In following the Caster Semenya case I found this.
Check it out and I must add.
Here is the real thing not all men are faster then all women. And training and diet can affect that even more. Finally if she were a "he" no one would be looking for Adasen's disease which causes a man to produce too much testosterone and become aggressive one of the Kennedy's had it, Bobby?...No one is looking to check the CHROMOSOMES OF MALE ATHLETES etc...at most they under go doping charges.
When I swim and I'm not that fast I can easily out distance the average male if I were six feet and trained I could probably outstrip 90% of most trained male swimmers.
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Of course not all men are faster than all women. I was a mediocre male runner, I would have ranked slightly better running against the girls but the top girls easily outclassed me. But the top male runners are noticeably faster than the top female runners. It's clear that the male-female binary doesn't fit everyone, but what's the alternative division that lets conventionally female athletes compete in track events?
The alternative as i see it, would be to do away with the female/male binary classes, and replace them with classes actually based upon the biological characteristics that give an advantage or disadvantage. Instead of currently where being female is the "characteristic" labelled as giving a disadvantage.
And they make distinctions based on actual biology, (to an extent) in other sports. Boxing for example is based upon weight. And the paralymics has many different classes.
I admit to knowing very little about biology, and don't know much about what characteristics give advantages. But supposing testosterone is a major factor, then couldn't average testosterone level be used to divide competitors?
Or alternatively, having all competitors regardless of gender competing together, and have their times/distances altered to compensate for individual biological characteristics?
These aren't perfect solutions, but I think a lot fairer than the current setup.
Testosterone fluctuates within a person. And
performance/testosterone=score wouldn't be much fun for anyone.
I did say "average testosterone levels", ie taken over a long period of time so as to account for fluctuations.
And scoring is already used in athletics, look at the heptathelon. Its won not by the person who runs the fastest or whatever, but by the person who is judged to be the best overall athelete.
Why do you think taking account of testosterone or biology "wouldn't be fun" in athletics?
I'm not sure that having the current system of subjecting women to sex tests, and allowing people to have unfair biological advantages is particularly "fun".
So you want to measure each athlete continuously to get their average testosterone level, then sort them into "weight" classes by that, or else judge them by their performance to testosterone ratio? That'll put an interesting twist on steroid use, as athletes find drugs to knock down their testosterone count before measurement.
Of course, if you're going to stop "allowing people to have unfair biological advantages," you're going to have to add height, weight, health history, genetic heritage, and a lot of other factors to your algorithm. Yao Ming can take a 2/7ths penalty on all his stats because he's so much taller than Earl Boykins. If you really don't see how this might put a dent in the spirit and enjoyment of sports, then I heartily encourage you to campaign for such a regime in professional competitions. I want to be a champion too. Highschool too, just to be fair. Maybe I can get some retroactive trophies.
well, for one thing, any system of qualification for athletics that required multiple costly medical tests would preclude amateur competition and make athletic competition an entirely classist endeavor. also "the current system of subjecting women to sex tests, and allowing people to have unfair biological advantages is particularly "fun"." Those are complete opposite systems. we can either come up with a test based model and test everyone, or we can say f- this and let people have their unfair biological advantages. you kinda, by definition, can't do both. the head honchos are trying to hedge their bets right now, and it's not going to work. they'll either have to come down to a standard, one way or another.
The problem is that testosterone levels themselves are fairly expensive to measure. However, the male/female binary so closely correlates to a distinction between high testosterone, low testosterone that it functions as a valid seperation.
At the same time the only circumstances that I could envision for a man to be able to compete in the low testosterone event would be if he were suffering from hypogonadism, under which circumstance he would very likely be prescribed artificial testosterone.
That would basically leave us with the situation we have now. We would have a division for low testosterone which would be entirely populated by women, and a division for high testosterone which would be populated by men and by a few women who exceeded the threshold for low testosterone. However the problem lies in the fact that while there is a range of levels, the distributions do not leave very much in between the average levels for men, and the average levels for women. Which would result in an inability to have the middle of the range due to an insufficient number of competitors.
I personally do not see how addison's disease (the endocrine disorder JFK had) is performance enhancing, the lack of adrenaline would make a lot of sports significantly more difficult to get bursts of speed. I particularly do not see how it is linked to excess testosterone.
Whats more naturally high levels of testosterone are not linked to aggressiveness in humans, only in rats.
All of that said, one of the largest determining factors between the gender divisions is the presence of testosterone, because it is a powerful steroid which isn't present in anywhere near the same levels in women as it is in men. This allows men to bulk up quicker, and see results from training faster once they hit puberty (also the reason why it isn't until puberty that the differences between boys/girls are all that pronounced). In all of the competitive sports I've been involved in it has been far easier for the guys to train to a given level of performance than it has been for the girls to do the same. It would be as unfair to expect the female athletes to compete against a man as it would be to expect them to compete against a female who was doping with testosterone.
if I were six feet and trained I could probably outstrip 90% of most trained male swimmers. - I seriously doubt that.
This one has been talked to death already. Let her run with the female athlethes and they will feel treated unfair. Let her run with the male athlethes and she will feel treated unfair. Mix all male and female athlethes in one class together and all female athlethes feel treated unfair as much, much less women will receive medals. A no-win scenario.
What if she were Rogue (cartoon not movies)? If she were Rogue she could probably wipe the floor with 99% of most trained male swimmers.
But in the particular case of Semenya, as far as I know no good reason has been given for why the other women should feel treated unfairly. If it turns out that she has male biological characteristics that give her an advantage over other women, then it'll get more complicated, but at this point isn't it basically a cock-and-bull suspicion?
As far as I understood a previous article other female athletes feel treated unfair.
Of course they feel treated unfairly, she won. The question is whether they have a reason to other than being sore losers.
Not only is the gender binary a myth, so much about the boxes society and we ourselves put ourselves is a myth. Every human being is different and there are few outright truisms that can be applied to ALL women or ALL men. For example, even though 98.6 F is considered to be the standard body temperature of health, it is really just an average, and lots of people run slightly lower or slightly higher than it.
there are some physical anomalies that would make a man a better athlete. Addison's disease ain't one of them, particularly given that two of the main symptoms are fatigue and muscle weakness. If you had said that a "superman" had an unfair advantage given his XYY genetic makeup, then we'd have something to talk about. yes he would tend (tend!) to have a small boost in size and strength, but XYY men are also generally much more aggressive and impulsive than XY men, which tends to land them in prison.
they check for doping first because, 99.8124% of the time, it's doping. as i recall, they checked her for doping first too. also, traditional steroids have a number of obvious physical symptoms (bulking up, enlarged male breasts, reduced female breasts, reduced testes, various musculo-skeletal issues, mood swings, and changes to mental state) and anything that fits that pattern gets checked for that first. it's like when your ankle hurts and you go to the doctor, it's almost always sprained or broken. they're going to check for that first. but very very rarely, it's a blood clot, or osteosarcoma. totally different problem. but the next time someone's ankle hurts, are they going to assume it's that? no. they still think sprain. why? because it's always a sprain.
sigh. i'm rambling. sorry y'all. insomnia's a right asshole.
I said Adasen’s made J.F.K. aggressive think the Bay of Pigs. That as testosterone laded B.S. as it comes. Aggression and desire make an athlete think Sea Biscuit. Heart can trump size any time. Plus it is already a given that most male athletes are doping and that the tests are not sophisticated enough to catch them. So with the doping the time difference between men and women is only minutes.
Then Margaret Thatcher's testosterone levels must have been through the roof.
All professional athletes have "heart". They wouldn't get to that level without years of dedicated training. Talent still matters. Usain Bolt takes competition less seriously than his competitors, yet still wins every time because God made him to run. Lance Armstrong has a unique physiology that prevents lactic acid from inhibiting his muscles as it does for mortal women and men. Heart's a given at that level, ability matters too.
I was going to bring up Lance Armstrong elsewhere today. His story of how he is, as far as at least 13 years of research on him personally at the University of Austin, is concerned, a unique physical specimen. He has advantages in his sport that NO OTHER documented human has, like the ability to improve his muscle efficiency, and THE LOWEST LEVEL of lactic acid production seen in 25 years of research on cyclists. He had advantages over even other world class cyclists. He even shows no ill effects from his cancer since recovery.
So why does this amazing athlete "only" place third at the most recent Tour de France? Maybe because he's getting older than other riders and took a few years off his old training routine.
Female athletes are questioned whether or not they are male, or "not female enough." Other than if they are doping, what remains for male athletes to be questioned or tested on, to be "treated like women?" Is there some advantage to a male athlete secretly being a woman, for men to be sex tested like women are? Should men's chromosomes be tested to prove they are humans, not animals with superior performance like cheetahs or gazelles? (I look forward to human enhancements through genetic engineering, not to cheat at sports, but to improve health.)
Right. Female athletes are a protected class, in that they only have to compete against other female athletes. There's a fastest man and a fastest woman in the world for any speed-based track event, but the first and second fastest people are both men. So if having female champions is a good thing, and it is, there has to be some kind of definition for who qualifies to compete as a woman. Obviously Semenya is a special case, and the protections for female athletes are screwing her over. It's cruel and arguably unfair not to let her run as a woman, but it'd also be unfair to the other female athletes to have to compete with her. It's a sad situation, without a good resolution.
BTW, JFK wasn't particularly aggressive at the Bay of Pigs. He inherited the plan for Eisenhower, and refused to call airstrikes. He was widely reviled for being weak or a Communist-sympathizer for abandoning the invaders.