Caster Semenya, the South African two‑time Olympic 800m champion, said on Sunday that the reinstatement by the International Olympic Committee of sex verification tests for the 2028 Los Angeles Games was “a disrespect for women”.
The hyperandrogenic former athlete also expressed disappointment that the measure was taken under the leadership of the new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe.
“For me, personally, for her being a woman coming from Africa, knowing how African women or women in the global south are affected by that, of course, it causes harm,” Semenya said during a Cape Town press conference on the sidelines of a sporting competition.
On Thursday the IOC reinstated genetic testing to determine female sex, starting with the 2028 Olympics, in effect banning transgender athletes and a large number of intersex athletes from women’s sports.
The IOC used chromosomal sex testing between 1968 and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, before abandoning it in 1999 under pressure from the scientific community, which questioned its effectiveness, and from its own athletes’ commission.
“It came as a failure. And that’s why it was dropped,” Semenya said in Cape Town.
1 in every 10,000 births has an ambiguous sex. If we forced every human on earth to undergo this a lot of people would unexpectedly find out their chromosomes didn’t dictate their sex their genitalia.
It’s a fishing expedition. They’ll always find something if they look because human genetics are messy as fuck. How many of us are walking around with an undiagnosed something? We all have a weird unknown thing going on. Mosic condition? Mothers with XY chromosomes? One of the -tisms? And believe you me, they’ll make sure to test the fuck out of the ladies who’re wining too much or are from countries without the resources to bribe or refuse. This isn’t about trans people or fairness. It’s fucking political bullying. But we’ll all yell science and talking points at each other while the real reason whooshes right over all of our heads.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen several debates wherein a trans person brings up how trans discrimination will affect intersex people.
Almost every time, that notion was dismissed entirely.
I just hope that we can realize how connected all of our rights are, but I get the feeling that pundits will spin this to blame trans women.
This was expected due to the debate around trans women affecting intersex women. This is a return to norms, ostracizing intersex women and shaming them as “not real women”.
It doesn’t make a difference so they should run all athletes together regardless of sex.
/s
Do they have to have respect in the first place before they can disrespect?
The devil is in the details. Much like with drug testing, its not easy and there are always people trying to beat the testing system.
The solution is not “what the athlete/country says”. They are testing for sex, not gender.
But you also can’t let the test be too simplistic, otherwise some people might be unfairly excluded.
But given the complexity of the biology and medical testing in general, it is unreasonable to expect that no-one will be unfairly excluded, or unfairly included.
The question is, do you want to bias it to let people though unfairly, or exclude people unfairly?
Ultimately they need to do what is most fair to most compeditors and credible for the sport.
Oh ffs, stop telling me about their sexy bits. Just let everyone do their thing, let us watch it, and let some awesome data visualization nerds pull crazy stats from the results.
You want to bring science into it, then do it, perverts. ‘Who jumped over the highest stick’ is just caveman logic for who generated the most acceleration in a vertical vector per kilogram (or awesome nerds, correct my caveman misunderstanding). Crunch the numbers, dammit, let’s see who really gets the gold!
So how are they going to verify an individuals sex?
It literally says right there in the text of the post.
Genetic testing.
Yes, but what specifically are they testing for? Y chromosome, 2 XX chromosomes, or SRY gene. Potentially different results for each option
Afaik the Olympics test hormone levels and use that. Edit: Oh wow they started doing genetic testing again.
Genes are a not reliable test because among the athletic population, 7 per 1,000 women have male genes.
There’s a fantastic article written by Dr Jordan Feigenbaum here which covers the history of methods used and cites scientific studies on the topic.
Well if 7 out of 1000 specifically have the sry gene they probably won’t get to compete.
SRY gene.
