RunRagged wrote:
douglas burke wrote:
Niyonsaba did NOTHING WRONG, She was born that Way, Wouldn't Intersex have a big disadvantage against Men? The same condition she was born with that helps her against Woman would disadvantage her against Men.
That said how do the people Justify The New Zealand Weightlifter? and The 2 Connecticut high schoolers? and the Division 2 400 Hurdler? They were BORN MALE and they let them compete as Women, yet people complain about people who are Born with a Condition.
I can't justify being against someone who was born with a Condition, On the Other Hand The Men Pretending to be Woman are pure Evil, Cheating to the Max, worse than Ped's.
Many of us female people are against girls' and women's sports being opened up to trans-identified males AND to XY DSD athletes with testes, male levels of T and male-typical sensitivity to T like Niyonsaba.* We think neither group has any place in female sports. (*Niyonsaba said several years ago that Niyonsaba has the same kind of DSD as Semenya, hence this description.)
As for Niyonsaba being "born that way," that's true. But it's also true that Niyonsaba was born more than 28 years ago. Since most girls get their periods between 10 and 13, average age 11, Niyonsaba has had a pretty good idea for at least or nearly half of Niyonsaba's life that Niyonsaba is not "just one of the girls" like the female peers Niyonsaba grew up with.
Niyonsaba might not have known the exact nature of Niyonsaba's DSD condition until Niyonsaba started competing in elite athletics and became subject to IAAF/WA rules, but no girl anywhere on earth reaches age 15 or 16 without menstruating or having any breast development and completely fails to take notice that something isn't right. No girl in such a situation thinks nothing of it. Most girls would be worried sick that something is very, very wrong.
By 28, most women not only have been dealing with their periods and menstrual cycles for an average of 17 years, they've also been worrying about unwanted pregnancies for at least a dozen years and fending off male sexual advances and assaults for far longer.
Whilst girls and women are vulnerable to pregnancy and male predation everywhere, the risks are especially great for girls in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the highest rates of teenage pregnancies and child and adolescent childbirth in the world. Girls in sub-Saharan Africa also suffer high rates of child and adolescent rape, forced child marriage, forced marriage by kidnap, and such horrors as "corrective" gang rapes meant to set sporty girls and suspected lesbians straight - and the rapes of young girls committed by men who believe raping a virgin will cure them of HIV and/or full-blown AIDS. As a result, complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death and disability for girls age 12-19 in sub-Saharan Africa, and HIV there is a now disease with "a predominantly female face" that's growing fastest amongst girls and women in their teens and early 20s.
In Niyonsaba's home country of Burundi, most women have already had several pregnancies and given birth at least once by the time they've reached Niyonsaba's age. In any given year, more than 8% of all girls age 12-18 in Burundi will become pregnant. The mean age that Burundian women overall give birth for the first time is 20; by 30 a majority of female Burundians have at least 3 children.
Whilst maternal mortality rates have gone down dramatically in recent years, childbirth in Burundi has always been very dangerous for mothers. In 2010, when Niyonsaba was 17, 500 of every 100,000 girls and women to give birth in Burundi died in the process. That's the kind of thing pre-teen and teen girls tend to pick up on, pay close attention to and fret about.
But athletes like Niyonsaba don't just have a huge leg up in sports over female athletes because they have male levels of testosterone and the myriad physical athletic advantages which males obtain from going through the male mini puberty of infancy and the male puberty of adolescence. Athletes like Niyonsaba - and Semenya, Wambui, Seyni, Chand and now Mboma and Masilingi - have a huge leg up in sports over female athletes also because they do not have female bodies and all the hassles, worries and complications that having a female body entails.
The DSD athletes competing in women's athletics don't have to track their periods; figure out how the daily changes their bodies go through over the course of their menstrual cycles affect their training and performance; deal with issues like menstrual cramps, PMDD, menstruation-related heavy blood loss and possibly anemia, or premenstrual bloat, breast tenderness, insomnia and migraines; worry about pregnancy and deal with the difficult realities and repercussions when they do become pregnant; or contend with any of the myriad gynecological conditions that so many women struggle with. Just as none of them has ever experienced pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, childbirth, childbirth trauma and injuries - or any worries over and fear of those things - none of the XY DSD athletes competing in women's sports has ever had to contend with commonplace "female troubles" like cystitis, vaginal yeast overgrowth, ovarian cysts, recurrent or chronic pelvic pain, pelvic inflammatory disease, uterine fibroids, polyps, "suspicious" breast growths related to estrogen, and the ankle sprains, knee and hip problems and joint issues that occur at certain times of the month due to changing levels of connective tissue laxity.
Nor when they are training and traveling to and from competitions do athletes like Niyonsaba have to put up with the catcalls, come-ons, sexually suggestive comments and other sorts of sexual harassment that female athletes must contend with as a matter of course. It's vey unlikely that when Niyonsaba is out running, a constant stream of trucks and cars full of men pull up alongside Niyonaba shouting "Show us yer tits, luv!" Similarly, when Niyonsaba snoozes or uses the loo on an airplane on the way to a meet, Niyonsaba probably won't wake to find some creepy bloke sticking his hand in Niyonsaba's shirt or crotch, or coming up close behind Niyonsaba in the loo line to cop a feel or give a hump.
Moreover, Niyonsaba and all the other XY athletes competing in women's sports NEVER have had to deal with the indignities that women go through as a matter of course just to obtain prescription birth control and make sure we don't have HPV that could lead to cervical cancer. In the Semenya case, Semenya complained bitterly about the one and only time in Semenya's life that Semenya had a standard gynecological checkup that included examination of the external genitals and an attempt to use a speculum to perform the internal probing commonly called "a pelvic." What Semenya seemed not to be aware of is that girls and women go through these sorts of exams throughout our lives as a matter of course. In many countries, women over 21 get a pelvic including a Pap smear once a year, but those who are sexually active need internal exams earlier - and many girls and women who have gynecological problems or are pregnant or postpartum will get numerous invasive internal exams a year.
TL;DR version: Just because XY persons like Niyonsaba were born with congenital conditions affecting only males that caused their testes to remain undescended and their external genitalia to develop atypically in utero doesn't mean that as full-grown adults they belong in women's sports. Women's and girls' sports are for those of us born with female sex chromosomes, female reproductive organs, female anatomy and female physiology. Women's and girls' sport are not for XY persons with male DSDs who apart from the appearance of their genitals are just as male as other males are. And they're not for males who claim to have special "gender identities" either.
