I'm not sure when Coe made these comments - might have been yesterday - but he deserves A LOT of praise for standing firm on this. Some of these quotes are amazing.
“We have two categories in our sport: one is age and one is gender. Age because we think it’s better that Olympic champions don’t run against 14-year-olds in community sports. And gender because if you don’t have a gender separation, no woman would ever win another sporting event.
“We’ve always been guided by the science, and the science is pretty clear: we know that testosterone is the key determinant in performance. I’m really over having any more of these discussions with second-rate sociologists who sit there trying to tell me or the science community that there may be some issue. There isn’t. Testosterone is the key determinant in performance.”
There are no normal women with elevated testosteron. They either have a DSD or a medical condition. No normal woman has T in the male range.
I happen to be eating lunch with two physicians and one is an endocrinologist. She is saying that this is true that there is a "normal" range of testosterone for women and we could implement a policy that says all women competing must be within that range. She indicated that the problem is that approximately 5% of women do not naturally fall within that range and the vast majority of those women are not experiencing a medical condition. Extrapolating that math, there were 465 women that qualified for the US Marathon Oly Trials in 2020. Over 20 of these women on average would fall outside the normal range. What do we do in their case? Tell them that they can't run? Raise the cutoff of normal female testosterone levels? Make them take hormones to reduce their natural testosterone levels in order to compete? She also said that some men without medical issues have naturally low testosterone, but don't have medical conditions. What if a fraction of these men fall in the women's range? Can they compete with the women? Unfortunately there is no simple scientific test yet that doesn't leave some poor group of people left out. Of course, testing for chromosomes is even less effective.
Chromosome testing is the answer.
Using testosteron can cause confusion.
To answer your question:
If an XX women with no medical condition has a high T, she can compete with other females.
can we please go back to 2016 and at least re-award the Olympic 800m medals to the first 3 female/women of the race? Imagine finishing 4th in that race? Didn't anyone stand up for those women? That race was an abomination.
What makes a man a man and a woman a woman is not ambiguous, fluid or arbitrary - at least it shouldn't seem that way when you understand (or are not willfully ignorant of in favor of gender ideology) what "sex" is and the function of sexual characteristics.
Then why is it so hard for you to say what makes "a female a female" rather than what makes "a woman a woman"? This issue would be so much easier if everyone could at least admit that gender is culturally specific with social expectations, while sex is a biological distinction. What it means to be a young woman in China is different than what it means to be a young woman in Saudi Arabia, or Colorado, or Namibia, or France, etc., etc. What fool would deny this?
For better or for worse, the two categories for sport are gender categories, not sex categories. If Seb and everyone else wants to change it to sex categories, he should say so.
TL;DR When talking about gender, use terms like "men" and "women"; when talking about sex, use terms like "male" and "female".
Uhhh because I use the term man/male interchangeably, just like I do for woman/female. I also don't subscribe to the idea what someone a man or woman is just acting out the roles and norms within a given culture. If a Muslim man wears a hijab, is he suddenly a woman? No, that's silly, he would be a man wearing a hijab. It really is that simple.
I think it's the case that all the DSD cases in elite T+F have involved Track athletes from sub saharan Africa. Is it the case that the syndrome , rare anywhere, is notably less rare in that region? I assume that the reason that all the athletes have been runners rather than field eventers is that by and large the talent pool of elite field eventers in that area is much smaller than that of runners, so the probability is that much lower (and for the usual reasons would assume that a biological male has various advantages over a female in jumping and throwing)
The Stache wrote:But it isn't that simple. You're completely unaware of the SRY gene, the androgen receptor gene, and the 5-alpha reductase gene, all of which must be fully functional to generate the phenotype that we recognize as typical male. Read back through the thread for more...
Also, there are XX people who have active SRY genes who are male. This occurs due to chromosomal exchange, or crossover. Can they join the female competitions since they are XX? Of course not.
We all recognize there is a problem. But it is not as simple as you make it out to be.
OK, I stand corrected on the simplicity factor. No problem. I accept that I'm behind the times understanding this issue. As an update, let's say this: no matter what, if you have a Y chromosome, AND/OR you have any other genetic markers that are typically found to produce male traits (such as the development of testes rather than ovaries) then you must run in the Y category.
The crappy part of this would be that women would have to be willing to undergo an invasive medical examination. But at least we could verify that they are women and not benefitted by an unusual/non-typical mutation that results in testes or other male characteristics. As I said before. otherwise there is nothing compelling about the Women's side of the sport. It would end up being just another category. I'd rather the Men's category be the lumped -in category rather than the women's.
can we please go back to 2016 and at least re-award the Olympic 800m medals to the first 3 female/women of the race? Imagine finishing 4th in that race? Didn't anyone stand up for those women? That race was an abomination.
Medals what about prize money? Bishop literally lost out on 1 million + on her Olympic cycle in endorsements it was a total joke how this situation was bungled.
Agree, it looks bad on someone in his position and is likely to weaken his argument. I don’t find myself agreeing with many arguments coming from sociologists, but would never diss them as a group, especially on record.
To be fair, he dissed second rate sociologists, not all sociologists.
Yeah, thanks Pokee. I was just having a little fun with his dismissal of only "second-rate" sociologists, which made me chuckle. A lot of these bio and math-and-science types of people come across as illiterate with respect to social science, but it's also true that social scientists haven't always been the most methodologically and scientifically rigorous group.
can we please go back to 2016 and at least re-award the Olympic 800m medals to the first 3 female/women of the race? Imagine finishing 4th in that race? Didn't anyone stand up for those women? That race was an abomination.
Medals what about prize money? Bishop literally lost out on 1 million + on her Olympic cycle in endorsements it was a total joke how this situation was bungled.
I thought it was a GREAT race, and ideal, since the top three competing against each other shared a similar condition and background. If it had been just Semenya, it would have been much less interesting. DSD athletes have every right to compete in sport and, fair or not, face physical, social, and psychological pressures that are difficult to overcome. Imagine what it means to intersex people around the world to see one of their own on the podium. We can quibble and adjust the rules after the fact, but that 2016 race forced us all to learn about these types of individuals and grapple with the true meaning of gender and biological sex.
To be fair, he dissed second rate sociologists, not all sociologists.
Yeah, thanks Pokee. I was just having a little fun with his dismissal of only "second-rate" sociologists, which made me chuckle. A lot of these bio and math-and-science types of people come across as illiterate with respect to social science, but it's also true that social scientists haven't always been the most methodologically and scientifically rigorous group.
Sociologists won't have a problem with that comment, because every one of them will think, "Hey, I am a first-rate sociologist. Seb is talking about the guy in the office next to me and he's absolutely right. That guy is a bozo."
I once saw a speaker tell an audience of stockbrokers about how stockbrokers did a crummy job, and he got a big ovation at the end, because the audience figured that he was taking about their competitors, not them.
can we please go back to 2016 and at least re-award the Olympic 800m medals to the first 3 female/women of the race? Imagine finishing 4th in that race? Didn't anyone stand up for those women? That race was an abomination.
yes please.
Let's not beat about the bush, it should never have been allowed.
And yet we still have Seyni who narrowly missed a medal in the women’s 200. Much like Mboma, Seyni has zero start or sprint technique. In the final Seyni completely messed up running the curve, and was still able to use strength and accelerate from way behind to nearly get Asher-Smith at the line. These athletes are running off their pure advantage and are beating women with far superior training and technique.
In the steeple, DSD athlete Getachew had set a national record in the 800m before being pulled right before the Olympics. After one year of running in the steeple (a technical event involving hurdling barriers while running full tilt), she set a national record at Worlds, beating another Ethiopian athlete Abebe who was visibly upset - she would have been the first Ethiopian female under 9 minutes.
These athletes are also showing impossible range - Niyonsaba was 3rd in the 800m at Rio, forced to move up, and beat world mile record holder Genzebe Dibaba’s record in the 2000m (Dibiba comes from literally the most accomplished family of women runners ever, the sisters have multiple world and Olympic medals between them. You quite literally could not get better genetics, training, role modelling etc. for the “cis women just need to try harder” crowd.) She is now second all-time in the two mile, and beat 5000, 10, 000 and half marathon world record holder Letensebet Gidey, who has the most perfect running form possible. She won the 5,000m diamond league final over 10,000m World silver medallist Hellen Obiri and was 5th in Tokyo in the 10, 000 an event she had only recently started running. No female athlete has ever shown a range from 800m to 10, 000m. Middle distance is a different discipline and 800m runners are either 400/800 types like Mu or 800/1500 types but no one is an 800/10, 000 runner. Again, note all the women who lost places and records are African women. In contrast, after Sifan Hassan did the unprecedented 15/5/10 triple in the Olympics, it took so much out of her she had to take months off running completely.
Take a look through Jamaican Twitter and see what a nation of sprint obsessed Black people think about DSD athletes beating female athletes and come back and say this is about European women.
XY 5-ARD athletes like Semenya are able to father children as the seminal ducts in the testes produce viable semen, and Semenya seems to have done so with their partner. In notoriously homophobic SA where corrective rape against lesbians is epidemic this supposedly lesbian partnership is publicly tolerated - this is because everyone knows Semenya is not female. In school, Semenya wore a male uniform as has been pointed out. Semenya has also made comments about how weak women are and other disparaging comments; and contrary to claims they lived and were socialized as a girl, they in fact played with boys, dressed as a boy (again, in a homophobic country) at school, wear the male track kit, etc. despite being sold as an advocate for rights, Semenya never speaks up about the many women’s rights issues in SA or in Africa.
In the 5000m we can all see there was a blatant difference in body and running style to the women on the track. While I do feel very bad for teenage Semenya who was only 18/19 when all of this started publicly, has been used by the SA federation and has been the subject of public discussion which I’m sure is traumatic, Semenya is now in their 30s, already has money and success, and yet continues on insisting on the right to run in women’s races. At this point, Semenya is absolutely complicit.