upon you, takes a remarkably egotistical character. A nasty, narcissistic one, some might say.
I guess there are many people, and me, that think it does offer insight into how womens and mens performance in the same sport under the same circumstances, with the same kit and the same training differs somewhat. It seems very illuminating to me, yet, I'm interested in why you think it doesn't, always happy to be proven wrong. do you think you could explain a bit more?
I don’t anything about Rugby
Brian Moore does. His article on this is behind a paywall, but the headline says enough, I feel.
Rugby is rightly an inclusive sport but until research disproves safety risk, transgender women should only play non-contact
Qualified solicitor, and rugby referee as well as a player.
A nasty, narcissistic one, some might say
And there's the plaguey rub. Lots of sportsmen and women are nasty narcissistic egomaniacs, it's what makes them (sometimes) the great athletes we all admire. All the athlete has to do is abide by the rules. If McKinnon has then that's a problem for the UCI, not her individually. If she hasn't, then her medal will be stripped, everyone will be bumped up a place, and she'll no doubt take to tweeting angrily...and the world will turn.
Saying “I’m a woman now” and taking the medals
The rules (as they stand currently) make that difficult to the point of absurdity for anyone who's not transitioning.
An why comparing Rachel Atherton to the men is irrelevant?
do you think you could explain a bit more?
How many times have you heard Rob Warner compare Aaron's times to Rachel, as opposed to the other way around? Why are the women's times compared to men times? I understand the temptation, especially in events where men and women compete on the same course in separate events, but it's patronising (in the truest sense of the word). I know it's largely not meant to be, but it is. Essentially it's suggesting that women's competition is only valid if compared to that of mens, rather than it being an expression of athleticism by itself
I pass someone every morning that has hair like this - don't know if he identifies as trans or anything and not bothered, and he seems to be 'fairly' comfortable in his skin - not sure this will do him/her any favours if it gets major publicity.
How many times have you heard Rob Warner compare Aaron’s times to Rachel, as opposed to the other way around? Why are the women’s times compared to men times? I understand the temptation, especially in events where men and women compete on the same course in separate events, but it’s patronising (in the truest sense of the word). I know it’s largely not meant to be, but it is. Essentially it’s suggesting that women’s competition is only valid if compared to that of mens, rather than it being an expression of athleticism by itself
All very valid but for the purposes of this thread the comparison between mens and womens sport of the same discipline is very relevant.
Essentially it’s suggesting that women’s competition is only valid if compared to that of mens, rather than it being an expression of athleticism by itself
No one is suggesting that.
It's a comparison to show the physiological differences between male and female athletes.
How on earth can she stand on the top step of the podium in a rainbow jersey and not feel embarrassment is beyond me. It's a bit like me being allowed to compete against the under 15s at my local club, then standing round celebrating whilst everyone just roles their eyes.
No one is suggesting that.
Proof it it was ever needed that some folk can't hold two concepts in the minds at the same time.
Mckinnon is one subject
comparing men and women in the same sport is a different one on the same thread Some people on this thread have made this point.
For those that don’t race TTs, you may be interested to know that there are standards for male and female at every age and distance. Riding to standard gives a time or distance above or below standard, and awards and placing are given based on this standard. The difference between male and female is about 20 years (and the same for trike to bike). So my 52yo standard is about the same as a 31yo female. Of course there are prizes for fastest and furthest, but placings based on standard as well.
I fail to note a huge difference between the East German female athletes forced to undergo virilisation under androgen doping (many with long-term health implications) and the reverse transition from male to female. Virilisation is not, sadly completely reversible.
Does it say ‘Sport is a Man’s Right’ on those shorts?
When I hear something like RA’s times being compared to the men’s I assume it’s to put into context how close she is despite the inherent disadvantage she has of being littler/lighter. Could be wrong of course, but I take it as them saying ‘that’s how good she is’ not ‘meh, the men are still much better’.
We know that while Caster Semenya has the legal status of ‘female’, Caster Semenya married a woman wearing traditional male clothing...
Well, evidence like that changes everything...
The point is, regardless of Semenya's specific physiology, she satisfied the existing criteria to race as a woman. I think that compelling her to use medication to limit her natural ability, if she wants to continue racing in her existing category is unfair and ethically dubious. There's a legitimate debate to be had about how you classify athletes, but you need to have a full and open discussion about how you do that, and potentially replace the existing male/female categories with something else, instead of applying a fudge to try and preserve a categorisation system that clearly doesn't work for everybody in its current form.
But who cares, if she’s XX she competes in the XX category. No ambiguity there, that’s be beauty of taking gender out of it and letting chromosomal makeup be the sole arbiter.
Chromosomal category might be part of a new system, but I don't know if it would be sufficient on its own. I believe there are quite a number of different chromosomal disorders (on both the male and female spectra) but I don't know enough about it to understand if you could use them to form practical categories.
How on earth can she stand on the top step of the podium in a rainbow jersey and not feel embarrassment is beyond me
Lance Armstrong managed it...
I don’t follow the trans rights movement closely, does anyone know if there is unity of opinion behind McKinnon’s stance or do some others see her as counter-productive to the cause?
I don't follow it so can't claim there to be unity, but from what I can see from those I know/am connected to, her behaviour seems to be viewed as counter productive.
Well, evidence like that changes everything…
If you ignore all the other points I made....
The point is, regardless of Semenya’s specific physiology, she satisfied the existing criteria to race as a woman. I think that compelling her to use medication to limit her natural ability, if she wants to continue racing in her existing category is unfair and ethically dubious. There’s a legitimate debate to be had about how you classify athletes, but you need to have a full and open discussion about how you do that, and potentially replace the existing male/female categories with something else, instead of applying a fudge to try and preserve a categorisation system that clearly doesn’t work for everybody in its current form.
That depends on what you mean by unfair.
It is unfair for me to race against 7-year-olds, for example, because I am not a 7 year old.
If you want to decide whether it is unfair or not in the case of Caster Semenya then you need to determine first what the difference between the 'male' and 'female' classes are in a sporting context.
And the obvious answer to that is 'possessing testes', since testicles produce testosterone, which is the major performance-enhancing steroid.
There really aren't many good alternative answers to this.
As far as 'natural ability' goes, the better answer would be that Caster Semenya belongs in the male category, and leave things at that.
However this seems to be difficult legally, in that Semenya's birth certificate says 'female'. So they tried a different approach.
Clearly you can only deal with these situations as they arise and I imagine that the rules were made with good intentions, but when you have someone who possesses normally-functioning testes in the women's race it makes a mockery of the sport.
It’s a bit like me being allowed to compete against the under 15s at my local club, then standing round celebrating whilst everyone just roles their eyes.
It is unfair for me to race against 7-year-olds, for example, because I am not a 7 year old.
Age is just a social construct.*
*Actually, I'd better make it clear that I don't believe that. It is, however, a comment I've read.
I think in real life, people with trans/intersex characteristics should be treated with compassion and understanding to help them achieve the same quality of life as anyone would want.
Once we enter into the world of sport, then it remains an issue bigger than sport can really cope with. Unfortunately, most sports administrators are just not really qualified to judge how to marry the social pressure to be inclusive with the need for level playing fields. I certainly do not envy them.
Funnily enough, I just watched Robert Millar's win in the Pyrenees in the 1989 Tour. True quality performance. It is no secret now that Robert became Philipa and I am glad to see Philipa still can write about the sport and I hope has found her peace. However, if Philipa raced in the women's races, I would certainly feel uncomfortable about what the other competitors had to face. Perhaps, trans or intersex should be a separate category in terms of sport? (I admit there will always be outliers in any category, and many athletes are genetic freaks in terms of hormones etc., but you have to try to draw lines in some common sense way...)
That depends on what you mean by unfair
What I wrote. Disqualifying someone from an existing category (for which they satisfy the criteria) by introducing a fudged requirement mandating unnecessary medication to limit performance.
There's a valid case for re-examining how we categorise athletes, but the IAAF didn't do that properly, resulting in a very poor outcome for Semenya and a number of other athletes.
You lot are so behind the time.
Channel 4 had this covered way back in the nineties - did nobody ever watch Trans World Sport on a Saturday morning after rolling in from a good night out?
------I'll get me coat ;o)
How on earth can she stand on the top step of the podium in a rainbow jersey and not feel embarrassment is beyond me.
I'd imagine being a narcissist helps.
Mumsnet claiming this photo says it all
Maybe resting posture should be the determinant?
LOL. Yeah, pretty obvious in that one. However, we do have to be careful not to judge simply on physical appearance (TBH, I think that's one of the reasons we have this current mess). For instance, tall folk might gravitate towards basketball but there might still be one or two players who are unusually tall and would stand out in much the same way. Interesting sitting pose though. 😉
Yeah, posture aside - there's no absolute proof that had she been born a woman she would not have the same physiological attributes she currently possesses. It is likely that exposure to testosterone has given her a developmental benefit re. muscle mass, but it's impossible to prove that couldn't have been achieved on training alone.
On the genetics slant - Robert Forsteman apparently has a genetic condition which leads to an increase of muscle mass, hence his legs are of terrifying proportions, but he doesn't always romp it - suppose there's a cut off where excess muscle mass stops being a clear benefit
Yeah, posture aside – there’s no absolute proof that had she been born a woman she would not have the same physiological attributes she currently possesses.
Yet I'm sure you are aware there's a very strong probability.
Which is all there really is for a lot of evidence-based decisions that get made.
Yet I’m sure you are aware there’s a very strong probability.
Which is all there really is for a lot of evidence-based decisions that get made.
Of course there's a very, very, "strong" probability, just playing devil's advocate
@mcj78 what a crock of nonsense.
Well that's a exceedingly well thought out & reasoned argument - not even sure what it refers to, so perhaps if you enlighten me i'll do my best to clarify things for you
For those taking it the wrong way, the photo is about the "man spreading", with the two born ladies sitting with legs crossed. It was also a light hearted comment.
MCJ58, do you really believe your first paragraph? Look at the photo's. That surely is evidence this athlete has not produced muscle mass by training alone. In fact I'd go as far as suggesting Rachel does not need to train as much as her opposition in order to win. This is someone who was born a male, went through puberty as a male, trained and raced as a male. At a later date identified as a female and transitioned.
I in no way believe they transitioned for the benefit of winning races. I think the message Rachel is making is correct, sport is inclusive. However I also do believe that the categories should be changed. Rachel shouldn't be racing against people born without her advantages.
“Yeah, posture aside – there’s no absolute proof that had she been born a woman she would not have the same physiological attributes she currently possesses. It is likely that exposure to testosterone has given her a developmental benefit re. muscle mass, but it’s impossible to prove that couldn’t have been achieved on training alone.”
Of course it isn’t impossible to prove. Look at a class of ten year old children - the boys and girls all average around the same height, ie the short boys are similar height to the short girls, the tall boys are like the tall girls, etc.
Then look at a class of 18 year olds. The normal distribution of heights and weights for male and female no longer sit on top of each other, the males’ distribution is shifted taller and heavier.
Increasing the size of the skeletal frame of a human increases the amount of muscle and thus strength and power that human can generate, as well as increasing heart and lung size and thus aerobic capacity.
Yes, top female athletes are far better than typical men at what they do. But take Olympic decathletes and heptathletes - the men’s builds gives them an inherent advantage which will not be fully removed by hormone manipulation because they are essentially competing in a heavier weight class (and if you’re bigger, weights feel lighter and distances are smaller vs stride length etc).
Strongman is another good example - the women competing in this are far stronger than most of us men but they’re at the extreme end of female genetics. But compared to the men they’re nowhere! These strongwomen might be getting on for 6’ tall and 15+ stone but the men are about a foot taller and twice the weight. Hormone therapy would reduce their muscle mass but it would not reduce the size of their frame, shrink their lungs or remove the number myonuclei that they have.
Any sport that requires power or force is better served by the average male frame than the average female frame. And that’s most of them!
I in no way believe they transitioned for the benefit of winning races
It would be naive to suggest that no one will do this given what some people are willing to do to themselves in pursuit of success and as we go down the road of self id the issue will only get greater. Sporting bodies are struggling with todays position. Imagine what could be to come.
What I wrote. Disqualifying someone from an existing category (for which they satisfy the criteria) by introducing a fudged requirement mandating unnecessary medication to limit performance.
There’s a valid case for re-examining how we categorise athletes, but the IAAF didn’t do that properly, resulting in a very poor outcome for Semenya and a number of other athletes.
Perhaps you are not seeing the issue, which is that as a woman in South African law, Caster Semenya starts from the position of having a right to compete in women's sport.
Whether or not Caster Semenya is a woman is to some extent a philosophical debate, and not one that is within the remit of the IAAF.
As such, given that there were 1, 2 and 3 athletes in the 800m all possessing testes and sensitivity to androgens, there was a fairness issue to those athletes who do not possess testes, and who had no chance of winning.
As such the IAAF set out to address the real issue which had arisen, which was that 3 athletes with testes and functioning androgen receptors were dominating an event to the exclusion of all athletes without testes.
In the past we have seen other athletes with testes & either non-functioning or very poorly functioning androgen receptors (e.g., Dutee Chand, Maria José Martínez-Patiño), and they have NOT dominated their sports, and the conclusion in respect of those cases has been 'let them run'.
The authorities can only respond to the cases that actually arise.
In terms of Semenya it seems that a better decision would have been to have said 'compete as a male', but it seems that this option was not really open to them. They have said
* you are biologically male (source: CAS case)
* you are a woman
* your male levels of testosterone give you an advantage over other athletes, and these levels arise from the fact you are biologically male, so you must reduce your T.
Saying 'you are a man' was not within their remit - legally Caster Semenya is a woman.
Semenya has three options now:
* compete at other distances not covered by the ruling
* compete as a man
* compete taking anti-androgens.
Only one of these options involves unnecessary medication.
But who cares, if she’s XX she competes in the XX category. No ambiguity there, that’s be beauty of taking gender out of it and letting chromosomal makeup be the sole arbiter.
Chromosomal category might be part of a new system, but I don’t know if it would be sufficient on its own. I believe there are quite a number of different chromosomal disorders (on both the male and female spectra) but I don’t know enough about it to understand if you could use them to form practical categories.
Makes no difference. If you have a Chromosomal disorder that means you're not XX you compete in 'other'. If you have a Chromosomal disorder that leaves you as XX you compete in 'XX'. That's the beauty of taking gender out of it and letting chromosomal makeup be the sole arbiter.
Interesting that you felt the need to say "on both the male and female spectra". because my suggested classification is nothing to do with sex or gender. This is simply classifying athletes according to an arbitrary definition that ends debate and uncertainty and is fair to the most people possible. (Sadly not everyone, but no classification would be.)
mcj78
Member
Yeah, posture aside – there’s no absolute proof that had she been born a woman she would not have the same physiological attributes she currently possesses. It is likely that exposure to testosterone has given her a developmental benefit re. muscle mass, but it’s impossible to prove that couldn’t have been achieved on training alone.
Not just muscle mass, the skeleton is different e.g. the shape of the pelvis, the type of muscle fibres, etc.
do you really believe your first paragraph? Look at the photo’s. That surely is evidence this athlete has not produced muscle mass by training alone. In fact I’d go as far as suggesting Rachel does not need to train as much as her opposition in order to win. This is someone who was born a male, went through puberty as a male, trained and raced as a male.
As I said, i'm not questioning whether in her current biological capacity she has benefited from the presence of testosterone during her formative years, she undoubtedly has & I actually agree with everything you're saying.
My (slightly convoluted) point was - if she had been born with an XY genotype & trained to the very limit of her theoretical capacity, would she be able to replicate the same form she has now? That's what we can't say for certain. You even say she probably doesn't need to train as much as her opposition - what if she was born a woman & did - would she still be winning? Get what I was meaning?
Everyone should have the right to identify as whatever they want. The issue comes when the "rights" to do A because they identify as B impinges in on the rights of others. Female (XX) athletes have the right to compete against other female (XX) athletes, if you are XY competing against XX, you are impinging on that right.
problem there is it’s hard to negate any performance advantage of increased levels of testosterone during the 20-odd years of her physiological development prior to that.
Those long femurs and narrower hips make quite a bit of difference! Male Puberty is the best Anabolic ever!
Those long femurs and narrower hips make quite a bit of difference! Male Puberty is the best Anabolic ever!
As a 40 year old hobbit with womanly hips I can only look forward to these performance enhancing benefits when they decide to appear 😀
Am I correct in believing that the UCI rules mean that Trans athletes still have a higher testosterone level than the female competitors? Surely that confers an ongoing advantage..
I find the trans athlete thing fascinating (much to my wife’s dismay!)
Father of 4, 3 girls and a boy.
1 girl of our girls certainly no older than 4 was adamant she was a boy without a willy (she is nearly 12 now). She cry’s if put near a dress, physically effects her. She loves her shorts and T shirt and that’s that. We don’t mind. She is who she is. However, she doesn’t say she’s a boy anymore, long hair earrings arguably typical girl appearance. If she was in some progressive Canadian / US home transitioning seems to be a thing.
The point being I couldn’t care less about someone being trans, eldest daughters friend has decided to be called a boys name as opposed to her girls name. Who cares?
Robert Miller (I’m not trying to dead name him, he exists in race results) was a fantastic cyclist. Can you imagine the mess he’d have made of women’s cycling at the time? He wasn’t a muscular man but he was technically a man.
I listened to the Strava podcast on McKinnon and I found it interesting but I do not think she should be competing with Women. As a man she was I imagine an ok athlete. I don’t think she woke up and thought I know I’ll become a woman to win, best not confuse the trans part, almost without question her body had distinct hormone advantages growing up. She can’t help that it is biological.
Particularly in strength based sports it’s scary. If your child is a female contact sport athlete do you fancy them competing for an Olympic place again a “man”.
Should trans people be able to compete, YES absolutely. We have para sports (in which people do try to get in the most suitable category of disability to give them an advantage in that class so not perfect!)
Flip it around a girl / woman who identifies as a boy / man is great at cyclist, world class in fact. How will they cope in the male field. Badly! Is hat fair? Absolutely not either.
My business partner is Canadian and his 17yo daughter is so progressive, which is her right. She skates at a decent level and ask the question how would she feel if a trans skater came in and busting moves only a “man” can do and win, she was dead against it. Not surprisingly.
Anyone being trans must be tough mentally, I can’t imagine how it must feel. And their “right” to compete as the person they feel they are is perfectly understandable, but if we all did what we feel was our “right” the world would be more ****ed than it is.
Find a way for any trans person to compete as fairly as possible, takes out the personal attacks they get and some court in the first place!
Perhaps you are not seeing the issue, which is that as a woman in South African law, Caster Semenya starts from the position of having a right to compete in women’s sport.
Whether or not Caster Semenya is a woman is to some extent a philosophical debate, and not one that is within the remit of the IAAF...
...Saying ‘you are a man’ was not within their remit – legally Caster Semenya is a woman.Semenya has three options now:
* compete at other distances not covered by the ruling
* compete as a man
* compete taking anti-androgens.Only one of these options involves unnecessary medication.
I'm not making any judgement on what you call the "philosophical debate", or Semenya's legal status in South Africa.
I'm specifically calling out the IAAF handling of the issue as unsatisfactory and unfair. Semenya satisfied the existing IAAF criteria to compete as a woman. The IAAF have tacked on additional conditions because of concerns about the way she has dominated her event. The fact she can "* compete at other distances not covered by the ruling" proves what a bodge it is.
The authorities can only respond to the cases that actually arise.
They need to have a proper, everything on the desk, discussion about how you classify athletes. As you point out yourself, they've allowed some athletes to keep competing without sanction, because they weren't "dominant", but have targeted other athletes in one event because they won too often (while allowing them to carry on competing, unmedicated, in different events). There's no evidence of a reasoned strategy, and I don't think this sort of inconsistency is good for anyone competing in the sport.
That's not quite the full story, @kcr.
There are a few different types of people here
1. those who like Rachel McKinnon were born with normal XY biology, and went through male puberty, and lived as male till some point in adulthood, whereupon they claimed to have some kind of 'innate female essence', which cannot be verified by any biological test, but is nonetheless accepted in law, as meaning that they are now legally women.
2. those who like Caster Semenya were undervirilised at birth, as a result of 5-ARD2, raised at female, and then were virilised at puberty due to the effects of T and SRD5A1
3. those who were undervirilised at birth, raised as female, and remained undervirilised throughout life as a result of a completely failed androgen receptor (AR). Although amenorrhea and lack of breast development is typical for such individuals, which may lead them to discover that they have testes, since their body completely fails to respond to testosterone, they gain no benefit from it.
4. a related group to #3, those whose AR is merely faulty. They process testosterone in some degree. Exactly how faulty their AR is is unquantifiable - it's a subjective assessment of how masculine they look.
So we have 4 groups of people who are legally women but all have XY chromosomes.
It is apparently not an option to say 'you can't play', and nor is it an option to say 'like duh, of course people who grew up as male and are 6" taller on average, are going to remain stronger than those who didn't grow up with androgens' (in the case of group 1). Instead we start from the presumption that la-la-la it's all the same and that the onus is on the people trying to exclude people with testes from women's sport, to prove that those testicular people have an advantage, not that the starting presumption is that they shouldn't.
So what the IAAF did is performed a study which showed that for events between 400m and 1500m, there was a correlation between female testosterone and performance.
This study strikes me as dubious in that if the normal range for total testosterone for people without testes is 0.4-1.5 nmol/L, but there are athletes with testes competing, whose testosterone is in the range of 10-30 nmol/L, then it's perfectly possible for there to be no advantage between 1.5 and 0.4, since both are still clearly small numbers in absolute terms, but going from 1.5 to 30 nmol/l, is clearly a different thing.
After all we already know that testosterone is performance enhancing, and it's the first drug down on the banned list.
And if you have 50 athletes with ovaries all in the 0.4-1.5 range, and then 1 or 2 athletes with testes in the 10-30 range, then it strikes me that you should exclude the testicular athletes from the sample before making your analysis.
I think it is rather silly, but let us not forget that the IAAF had been through multiple legal challenges to their rules, and they kept losing, so they wanted to make sure that this one stuck.
By limiting it to specific events they went on to win their case.
By contrast in the case of Dutee Chand they lost. So it's not quite right that they've allowed athletes to compete without sanction.
Rather what has happened is that over the decades numerous athletes have been subject to challenge. The end result of those challenges has tended to be the athletes winning.
It does not follow from that that all possible challenges to intersex athletes in women's sport should fail.
Clearly one can distinguish the case of #3 above, the athletes who completely fail to process testosterone, from Caster Semenya, whose body processes testosterone normally, and merely has a somewhat faulty testosterone -> DHT conversion. In reality of course most of the athletes with faulty androgen receptors still process testosterone to some degree (group #4). It is well-known that such athletes are vastly overrepresented in female sport. However there is perhaps a conceptual difference between 'overrepresented' and 'unstoppably dominant'. I.e. a woman in group #4 who is a highly undervirilised biological male cannot possibly achieve the level of dominance vis-a-vis women, that a normally virilised biological male could. In the Caster Semenya case, we do not know whether the range of athletic performance of people with 5-ARD2 is identical to the range of people with normal male biology, but it is possible that it is. In other words, if a world champion athlete in any sport needs to have, say, 1 in 1 million genetics, plus training, then given that:
1. 5-ARD-2 is very rare
2. 5-ARD-2 should always be assigned male at birth when identified at birth
and if we consider that the performance curve for men is a bell curve similar to that for women, but to the right of it, such that the most genetically superior woman for a given sport may be at merely the 80th percentile for male genetics (obviously this will vary - for running the male performance advantage is perhaps 10%, whereas for weightlifting it is more like 30%), then it is rather likely that the curve of 5-ARD-2 is identical to that of 'men'. If that is so, then it is not all that difficult for such individuals to dominate women's sport.
As far as the question of specifically other athletes continuing, I do not know whether Dutee Chand, who is a sprinter, is group 3 (CAIS) or group 4 (PAIS), however it's likely to be PAIS rather than CAIS. And athletes with PAIS are required by the regulations to medically restrict testosterone, though these do not apply to the sprint.
As a fairness issue, I would say that athletes who have produced & processed testosterone from their testes from puberty should not be allowed to compete, i.e. no McKinnon, and no Semenya. For those who did not proceess testosterone, or partly processed it, it's a more difficult issue.
People with functioning testes and working ARs, and hence normal endogenous male levels of testosterone during puberty, will normally develop a male gender identity. Both Semenya & McKinnon are in this category. Whether or not they actually identify as male or female seems to me a slightly ludicrous question, like whether they actually believe in God or not. It doesn't really matter, give that there are people who say they identify as female, and yet have beards, etc., so the statement 'I identify as female' doesn't have any single clear meaning.
That is the problem in that we are not judging this by an objective external standard. Rachel Dolezal asserted that she was black, and while she was told that she was not, it is quite possible for someone to be some fraction black and look like she did. There is no possible way for a baby to be formed except between the combination of the strictly and exclusively binary division of male and female gametes, but race is a much looser grouping of people who look somewhat similar to each other. You can't prove someone to be black by DNA testing, but yet you can quite easily prove that, for example, Rachel McKinnon has XY chromosomes, and no relevant DSD.
I read that 🙂
good post
That’s not quite the full story...So we have 4 groups of people who are legally women but all have XY chromosomes.
Of course it's not the full story, and I think the detailed information you have posted demonstrates how complicated the story is. I think you're still just scratching the surface, and there are a lot more than 4 groups of people involved in the issue.
It is apparently not an option to say...
I think every option is on the table until the authorities (and wider society) have a proper debate about how we classify sport. The only thing I'm reasonably confident about is that anyone who claims to have already devised a cast iron solution is probably wrong.