The Caster Semenya issue. The mentioned NYT article argues that is discriminatory, which it pretty much is. However, there are bigger issues afoot.
I’ve actually followed this a decade prior to the huge blow up a week or so ago when the IAAF ruled that she had to lower her testosterone levels to compete.
What she has is androgen insensitivity syndrome. If you followed House MD back in the day, they did an episode on it.
What happens in this condition is that early in the womb testosterone starts differentiating the zygote into male (or lack of testosterone differentiates it into female). However, “boys” with XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity will start to differentiate toward girl traits because their cells have mutated forms of androgen receptors and can’t pick up on the elevated testosterone levels telling the body to differentiate into a boy.
You can read more about it here on wikipedia though it gets more strange based on the variations. Some of the women have testes and some have ovaries. Some are hermaphroditic. Not actually sure what Semenya has whether partial or complete but it’s pretty clear that she has female genitalia and was raised as a girl (though she has some masculine features compared to women).
Track and Field obviously tests for levels of androgens “outside of normal” for male and female (generally arbitrary ranges that are statistically significant outside of the normale population). So in 2009 or so it set off alarms when Semenya was starting to decrease her times significantly and break records. That’s when they figured out she had the intersex trait (XY) but is phenotypically female.
This is truly a tough case to rule on.
However, the bigger can of worms is not this case but the burgeoning “transgender cases” of men identifying as women and competing with women and breaking women’s records. This is starting to happen all over the world and you typically see the women athletes and all of the people defending Semenya complaining about it.
They know these men are just doing it because beating women is easier, they can set records, and it leaves a bad taste in their mouth, but the double standard is obvious. The really big issue is when there starts to be prize money involved. If you defend Semenya in these case, you can’t complain about men randomly identifying as women competing against women.
I think it’s most likely the IAAF decided to make a stand here on the transgender issue rather than delve into the more controversial cases of where clear biological men are identifying as women and allowed to compete as women. Testosterone was just their way to do it because it will eliminate the other biological men raised as men who try to identify as women in the future.
Funny enough, Dalrock mentioned this topic a bit today as I had written up this post yesterday. Biological males (raised as males) who are winning at women’s races.
