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

submitted by greenish from bbc.co.uk

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[–]crodish 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

I remember something from a video that said only male intersex people had the SRY gene anyway, so couldn't they just test for that?

[–]NecessaryScene1 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

It's sufficient to detect that an athlete is male or male-genetic intersex, and hence should be subject to the extra determination. Main problem is that they don't want to rule out everyone with an SRY gene. Certain disorders like CAIS have the SRY gene and produce the testosterone, but it has no or negligible effect due to other genetic problems. So it's deemed fair for CAIS athletes to run as women (regardless of testosterone level).

Certainly anyone without an SRY gene is definitely eligible as female, though.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Certain disorders like CAIS have the SRY gene and produce the testosterone, but it has no or negligible effect due to other genetic problems. So it's deemed fair for CAIS athletes to run as women.

Actually, there is evidence that individuals with CAIS might have some physical characteristics that could give them advantages over XX female people in sports, such as height. Also, they will be advantaged over XX females in sport coz they don't have to contend with a whole host of physical issues that come from having female biology that often serve as real drawbacks and detriments in sports.

A competitor with CAS will never have to deal with periods and period pains, and the anemia many girls/women are prone to due to menstrual blood loss, or contend with all the hormonal changes that occur during the menstrual cycle - which not only affect mood, sleep patterns, motivation, but make girls and women much more prone to injuries at certain time of the month coz of how ligaments, cartilage & muscle are affected. An athlete with CAIS will never have to worry about birth control or use hormonal contraceptives, an IUD or the MA pill; will never spend a moment fearing she might have gotten pregnant accidentally; will never have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy and contemplate or obtain an abortion, desperately try to find an abortion provider and the $$ to pay for an abortion, or suffer embarrassment and shame entering and exiting an abortion facility whilst religious zealots are screaming abuse at her. If god forbid, an athlete with CAIS is raped, she won't have to spend a moment worrying that the rapist impregnated her as well as assaulted her.

An athlete with CAIS will never have to deal with all the issues around pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and trying to get back in shape afterwards that female athletes like Serena Williams have faced - and which have really reduced SW's athletic abilities and knocked her off her game. An individual with CAIS will never have to contend with any of the serious female specific health issues that often sideline female athletes - like ovarian cysts, fibroids and endometriosis. And an athlete with CAIS who competes at the masters and senior levels will never have to deal with all the physical symptoms of peri-menopause and menopause that the XX female athletes she's competing with will.

I think people with CAIS should be considered girls & women in most/all circumstances - but think there's lots of grounds to argue that they might have unfair advantages in female sports.

The assumption that XY people with DSDs across the board are so similar to XX women that none of them can be assumed to have a leg up over XX athletes in sports is what got the sporting world into this mess in the first place. With the Semenya case, all the sporting bodies have been put on the back foot - having to provide proof that Semenya (and similar athletes like Niyonsaba and Wambui, the two other XY runners who got medals with Semenya in the women's 800m at the Rio Olympics) do have an advantage. When in fairness, it could be argued that XY DSD athletes should have to be the ones providing proof that they don't have advantages.

[–]jelliknight 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

We don't know for sure what advantages CAIS might confer, over being female. It's irrelevant anyway. Women are not defined by weakness or slowness, we are defined by being FEMALE and no one with CAIS is female.

The purpose of womens sports is to see how good WOMEN can be, to give WOMEN and GIRLS something to aspire to. It's more important than an individual success.

The answer is simple, Caster and people with CAIS can campaign for an all inclusive sports event, akin to the paralympics. We've fought to hard and long for womens sports to cede them to the .001% of males being discussed.

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I agree with your POV wholeheartedly, and I wish the issues of what advantages CAIS might confer over being female were irrelevant.

But according to the IAAF/WA, XY athletes with CAIS and PAIS can be found in the female division of elite international athletics at much higher rates than the conditions CAIS and PAIS occur in the the human population overall.

[–]NecessaryScene1 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I agree CAIS is borderline - I wouldn't like to draw that line. I was just noting where the IAAF have drawn it.

Thinking more deeply, I agree that it's likely that they have competitive advantages, but I doubt it reaches the point of being "unfair" enough to exclude them. It's not the fundamental male/female physique difference as in Semenya's case that led to the creation of the other split category in the first place. And I don't think we're seeing podiums full of CAIS athletes.

It feels to me more like a place where the whole "big feet/lungs/whatever" argument used to support including Semenya would actually apply. It's that scale of advantage. We don't have separate athletics categories for any advantage smaller than sex, as they're not so large that they're an absolute requirement to be competitive at all. I feel that a CAIS vs non-CAIS competition is still meaningful, as Ross Tucker might put it.

[–]MarkTwainiac 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thinking more deeply, I agree that it's likely that they have competitive advantages, but I doubt it reaches the point of being "unfair" enough to exclude them.

Not to belabor the point (LOL), but while I get where you're coming from, I think it's worth mentioning the extent to which sports scientists and sports governing bodies long have been, and now still are, hyper-concerned with trying to gauge and eliminate any/all unfairness - even the most infinitesimal - within each sport, and within each sex category. In sports like track & field, the difference between winning and not is usually a tiny fraction of a second. Look how close this race from more than 35 years ago was: https://youtu.be/vZSsoNhjYVk

What's more, the margins in sport are getting slimmer all the time, which is why today's standard sports chronometers break down seconds not just into 100ths, but into 1,000ths - and the official ones used by the IAAF/WA now must be able to measure in increments of 1/10,000th of a second, whilst at the Olympics since 2012 the official timing and recording devices measure in increments of 1/1,000,000th of a second.

Used to be, athletic competitions like track & field and swimming races used starting guns to tell athletes when to "go!" But extensive & expensive research was done that showed that in track & field (and other events like swimming) the farther an athlete was from the starting gun when it went off, the longer the sound took to reach him/her - meaning the closer an athlete was to the gun when it went off, the more of an advantage she or he would have. Now these were teeny-tiny advantages measured in milliseconds (millionths of a second), but athletes and all the sports governing bodies still found them significant enough that the various elite-level sports where every fraction of a second counts and every athlete is supposed to start off at the same time got rid of starting guns. Now in track & field and swimming, the sound of a starting gun is sent to electronic speakers set within each athlete's starting blocks so that every competitor hears it at exactly the same time.

https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/olympic-timing.htm

If you look at the business of modern day sports, there is a vast emphasis on identifying and eliminating anything that might provide even the slightest advantage, no matter how small. In sports today, the prevailing belief is that that no unfair advantage is too small not to be banned and excluded. Except, that is, in the case of girls & women's sport, where now athletes with the biggest unfair advantage of all - being male - are being allowed to compete if they have DSDs and/or an opposite sex "gender identity."

As much as I feel for persons with CAIS, in an era when sports clocks measure in increments of 1/1,000,000ths of a second, I don't think it's fair to girls & women's sports - or consistent with the ethos of modern sports in general - to tell CAIS or other athletes with DSDs, in essence, "even though you have an unfair advantage in female sports, you still get to compete anyways coz in the grand scheme of things, your advantage really isn't all that big - plus it would be mean to exclude you, what with you having a DSD that evokes special sympathy."

Also, all this current-day emphasis on "not excluding" anyone is BS - and sexist BS at that. Women were excluded from sports - and a zillion other endeavors and places - since the dawn of human history. But boys and men have never been pressed to see how "mean" and "unkind" it was of them to be so "exclusionary," or to get all sad, guilty, teary-eyed, pouty-faced about how bad all those billions of excluded girls and women must've felt as a result. The pressure to be "inclusionary" nowadays is being put almost exclusively on girls & women. And it's no accident that it's happening at a time in history when for the first time ever girls and women have managed to carve out/create some female-only areas that exist exclusively for our own benefit. From rape refuges and shelters where women subjected to sexual violence by males can find safety and healing amongst others of our sex; to loos, locker rooms and changing rooms where we can be away from prying, perhaps pervy, male eyes and predators when in states of undress and vulnerability; to sports where females can compete fairly with/against other female people and finally get a taste of what it's like to reap some of the rewards.

[–]NecessaryScene1 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Good effort, but I can't quite buy it.

identifying and eliminating anything that might provide even the slightest advantage

But those "things" are equipment issues, not physiological attributes. No-one is busy trying to exclude the people who are just too unfairly tall or whatever. Closest I can think of is Oscar Pitorius, but that was still equipment, albeit prosthetic.

I think I would basically say that Semenya clearly has the male advantage, and we have the category for that, so Semenya falls into that category.

It's far from clear that the "CAIS" advantage is the male advantage. It may be an advantage, sure, but if the sports population were made up of just CAIS and normal males, the first thing you'd do is separate the CAIS from the males for fairness. Given sufficient numbers, there's no way you'd force CAIS to compete against normal males. Whereas if the population were made up of 5-ARD and normal males, it's not clear whether there would be any point having separate classes. I don't think there's any reason an elite 5-ARD runner couldn't be up on the male podium. (Insert bad quip about being more streamlined here).

Lots of people assume that athletes like Semenya can't compete with males, but there seems to be no real logical basis to that aside from "she's a woman". But a CAIS athlete couldn't compete with a male any more than a standard female, what with not having undergone virilisation.

So the remaining question is, if there were no males, and the population was just normal females and CAIS athletes, would we create a category split just for CAIS? In a CAIS versus female field, is the CAIS advantage so huge that it overrides everything else? Surely not.

We really don't try to identify and eliminate every physiological advantage. We only do the really big ones. Sex in most sports, and weight in a few. And that's it. It really doesn't seem like CAIS gets anywhere near the level of a requiring a new category split.

I'd be interested to see more stats for comparison though - I've seen the thing about CAIS being dozens of times overrepresented (IIRC), but how does that compare to, say, certain heights, or weights?