... The @DZFOOTBALLDZ account agrees, in another post, that the athlete in question has a condition like Caster Semenya. That condition is a male, 46XY DSD: 5alpha Reductase Deficiency. We have known that this is the condition, since the World Athletics regulations ...
... and the testing of those regulations in the Court of Arbitration of Sport in 2019. You can read the judgment here: ...tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user…
... this confirms that athletes like Semenya are karyotypically male. That is, they have male chromosomes. But this might not be the point if we are interested in phenotype. In sport, we are interested in whether athletes have specifically *male advantage* ...
... this depends largely but not wholly on male puberty and the affects of circulating testosterone. If someone's body is completely immune to androgenisation (CAIS cases), then there is, arguably, no male advanatage at all, and these cases are, ethically, quite hard. ...
... but if @DZFOOTBALLDZ are correct, and the condition in question is 46XY 5ARD, ('like Semenya') then this is not a tricky ethical problem.
What is in question is *whether the athlete in question has male advantage* Let's keep our eye on the ball...
... What *doesn't* count for resolving this question?
Your preferred pronouns
How you dress
How you were brought up
What it says on your passport
Your 'legal' sex
Whether you are, or are seen as 'trans' or not.
Your 'race' or ethnicity.
How your genitals look
...
... People on all sides should remember this: I *don't care* how the athlete in question was dressed in their childhood, or how they dress now.
What matters is, as CAS said in 2019, "immutable biological characteristics". The regulations concern ...
... "a group of individuals who have certain immutable biological characteristics (namely a 46 XY DSD coupled with a material androgenising effect arising from that condition)" ...
... and this is important because "It is human biology, not legal status or gender identity, that ultimately determines which individuals possess the physical traits which give rise to that insuperable advantage, and which do not." ...
... We know, for certain, that the possession of the following characteristics is jointly sufficient for an athlete to be biologically male:
i) XY chromosomes
ii) the existence of testes (producing small motile gametes)
iii) the existence of male-typical levels of ...
...testosterone and
iv) sensitivity towards those levels of testosterone such that they drive physiological change through puberty.
Some people have speculated about PCOS and CAIS in these cases.
PCOS cases fail, obviously, on i) and ii).
CAIS cases fail on iv). ...
... But 5ARD cases, covered by the 2018 regulations and meet all four of these criteria.
The standard story about such athletes is just false. In referring to Semenya as a female athlete with abnormally high testosterone levels, the story has barely a nodding acquaintance ...
... with the truth. Semenya is, indeed, legally female. But Semenya is biologically male. As well as being biologically male, CS have normal levels of testosterone, which has had an androgenising effect. (andros = man, genesis = becoming) ...
... (By the way. I think the World Athletics rules are terrible: there should have been no route into female competition from reducing testosterone).
Let's go back to the rational for separate female competition: Male physiological advantage. ...
... again, this is what justifies female sport both in terms of fairness and safety. Male advantage justifies the *existence* of female sport, and it gives the *conditions of eligibility* for the female category - it must exclude male advantage. ...
... Allowing male advantage into female sport unquestionably undermines both fairness and, where appropriate, safety. And this is precisely what the @IOCmedia is licencing.
This is unethical.
I do not believe that female boxers at the Paris games can have given their ...
... fully informed, rational consent to such match ups. I also believe that the post I'm quoting places unreasonable pressure on those boxers.
It is, for those reasons, deeply unethical.
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There will be academics at @SussexUni - which is under the cosh for other reasons, at the moment - who will feel unfairly hit by this OfS fine, because they, themselves, did nothing wrong.
But:
They did nothing wrong, because, in many cases, they did nothing. Complicity is a ...
... notoriously tricky concept, but I know that some saw what was going on, realised it was out of order, but failed to act. The students who protested, who demanded that @Docstockk be sacked for wrongthink, all had tutors. ...
... Many did much more than sit on their hands - Sussex @UCU were much more than complicit by omission. Not only were they rubbish at the basic tasks of trade unionism; they were actively vile, accusing Stock of 'weaponising Employment Law.' ...
... Of course, 'setting up a task force' is what people do if either (i) they want to solve a problem in a big organisation or (ii) they want to kick a problem into the long grass. So we can't know which it is. The devil is in the details. If it is anything like the process...
... that led to the framework document, it will be a disaster. But it doesn't need to be.
Second, 'working with the international federations' sounds bland. Who'd be against this? ...
The claim that such-and-such is a 'moral panic' is overused and has lost its critical edge. However...
a promising candidate for a moral panic is the idea that sex eligibility rests on 'genital inspections'. It doesn't, and the suggestion that it does is dishonest...
... In ordinary social settings, sex eligibility rules don't rest on a mechanism of verification *at all*. They rest on people acting properly. If a gym says that it is for females only, don't go in if you are male. ...
... If a race has sex categories, don't tick the F box unless you are female. If you are trans, then you know you are trans, and can act honestly, and accordingly. The idea that trans people will necessarily break such rules unless they are policed is a bit, er, dodgy. ...
These last years have been troublesome, in some ways - but to see National Governing Body after NGB, and International Federation after IF coming out, (albeit some more clearly than others) for the integrity of female sport - has been a joy.
... The TRAs took a top-down approach. TRAs captured the policy making apparatus at a high level - like the IOC - and 'retraining' in various bits of convoluted language was pushed hard, as a substitute for policy. So they never really established a justifiable, rational, policy. The IOC's ...
... attempt at this is still one of the worst bits of public policy I have ever seen. And it is comprehensively ignored.
Without a justifiable policy and without the agreement of female athletes, there was (in retrospect) bound to be an unraveling. When, in 2021 ...
Three reasons why this study is worthless, in my view. These are not technical reasons to do with study design, though there are those as well. I'll group the reasons under three headings: 1) Performance metrics, 2) Body metrics, 3) Fair sport...
...So: 1) Performance metrics. We know, already, that lots of different variable inputs, like training load, can affect performance metrics. Those who push t-reduction assume that some (small) reduction in performance generates conclusions about fairness and categories. But they fail to provide any argument to that effect.
We know that T-reduction may have some effect on some performance metrics.
So can lead weights.
So what?
... 2) Body metrics. We know, already, that body metrics like height can give an advantage in games like volleyball. We know that being male gives a height advantage. And we know that T-suppression does nothing about male height advantage. Similarly hand size and upper body metrics. So we know that male skeletal advantages will remain.
Of course, these skeletal advantages could be overcome by attaching lead weights to boots (etc).
So. I've been looking at the World Athletics consultation on DSDs, announced earlier this week, and I think I've spotted a shift. If so, it's good and important.🧵
Here's what the consultation document says, side by side with what the IAAF said at CAS in the Semenya case (2019)
.. I should say that I think WA (IAAF: they're the same organisation) have been trying to do the right thing for quite a while, so none of this is an attack on their will.
I think the new move is to say 'we're not interested in your gender identity, it's not relevant, we don't judge or question it, that's up to you. ...
... but the previous position was 'If your gender identity/legal sex is female, then you have a right to compete in the female category' and I think this got them off on the wrong foot. I understand that legal sex is going to be of some importance for legal eligibility rules, and that WA needs to be cognisant of this. ...