ESPN: "Caster Semenya listed to run at worlds in Oregon" (5000m)

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

When Semenya was added to the 5000m entry list, she did not replace another runner from South Africa. She replaced the runner next on the world rankings. (The next highest South African is outside of top 100.) So South African runners have less incentive to object, because they have less to lose from including Semenya. The runner next on the rankings has more to lose, and her opinion is more important than those of other South African runners who couldn't have competed at the World Championships anyway.

Two Namibian sprinters with 200m PB in 24s won silver medals at World U-20 as members of their 4x1 team. They would have had no chance to qualify for World U-20, let along winning medals if not for Mboma and Masilingi. So I bet they are quite happy that they had the two sprinters with DSD as their teammates. But the athletes from Poland who finished 4th in that relay might have different feelings. Which opinions should matter more? The two Namibians who piggybacked on Mboma and Masilingi, or the four Poles who didn't get their medals?

The opinions that should matter the most in each case is the ones held by those who have the most to lose by the inclusion. And usually that's not the domestic competitors. The opinions of domestic competitors are important when it comes to deciding whether to include DSD athletes in the domestic competitions. But their voices are not the most important in the international competitions.

RunRagged wrote:

I am confident that close to 100% of adults globally have heard of menstrual periods and that most know that women and girls have organs colloquially referred to as wombs inside the abdomen too.

If most of the world hadn't heard of menstruation, how do you explain all the taboos and shaming rituals around menstruation in various cultures that go back thousands of years? Such as the menstrual huts where girls and women in Nepal are banished and confined to when they have their periods; the view of orthodox Judaism that menstruating girls and women are unclean; and the social customs in South Asia which prohibit girls and women from preparing and serving food, and sometimes even entering kitchens, when they have their periods?

I also bet nearly all adult humans around the world - and the vast majority of children and adolescents too - are fully aware that only members of one of the two human sexes can get pregnant, give birth, breastfeed and die in childbirth.

RunRagged wrote:

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

If you go by what "the majority of women and men" think, then I bet they think the biological characteristic that separates men and women is the external genitalia. That would make all people with DSD discussed here women. What percentage of global adults know about XX and XY chromosomes? I would think less than 50%.

In both Chand v. IAAF and Semenya v. IAAF, CAS explicitly states the following.

Human sex is not binary.

There is no single physical marker that separates men and women.

Who is or is not a woman under any jurisdiction is irrelevant in the case.

IMHO, insisting on the strict binary of human sex makes this issue harder than it should be. You either have to make an argument that anyone who is ineligible to compete in the women's division is a man by defnitition, or an alternative argument that some women are ineligible to compete in the women's division. CAS took the latter position in both cases, because they considered it to be an easier argument to make. IAAF explicitly took the latter approach in the Chand case, while they never mentioned Semenya's sex or gender in the second case.

As mentioned on another thread previously, some legally disabled persons are ineligible in any para category. There are some naturalized athletes who are ineligible to represent their adopted countries in international competitions. So it is not impossible to argue that some women are not eligible to compete in the women's division.

However, I think it makes the argument easier if we simply accept that human sex is NOT binary. Instead of having M and F as only legal categories, we should have M, F and X. Then we can make an argument that people in X either compete in their own division or they compete with people in M, while people in F only compete among themselves.

Human sex is not binary.
There is no single physical marker that separates men and women.
...simply accept that human sex is NOT binary.

Binary means "relating to, composed of, or involving two things" (Oxford).

If human sex is not binary, pray tell what are the names of the additional sexes found in humans beyond male and female?

If human sex is not binary, please name the other kinds of human gametes involved in human reproduction other than sperm and egg. Please also name the kinds of gonads or gonadal tissue that all the additional kinds of human gametes come from.

If human sex is not binary, what are the additional human sex chromosomes beyond X and Y? What are the options for human sex beyond being either SRY-gene positive or SRY-gene negative?

Every once in a while but very rarely, human beings are born with anomalies of the external urogenital anatomy that make it difficult for others to tell their sex based solely on the outward appearance of their "privates." So more thorough exams and investigations are needed.

But just because some individuals can't easily and instantly be slotted into the correct sex category with 100% accuracy solely by taking a glance at their groins doesn't mean there aren't two human sex categories.

It seems to me that you are interpreting the fact that some rare individual human beings aren't easy to place within the human sex binary solely by taking a quick look at the outward appearance of their bodies - particularly at the time of birth - to mean that sex in Homo sapiens cannot be not binary. As though no member of the human race is distinctly male or distinctly female. As though instead of making, or having the potential to make, sperm or eggs, many humans make some other kinds of reproductive germ cells such as speggs, spergs, spovum. As though many of us are a hodgepodge of arbitrary sex organs, primary and secondary characteristics, gonadal tissue of varying types all blended and blurred together - so much so it's impossible to divide the human race into two distinct biological sexes who've evolved to play two totally different and non-overlapping roles in human reproduction.

Your contention is that because some rare persons have atypical urogenital anatomy for their sex, then there are no physical characteristics in humans that can be said to be distinctly or definitively male or female and which distinguish the two human sexes from one another. Thus, there's no reliable way whatsoever to tell the difference between human males and females, and no way on earth to figure out the sex of individuals like Caster Semenya.

I think your contention that human sex is not binary and there's no physical marker or markers that distinguish human males from human females is far less supported by science and logic than my position is. In fact, I think it's pretty much rubbish.

RunRagged wrote:

The WA/IAAF DSD regulations only apply to athletes whose bodies respond to the testosterone their testes make in male-typical ways at least fully or partially. So yes, the athletes named above have to be fully or somewhat sensitive to the large amounts of testosterone that their testes produce. If they weren't, they wouldn't be subject to the WA rules regarding participation of XY DSD athletes with testes and male levels of T competing in women's events.

Most DSDs, whether they be the kinds of DSDs that occur in people with testes or ovaries, do not impair or affect individuals' ability to physically respond to and utilize androgens.

People with Semenya's DSD, XY 5-ARD, for example, have normal healthy male-typical response to the male amounts of T that their testes pump out. Their only issue is that they can't convert T into its more potent form, DHT. During gestation in utero, DHT is needed for the penis and prostate to develop properly. As a result, babies with XY 5-ARD are usually born with small and underdeveloped prostates, and with penises that are minuscule and slightly malformed (hypospadias) or penises that are missing entirely. But because they respond to T in the way other males do, persons with XY 5-ARD go through and benefit from the testosterone-fueled male mini puberty of infancy and male puberty of adolescence just as other males do. In the process, they obtain all the physical features and advantages that allow males to vastly outperform females in nearly all sports.

The only XY DSDs that impair individuals' response to androgens are the ones you named - Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) and Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), both of which are DSDs that only occur in individuals with male gonads, testes, male sex chromosomes, male genetics and male ARs.

In XY people with CAIS the male androgen receptors don't work at all. So persons with CAIS can't use the the natural testosterone that their testes make in massive amounts in the ways males customarily do. Instead, the testosterone their testes make gets converted into estradiol through the process known as aromatization. All males normally aromatize some of the testosterone the testes make into estradiol, but genetic males with CAIS aromatize all the testosterone their testes make.

In XY people with PAIS - partial androgen insensitivity - the male androgen response is only partly reduced. So whilst XY athletes with PAIS like Dutee Chand don't benefit from the testosterone that their testes make to the same extent that athletes like Semenya benefit from the testosterone that their testes pump out, they still benefit from it enough to have considerable unfair advantages over female athletes in sports.

PAIS athletes like Chand might not have gone through male puberty of infancy and adolescence in exactly the same way as athletes like Semenya did, but they went through male puberty all the same. In the process, they acquired most of the physical features typical of males rather than of females even though the appearance of their external genitals might look ambiguous or more like female genitals than male ones - at least at first and far-off glance. Apart from the configuration of their urogenital anatomy, their overall physiology, anatomy, genetics and androgen response are male - thus they differ from females in thousands of ways.

Females can and often do have the same mutations and other anomalies that cause AIS in males - in fact, the inherited mutations that have been identified as causes of AIS are on the X chromosome. So when AIS is caused by inherited mutations (as opposed to de novo mutations), it's always passed down from mothers. But because female development in utero and during infancy, childhood and puberty of adolescence is not dependent on androgens, when XX females have impaired or absent androgen sensitivity, it doesn't result in a DSD.

Most XX females with diminished androgen response that in XY males cause DSDs - CAIS or PAIS - only learn about their condition after their XY children or siblings are diagnosed with AIS.

RunRagged wrote:

I would base eligibility for female sports competition on more specific criteria than having XX chromosomes. I'd base it on not having the SRY gene. The SRY gene is what determines whether a human will develop as male or female.

The SRY gene is normally on the Y chromosome in males, most of whom are are XY but some of whom are XXY, XYY and so on.

However, every once in a while the SRY gene goes missing from the Y, so you end up with XY people who are female. And every once in a while the SRY gene somehow ends up on an X chromosome, so you end up with XX individuals who are male.

I wouldn't confine eligibility for women's competition solely to athletes with two X sex chromosomes because that would be unfair to people with female DSDs such as Turner syndrome, who are 45,X0, and with X trisomy, who are 47,XXX.

I also wouldn't confine women's competition solely to athletes with X sex chromosomes alone coz that would make millions of women who have given birth to or been pregnant with male offspring ineligible too.

During pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into women's bloodstreams, then travel to various parts of women's bodies where they remain for decades - often for life. As a result, women who are mothers of sons like me, or who have been pregnant with male fetuses, typically have XY cells containing the DNA of our male offspring scattered around our bodies. So when we get our sex chromosomes tested, we sometimes test as being XX/XY.

This happened with me when a tumor I had removed from my inside one of my eye orbits was biopsied. Somehow cells with my son's DNA ended up in a part of my body very far from my uterus - and these cells were found more than 20 years after he was born.