Caster Semenya losses appeal against the restriction of testosterone levels in female runners

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[–]BEB 26 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 0 fun27 insightful - 1 fun -  (18 children)

He also posted a picture of little baby running shoes on social media or somewhere, so the speculation is that his wife is pregnant.

It would be a trip, after all the years of people insisting he was female, if he were the biological father. And I'm not trying to harsh him, because he didn't know he was male until relatively recently.

[–]GConly 35 insightful - 1 fun35 insightful - 0 fun36 insightful - 1 fun -  (8 children)

And I'm not trying to harsh him, because he didn't know he was male until relatively recently.

He knew.

He would very obviously have not gone through female puberty.. no breasts, no menstruation.

He obviously would have developed male height, muscles and a broken voice.

One of his family came out a while ago and admitted they knew he was male for years. Africans aren't stupid, they have doctors. He lived as a boy as a kid as well.

[–]fireweed 33 insightful - 1 fun33 insightful - 0 fun34 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There are photos out there of him wearing the boys' school uniform. His story about being raised as as girl is complete and total bullshit.

[–]MarkTwainiac 22 insightful - 1 fun22 insightful - 0 fun23 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

And South Africa specifically doesn't just have doctors, it has some of the best doctors in the world. South Africa is the country that pioneered the first heart transplants, after all.

Moreover the Africans in the ANC are some of the most politically astute and clever people ever. Not coincidentally, prior to, during and after apartheid, many men who were and are the powers in the ANC went to university and graduate schools in the US, Canada, the UK and other countries in Europe. As a result, they caught wind of postmodernism, queer theory, gender ideology, identity politics, critical race theory, intersectionalism and choice feminism early on - and they quickly saw how these ideologies could be used to their own advantage to challenge and thwart the powers-that-be in the Global North and basically stick it to the (white) man by hoisting Euroamericans by their own pomo/QT petard, so to speak.

And they were right! The whole saga turned out to be a brilliant PR move and long con that the entire world fell for and went along with for a full decade. Semenya was used by SA politicians basically to play out the story of "the emperor has no clothes" on the world stage. Anyone who dared to point out that the emperor (Semenya) was actually naked and clearly seemed to be male was derided as a racist, sexist, white supremacist trying to impose Eurocentric standards of beauty and femininity on poor poor Caster, who was portrayed not as a cheating male but as an exemplar of "strong black African women" whom haters, racists and sexists were out to oppress, bully and victimize.

[–]PenseePansy 16 insightful - 2 fun16 insightful - 1 fun17 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Anyone who dared to point out that the emperor (Semenya) was actually naked and clearly seemed to be male was derided as a racist, sexist, white supremacist trying to impose Eurocentric standards of beauty and femininity on poor poor Caster, who was portrayed not as a cheating male but as an exemplar of "strong black African women" whom haters, racists and sexists were out to oppress, bully and victimize.

I recall reading precisely this sort of thing about Semenya on SJW-y type websites (before I wised up about wokeness): observing "looks like a man" can only mean that you think black women are UGLY! (i.e., they don't meet white beauty standards = not feminine = masculine = ugly women) So simply noticing this PAINFULLY OBVIOUS FACT makes one a racist, sexist creep! And shallow to boot! And so on and so forth ad nauseum.

But wait a moment... doesn't this very train of thought have some pretty racist, creepy, and shallow implications itself? Such as:

  • Doesn't buying Semenya's story mean that the one who believes black women are masculine is actually YOU? Since Caster is manifestly male... and you somehow see no contradiction between THAT and being a black woman?
  • Isn't treating women's looks as their most important feature-- so that an accusation of supposed ugliness becomes the worst possible insult-- the very DEFINITION of shallow/sexist?

Anyone else ever notice these inconvenient little hitches in the lefty pro-Semenya narrative?

[–]BEB 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I saw this whole piece, a while back, on how he lived as a girl as a child in a remote village where there was no medical care. It made it sound as if he, and everyone around him, didn't know he was male.

But apparently, many media outlets did not report accurately on Semenya (see the article I posted above).

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

AFAIK, the facts in this piece from late August 2009 - two weeks after Semenya had "sex testing" in Pretoria, but when SA sports officials were still lying that Semenya had not - have not been proven wrong; otherwise, it would've have been taken down already due to legal challenges. (The DM is a tabloid, but it does belong to and abide by to IPSO standards and governance, and it obeys legal rulings.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208227/She-wouldnt-wear-dresses-sounds-like-man-phone-Caster-Semenyas-father-sex-riddle-daughter.html

But one important point this piece misses concerns Semenya's famous South African birth certificate that says Semenya is FEMALE in all caps and is often used as solid-gold "proof" that Semenya has always been seen as female.

In an attempt to end the controversy about her gender status, her family yesterday showed the Mail a copy of Caster's birth certificate. It backs what her friends, family and teachers insist is the case: that the 18-year-old is a woman, albeit clearly with some male characteristics.

The certificate confirms her birth date as January 7, 1991 and clearly states 'female' under the section marked 'gender'. Written in Afrikaans and English, the one-page birth certificate includes Semenya's full name, Mokgadi Caster Semenya. The document also lists her ID number and confirms her country of birth as South Africa.

Semenya's sister Nkele, 16, said: 'This is proof that my sister is a girl. She was a girl when she was born and she is a girl still. Hopefully this will stop people making rumours about her.'

Of course, these rumours have dogged Caster's athletics career - and the birth certificate had to be produced on numerous occasionsto assuage the doubts of other female competitors. 'More often than not, when we met other schools for athletics there would be some question about Caster's gender,' said one school official. 'We took to keeping a copy of her certificate so we could show beyond doubt that she is a female.'

If the DM reporters had taken a closer look at the birth certificate (photo in article), they would have seen that it clearly states it was issued in April, 2007 - when Semenya was 16. There is no evidence that Semenya received a BC or other identity document stating Semenya's sex as FEMALE or F before this; in fact, there is no evidence that Semenya's birth was entered into any official registry of births or other records when or soon after Semenya was born or at any other time prior to 2007.

Semenya only obtained a BC after Semenya started running - and winning - in female track events - and was so exceptional compared to the other female competitors that Semenya was brought to the attention of the honchos at the national body, Athletics South Africa.

Upon seeing Semenya compete, ASA officials immediately saw how Semenya could be used to obtain two objectives: a) obtain international athletics glory - and money - for South Africa; and b) challenge the hegemony, rules, and authority of the international sports governing bodies like the IAAF and IOC, and tarnish their reputations in the eyes of the world, by making them appear to be racist, sexist, colonialists from the Global North intent on unfairly discriminating against, oppressing and body-shaming a "strong black woman" from the Global South with the misfortune to have a DSD by expecting "her" to live up to archaic, Eurocentric definitions of biological sex and to conform to sexist, white supremacist notions of what a woman is and how women should (and do) look, sound like and perform in athletics and on the running track.

And who in 2007 issued the 16-year-old athlete a birth certificate saying Semenya is FEMALE in all caps? The very same government of South Africa whose officials realized all the mileage they could get out of running the long con that is the Caster Semenya story. Funny dat.

[–]blackrainbow 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Also, he said he "feels" like a male

[–]jet199 12 insightful - 2 fun12 insightful - 1 fun13 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Lived as a boy as a child, lives as a man now. Literally only IDs as a women to compete. He's actually worse than the delusional trans who really believe they are women.

[–]Shesstealthy 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Interestingly the article I read about this took great pains to say Caster was a cis-woman with an intersex condition. So... if she feels like a man perhaps they should be respecting her words and seeing her as a TIF.

[–]MarkTwainiac 26 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 0 fun27 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

he didn't know he was male until relatively recently.

BEB - Semenya has known for certain since August 2009 that he is an XY person with a male-only DSD (5-ARD), fully functioning testicles, and male levels of testosterone whose body responds to/uses the testosterone his testes produce in all the normal ways male bodies typically do, and that he went through male puberty and therefore has all the athletic advantages that male puberty confers.

South African medical professionals gave Semenya a full workup in August 2009, before SA sports authorities introduced Semenya to the world as SA's new "golden girl" runner at the 2009 World Juniors the next month. Based on the results of all the testing done on Semenya in August 2009, leading SA medical doctors - including Nelson Mandela's personal physician - told SA sports authorities that Semenya is not eligible to compete in female sports coz Semenya is not female. But SA sports authorities went ahead anyway, coz they had already decided to make use of Semenya and Semenya's DSD to stick it to the international sports governing bodies with whom they had long been at war, due to the history of colonialism, apartheid and more recently the case of another SA athlete with physical differences, Oscar Pistorius.

If you examine all the material published about Semenya, it becomes very clear that the whole story about Semenya being considered and treated as female since birth is a sham - and a con. Semenya wore a boys' uniform to school, and played football (soccer) on the boys team - privileges unheard of for any female person in sexist SA. Semenya last year said Semenya's own sister always thought Semenya was a girl, and all of Semenya's life "everyone always knew there was something different about me."

Semenya in late 2014, whilst Semenya was still on medication to suppress testosterone that Semenya had been taking for several years at that point in order to meet eligibility rules for participation in women's sports:

https://youtu.be/Hvg50P4FwTk

Semenya in August 2019, after the details of Semenya's case, sex and physiology had been revealed to the world:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2019/aug/14/i-have-high-testosterone-so-what-says-caster-semenya-video

Everyone: please don't make statements like Semenya "didn't know he was male until relatively recently" until you've taken the time to look into the whole story from the beginning.

[–]BEB 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Sorry. I could have sworn that even a few years ago the media was still referring to him as a her.

OK, just looked - here is the May 2019 article I read about Semenya and it refers to him as a her. No wonder I was confused.

By the way, this is a very popular running blog (Let's Run) that is pretty fair about covering TIMs competing with women in track events.

From the article:

1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes

It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes.

...How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBC could all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me. Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead paragraph of every story...Because of the glaring XY omission, many across the globe ended up reading opening paragraphs like this from the front page of the New York Times:

Female track athletes with naturally elevated levels of testosterone must decrease the hormone to participate in certain races at major competitions like the Olympics, the highest court in international sports said Wednesday in a landmark ruling amid the pitched debate over who can compete in women’s events..."

https://www.letsrun.com/news/2019/05/what-no-one-is-telling-you-about-caster-semenya-she-has-xy-chromosomes/

[–]MarkTwainiac 15 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 0 fun16 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

LOL, I'm the one who alerted the author of that Lets Run piece to the existence of photos online of Semenya wearing a boy's uniform to school.

Although by the standards of the internet LetsRun (LRC) has tried to be somewhat fair about males with DSDs and trans identities in female sports, the site overall is very misogynistic, just like the rest of the internet. Many threads objecting to TIMs in women's sports get zapped immediately, particularly ones about Montana runner June Eastwood. I've started several carefully-worded threads there written in the most measured, balanced tones about the current status of the Title IX lawsuits in CT, the Idaho law, and World Rugby's soon-to-be-released rules saying it's a danger to women for TIMs to be in women's rugby. And they all got removed immediately.

The rules of Lets Run are that both TIMs and Semenya must be referred to with female pronouns. When I asked why this was the case about Semenya after Semenya's sex had been revealed, the author of that piece - Robert Johnson, aka rojo - emailed me to say that anyone who doesn't have a penis is a woman!

[–]MezozoicGay 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That how propaganda works. People who are not explicetely interested in this, are just hearing somewhere parts of information, read somewhere some other part, just pecause info-noise is that big and it is everywhere with key words, so they have some vague thoughts and ideaas in their head because of that - "that person is woman and had some cool heroic story, ah and terfs are just evil I heard, they did something evil, dunno what", and so on.

[–]peregrine_throw 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

u/MarkTwainiac suffering no fools in this post. Rock it!

Btw, where'd you get this?:

South African medical professionals gave Semenya a full workup in August 2009, before SA sports authorities introduced Semenya to the world as SA's new "golden girl" runner at the 2009 World Juniors the next month. Based on the results of all the testing done on Semenya in August 2009, leading SA medical doctors - including Nelson Mandela's personal physician - told SA sports authorities that Semenya is not eligible to compete in female sports coz Semenya is not female.

Can't seem to find any docs source relating to the 2009 full work-up male (non)recommendation as offically released, and the Mandela tidbit...

And yes, to assume SA had/has none but subpar, bumbling incompetents for doctors serving their elite athletes is smh. They had to know.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Sources below. But first: I erred when I referred to the 800 meter world championship Semenya won in Berlin in August 2009 as the Juniors. It was the Women's World Championship. Semenya had already won the Junior (girls) Championship in the 800 the previous year.

Video of the August 2009 800m Women's World Championship, which Semenya handily wins by a huge margin: https://youtu.be/MpblUehi9Dk

Now the (main) sources:

1) Associated Press report on the press conference the head of ASA gave on September 19, 2009 admitting Semenya had been medically checked out in Pretoria on August 7, and that he and other officials decided to lie about it:

South Africa's top athletics official admitted on Saturday that he had denied knowledge of gender tests done on runner Caster Semenya in South Africa, saying he had lied to protect the athlete's privacy.

Athletics South Africa (ASA) president Leonard Chuene told reporters in Pretoria on Saturday that his constant denials of the tests, which he said he was aware of when they were done in early August, were an "error of judgment" and he hadn't meant to deceive the public.

"At that time I was acting in the best interests of Caster Semenya, as a person. I believed at that time that my consistent denials would help to protect her, that's what I believed. I have however realised that it was an error of judgment and that I could have been more forthcoming with this information, even if it was difficult," he said.

South African officials had repeatedly insisted tests were done on the 800-metre world champion only abroad, not in South Africa.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ordered more tests done on the runner in Berlin, saying questions had been raised about her muscular physique, running style and recent stunning improvement in times.

It has refused to confirm or deny Australian media reports that Semenya has both male and female characteristics, saying it was reviewing test results and would issue a decision in November on whether the athlete would be allowed to continue to compete in women's events.

Chuene admitted tests had been done at a Pretoria hospital on August 7 at the behest of the IAAF, adding that it was unclear whether Semenya was informed of the nature of the examinations.

Chuene said that despite medical advice and a request from the IAAF, he had refused to withdraw Semenya from the race because there were no results yet from the tests.

Video and text here: https://youtu.be/mLoTmod2jno

2)"Caster Semenya's Saga" by Ross Tucker, who is South African, published December 31, 2009 on science of sport:

Inside athletics circles, it has been widely known for about three years that all was not well with Semenya. In fact, three years ago, at the SA Junior Championships, ASA (Athletics South Africa, the official governing body) officials informed all competing teams that they knew of the problem and were investigating, so they should please not lodge any protests. Needless to say, nothing was done, until the IAAF acted on these reports, and requested an investigation from ASA (which is what they should do, according to their own policy).

ASA complied, under the guise of doping control, and Semenya found herself undergoing invasive physical examinations in South Africa, a few days before the team left for Berlin. Those results were enough to cause the ASA doctor, Harold Adams, to request that Semenya be withdrawn from the team. We may never know what was found by those tests. However, it is relatively easy to perform physical exams to confirm that an individual possesses no womb and has ambiguous genitalia. Genetic testing would follow and the picture would become clear very quickly. I would be very surprised if ASA did not know everything at that point. However, they refused to withdraw her, and the rest is history.

After a leading medical expert from a major SA university weighed in and told SA sports official to withdraw Semenya

Leonard Chuene (head of Athletics South Africa) publicly announced that he would not accept the opinion of a “scientist from some stupid university”, which tells you all you need to know about the now former president of ASA. Meanwhile, the Minister of Sport, our highest ranking sports official, declared that the questions about Semenya meant nothing. His words? “That means nothing. There are many hermaphrodites in the world so what does it matter. This girl is running as a girl who has been accredited as a girl. Nobody has questioned that (this comes after the whole world was questioning it, I might point out). She doesn’t have a womb, so what?”.

He went on to declare that if anyone tried to take her medal or stop her from running, it would be the “Third World War”. I was embarrassed to be South African, and wrote as much, for which I received a letter from the Minister saying that if I knew something he didn’t, I should say so. Perhaps the Minister will in future consult an expert endocrinologist, geneticist or doctor? Or maybe he’ll even read this website in 2010…

https://sportsscientists.com/2009/12/number-1-caster-semenya/

However, I would recommend reading all of Ross Tucker's posts on the Semenya case going in chronological order starting in August 2009. It's really an amazing story full of intrigue, outright lying, political bullying, PC posturing, and cowardice on the part of the IAAF and other sports bodies who to avoid charges of racism and sexism, backed off on the Semenya case in hurry then bent over backwards to come up with new rules to allow males with DSDs to compete in female sports.

3) "Semenya wins 800 meters" - report from ESPN, August 19, 2009, containing such doozies as:

South Africa team manager Phiwe Mlangeni-Tsholetsane would not confirm that Semenya was having a gender test, but said "there was no cheating on our part."

"We entered Caster as a woman and we want to keep it that way," Mlangeni-Tsholetsane said. "Our conscience is clear in terms of Caster. We have no reservations at all about that."

And this pack of lies from a spokesman for the University of Pretoria:

Morris Gilbert, a media consultant for TuksSport, the University of Pretoria's sports department, said the issue of Semenya's gender has not been raised since the 18-year-old freshman began attending the university.

"It's the first time in South African sport that we have had a gender issue," he said.

He said the university would not get involved in the recent controversy over her gender.

"We are all very proud of her and of what she's achieved," he said. "The university stands behind her all the way."

He attributed her recent success to hard work and rigorous training.

"She trains a lot," he said...

https://www.espn.com/olympics/news/story?id=4409318

4) "South African official lied about Semenya gender tests" - CNN report, September 19, 2009

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/SPORT/09/20/athletics.caster.semenya.chuene.oosthuizen/index.html

Some other relevant press reports:

https://www.espn.com/olympics/trackandfield/news/story?id=4489230

https://www.espn.com/olympics/trackandfield/news/story?id=6135110

Two corrections of errors I made in previous posts:

1) I believe the doctor I was referred to as Mandela's physician is Harold Adams (mentioned by Ross Tucker above). But it looks like Adams was the personal physician of two of the men who became President of South Africa after Mandela - Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma - not Mandela. Though my recollection is that Mandela's physician weighed in too - this was a BIG topic in SA medical circles back in 2009. My notes say he did, but I can't find the source at the moment, so maybe I got that wrong.

https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/mail-guardian/20090918/281535107030375

2) I said it was the head of Athletics South Africa who made the flip public statement about Semenya not having a womb, who cares? It was actually the SA Minister of Sport, as Tucker says. Not being from SA myself, I conflated the two positions. Apologies.

[–]jelliknight 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thank you! You're doing wonderful work.

Yet again, a man is being given the benefit of a sliver of manufactured doubt so he can screw over all women. Fuck this asshole, fuck the women supporting him and gaslighting other women.

[–]MarkTwainiac 16 insightful - 1 fun16 insightful - 0 fun17 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Semenya's wife apparently had the baby a year ago June, at the very time when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled in favor of the IAAF/World Athletics in the case - and the CAS released the full decision revealing that Semenya's DSD is 5-ARD, which is a DSD in male people only.

Female people can have 5-ARD, but since it's an enzyme deficiency that mainly impacts males' ability to convert testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, which plays a crucial role in the development of male genitalia in utero, 5-ARD does not impact sex development in female people. Most female people with 5-ARD will go their whole lives unaware they have the condition.

I imagine that Semenya and his wife kept news of the baby under wraps at the time of the birth and infancy because of the questions the birth would raise and the PR problems it would cause.

Semenya did a lot of videos from Semenya's home during lockdown, and it was very clear from the footage shot in April and May that he had a baby in the house, as items like toys and a walker were evident in the background.

[–]goobandit 7 insightful - 4 fun7 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

It’s 2020. Women can be dads too, dontcha know!