Caster Semenya & Bio Males in Women's Sport

submitted by dandeliondynasty from self.GenderCritical

Someone told me recently that trans women should be allowed in women’s sport because “Look at Caster Semenya.”

Caster Semenya is a South African middle distance runner and Olympic gold medalist. A few years into her career, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and high testosterone. She has been (rightly, in my opinion) excluded from many races unless she takes testosterone-reducing medication.

You can’t use her to argue the case of biological males. She should meet the testosterone benchmark while men should be excluded entirely from women’s events because:

1) Semenya built her career in good faith, believing herself to be a biological woman (she has female genitalia and a female body). 2) The testosterone rule seems sufficient to placate her competitors. Her 5’10” 154lb frame is within reason for a woman. By contrast some of these hulking 6ft, 200lb biological men have an obvious advantage and in contact sports could seriously injure women.

One thing that bothers me is that Caster was treated much more disrespectfully and invasively than any of these biological males ID'ing as women have been. More than once competition staff (sometimes not even medical staff) demanded to see her genitals before she could compete. She did not consent to the sex test that revealed her condition- her own coach lied told her the test was for something else. A lot of complaints from officials and competitors were not just “she may be intersex because she’s unusually fast” but racially-tinged insults like “she’s so ugly and looks like an ape so she must be a man.”

I try not to perceive discrimination in everything but doesn’t it feel weird that a black lesbian’s dignity was so disregarded in the name of protecting the fairness of women’s sports, then within a decade when it’s a bunch of men’s egos at risk - you don't even need a sex/genital check, you already know it's the wrong answer - women athletes can go to hell?

Sources: Wikipedia, my memory from her controversies 10 years ago

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[–]NecessaryScene1 24 insightful - 1 fun24 insightful - 0 fun25 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Semenya built her career in good faith, believing herself to be a biological woman (she has female genitalia and a female body).

Good faith is highly debatable. There's very little supporting evidence, and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Semenya certainly doesn't have a "female body", and that would have been obvious since puberty. And hence the restriction. Semenya's DSD interferes with genital development, not the rest of the body.

Semenya may have been believed to be female at a very young age, but it seems likely that they were enrolled onto an athletics program because the DSD condition had become known - it appears that African countries were deliberately trying to find XY DSD individuals who had been declared female at birth to take advantage of the recently relaxed sex testing rules in athletics. This tactic was more easily exploitable by poorer countries where DSDs were less likely to be detected at birth, so there was a greater chance of male DSDs being wrongly registered as female, and hence eligable for women's sport.

And that's how you ended up with 3 DSD males on the women's 800m podium at Rio. And the IAAF realised they had a problem.

More than once competition staff (sometimes not even medical staff) demanded to see her genitals before she could compete.

I might be wrong, but I thought dignity was out of the window for most athletes at top level, when it comes to urine tests for doping, for example.

But that response is understandable. Semenya does not have a female body. It is very typically male, apart from (apparently) genitals. This really isn't a case of a "butch" female - Semenya is viralised to typical male physique by the presence of internal testes. Being sceptical of Semenya's claims to be female makes just as much sense as being sceptical of Charlotte Clymer's or Danielle Muscato's. The genitals may be naturally undeveloped, rather than surgically removed, but Semenya is basically as much of a TiM as them. (Would you accept that Danielle Muscato was a woman rather than a TiM if he'd been recorded as female at birth and raised "as a girl" for some years before puberty? What would you do if Clymer insisted on taking part in your sports event?)

Previously sex tests were routine, and a simple mouth swab, which would work for 99%+ of people. They would have picked up Semenya as having male chromosomes (possibly unlike a genital check), and that could have been investigated more humanely. But I understand they had been ruled out, which possibly led to having to go straight to less dignified methods.

Her 5’10” 154lb frame is within reason for a woman. By contrast some of these hulking 6ft, 200lb biological men have an obvious advantage and in contact sports could seriously injure women.

It may be "within reason" for a woman, but 5’10” 154lb is average male. And a fit male of any weight easily outperforms a fit female of the same weight. It is not effective to only rule out males on weight grounds and assume that equal weights makes it fair. (Go look at any sort of sports like weightlifting that have weight classifications to see how vast the same-weight male/female difference is).

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Semenya may have been believed to be female at a very young age, but it seems likely that they were enrolled onto an athletics program because the DSD condition had become known - it appears that African countries were deliberately trying to find XY DSD individuals who had been declared female at birth to take advantage of the recently relaxed sex testing rules in athletics. This tactic was more easily exploitable by poorer countries where DSDs were less likely to be detected at birth, so there was a greater chance of male DSDs being wrongly registered as female, and hence eligable for women's sport.

I've read this a couple times - do you remember where you heard it? I'd love a source for this for future arguments.

[–]MarkTwainiac 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The idea that some African countries were looking for males with DSDs seems to come partly from the unusually high number of males with DSDs from African countries competing in female athletics. A leading physician for the IAAF reported several years ago that in female elite level track and field, but particularly running, males with DSDs are represented at 140 times the rate they can be found in the general population, with the majority of these athletes coming from Africa - although some come from other poor countries too.

Kenya, whose organized athletics programs especially for the country's world-class runners are famous for doping violations, is a good example. Since Semenya lost the case against the IAAF/WA last year and new rules were put in place regarding the testosterone levels of DSD males in female competition, at least six Kenyan national team runners in the female division - in addition to 2016 Olympic medalist Margaret Wambui, who won the bronze in the women's 800m behind fellow male DSD athletes Francine Niyonsaba and Caster Semenya - have been withdrawn from competition or kicked off the team because they don't meet the new criteria the IAAF/WA has now put in place.

Since DSDs as a general category are extremely rare - and male DSDs that affect the development of the external male genitals in utero to the point that they might appear atypical or more female than male at birth are even rarer - it's highly unlikely that a single national team of a country of 47 million would have so many DSD athletes on the national team all at the very same time had not they been actively recruited. Finding such athletes wouldn't require medical knowledge or "genital checks" either: scouts would only have to put out the word for fast supposedly female runners who have never menstruated.

Very often, the athletes who appear might have been recruited in such schemes are/were taken advantage of and exploited by cynical athletics powers-that-be and political leaders in their countries for their own larger aims.

Though athletes from poor rural parts of Africa like Kenya's Maximilia Imali and South Africa's Semenya might have grown up without knowledge of DSDs, the medical establishment and athletics honchos in Kenya and South Africa and elsewhere on the continent and throughout the world are as well acquainted with, and thoroughly versed in, DSDs as physicians anywhere else on earth. (Some of the best DSD knowledge information comes from poorer countries of the world like the DR, in fact.) What's more, many of those in positions of power in Africa in recent memory are men who were educated in the US, Canada, the UK and Europe - where they learned all about post-modernism, critical theory and queer theory while continuing their commitment to anti-colonialist African revolutionary politics.

Not surprisingly, it seems to have occurred to a good number of these men now in positions of power in various places in Africa that all the faddish ideas coursing through Western academia since the 1980s - such as "sex is a spectrum," "all boundaries are bad," "only white people can be racist," and "all the world was a paradise of peace and equality with no slavery, abuse, hierarchies, war or other problems" until evil whitey from Europe came along and introduced every imaginable horror and imposed the sex binary" - could be used as a way to undermine Euroamerican hegemony and many of the fundamental principles on which Western culture, colonialism, international relations and international sport are based.

I'm pretty sure that many of the powerful guys in Africa who cleverly engineered the incursion of male DSD athletes like Semenya, Wambui, Niyonsaba and Imali into female sports are laughing their asses off at what's happened. Cuz their plans seem to have worked out just as they wanted. And I bet they chortle particularly loudly every time they hear or see TRAs and the woke from North America, continental Europe and the UK make the idiotic and incredibly racist claim that the sex binary is a colonialist, white supremacist idea that the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East had absolutely no clue about until they learnt it from the white Europeans who started showing up in their lands and colonizing them 500 years ago. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the preposterous lie that the sex binary is European, colonialist and white supremacist and therefore came as total news to Africans and all the rest of the world might've been cooked up one night years ago when members of the ANC with an especially good sense of humor were having a boys night out.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A leading physician for the IAAF reported several years ago that in female elite level track and field, but particularly running, males with DSDs are represented at 140 times the rate they can be found in the general population, with the majority of these athletes coming from Africa - although some come from other poor countries too.

Kenya, whose organized athletics programs especially for the country's world-class runners are famous for doping violations, is a good example. Since Semenya lost the case against the IAAF/WA last year and new rules were put in place regarding the testosterone levels of DSD males in female competition, at least six Kenyan national team runners in the female division - in addition to 2016 Olympic medalist Margaret Wambui, who won the bronze in the women's 800m behind fellow male DSD athletes Francine Niyonsaba and Caster Semenya - have been withdrawn from competition or kicked off the team because they don't meet the new criteria the IAAF/WA has now put in place.

Thanks for this! I knew the last Olympics 800m had all male DSD on the podium, but I hadn't heard Kenya lost six off the female division or the bit about the representation rate.

[–]Sun_bear 19 insightful - 1 fun19 insightful - 0 fun20 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I don't know if this link is going to work, but hopefully, here's a picture of Caster during his school days: https://images.app.goo.gl/STnmJS6PQa6w8Yxb7

If the link doesn't work try googling his name and 'school'. You should be able to find a few pictures of him at school, in all of them he will be wearing a boys school uniform.

Caster Semenya is a man. He's a man who was raised as a man and identifies as a man. A previous GC poster had found evidence that he openly lives as a man in South Africa. He's making a mockery of women's sports.

I know that when I first heard the case the information given was highly misleading and it made you feel very sorry for Caster. The press made it out like questioning the sex of this athlete was coming from a place of racism, that Caster was being picked on because he was exceptionally talented but also very ugly (for a woman). Even now the press tries to obscure the fact he has XY chromosomes, not female reproductive system whatsoever and testes. But even if an athlete with DSD believed themselves to be female as a child, by the age of 16 they would have visited a doctor to find out why they hadn't started their periods or developed breasts. There is no 'good faith' in the case of DSD athletes, there is only cheating.

[–]ZeWombat 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This is a post from our early days ... https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/55yu/is_castor_semenya_a_gender_nonconforming_woman_or/

Much new info has been learned about this case.

[–]GConly 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Semenya built her career in good faith, believing herself to be a biological woman (she has female genitalia and a female

Looking at Semenya this seems unlikely. Semenya has 5ard deficiency, and internal testes. For a start most males with this condition identify as male before puberty, appearing as 'tomboys' to others. Any pretence at appearing female gets dumped at around puberty if it's possible.

Semenya has never had a period ( no ovaries no uterus) and would quite obviously had his voice break and developed male muscles and height. Africa is not so free of modern medicine that his family wouldn't have noticed something was up.

If you watch a video of him it's quite obvious that's a guy. He is just a man whose penis didn't grow.

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Caster Semenya is a South African middle distance runner and Olympic gold medalist. A few years into her career, she was >discovered to have XY chromosomes and high testosterone.

Sorry OP, your post is full of information that is either somewhat or largely misleading or entirely untrue.

Semenya was fully checked out medically by South African sports officials before they put Semenya on the world stage for the first time by introducing Semenya at the 2009 world junior championships in Germany as SA's "golden girl."

Prior to the Semenya's trip to Germany in 2009, SA medical authorities and academics, including Nelson Mandela's personal physician, told SA sports authorities that Semenya could not compete in female athletics because Semenya is a male with a male DSD (and a male-only DSD, 5-ARD, that in 2009 was well understood worldwide, at that). But SA sports officials, led by the powerful head of Sports South Africa (who would later lose his job in disgrace due to corruption), balked and said they were going to have Semenya compete in women's sports anyway as a way of "sticking it to the man" by using Semenya to challenge the hegemony of the Eurocentric IAAF (now World Athletics) and the racist, colonialist standards imposed by the "Global North" onto the "Global South." If the IAAF/WA were to challenge Semenya's eligibility based on questions about Semenya's sex, SA Athletics promised to paint the IAAF/WA - and anyone else who raised questions about Semenya's sex - as racist, sexist, colonialists intent on picking on a "strong black African woman" for failing to live up to racist, Eurocentric standards of femininity based on white women's looks. Which is exactly what they did.

Before putting Semenya on the world stage as a supposedly female athlete, SA authorities informed the IAAF that if they raised any questions, SA would wage an international PR campaign about "human rights" against the IAAF that they promised would be much bigger and even more damaging to the IAAF and international sports bodies than the campaign SA had previously waged against international sports authorities about the "human right" of "blade runner" Oscar Pistorius to run in regular competition with the space-age prosthetics that gave him a demonstrable edge. Which is exactly what happened.

The whole Semenya saga is an intentional fraud, a long con. And posting the info in the OP here as though it were factual is unfortunately just helping to perpetuate the con and to gaslight all those taken in by the fraud.

Semenya built her career in good faith, believing herself to be a biological woman (she has female genitalia and a female body)

Please OP read up on males with 5-ARD. It's an extensively studied and well-understood condition and info about it is not hard to find.

Males with 5-ARD have malformed external male genitalia, not female genitalia. Males with 5-ARD go through normal male puberty and have male bodies that are just like other male bodies except for the appearance and location of their male genitalia, and the fact that many 5-ARD males have very little facial and body hair.

Semenya said in the summer of 2019 that everyone "always knew that there was something different about me" from early childhood. Semenya says his own younger sister as a toddler thought Semenya was male; Semenya's dad has always been vague about what sex Semenya is. Tellingly, in a society where sex segregation, male supremacy, homophobia, and horrid injustices, violence and abuse against girls and women - and especially lesbians - are very much ingrained, Semenya always wore the boys uniform to school, and was allowed to play football (soccer) with the boys - privileges not granted to any other female child when/where Semenya grew up, or anywhere else in SA for that matter. Semenya in many interviews has said that growing up Semenya's was always with the boys and wanted nothing to do with girls, because Semenya considers female people to be "soft, weak and boring."

The head of Semenya's HS told the New Yorker in 2009 that he didn't realize Semenya considered himself to be a girl until Semenya's final year, and Semenya's first running coach from this time used male pronouns when speaking of Semenya. Semenya's first legal document showing a sex marker was a SA birth certificate that SA authorities issued in 2007 - after 16 year-old Semenya had been scouted and identified by national powers as an athlete who could a) win in women's running internationally and b) be used to challenge the longstanding authority of Eurocentric international sporting bodies.

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I try not to perceive discrimination in everything but doesn’t it feel weird that a black lesbian’s dignity was so disregarded in >the name of protecting the fairness of women’s sports

It's bad enough that Semenya is being used as a model of "strong black African womanhood," but it's doubly insulting when Semenya is made out to be a representative of black lesbians.

Semenya loves telling of how Semenya's wife, Violet Raseboya, thought Semenya was a male when they first met; to this day, Raseboya apparently does not consider herself a lesbian.

Prior to and during their wedding, Semenya enthusiastically partook of all the traditional male roles in his and Raseboya's tribes' betrothal and marriage customs. Semenya asked Raseboya's male elders for permission to marry Raseboya, and even paid a "bride price" for Raseboya. Raseboya did not reciprocate in doing the same for Semenya.

I follow Semenya closely and try to listen to/read every public statement Semenya makes. Semenya has gotten lots of attention and awards for being a woman, and brags about being a woman all the time, but Semenya's politics are not focused on either women's rights or lesbians rights.

Semenya speaks only about "human rights" - and Semenya's main focus seems to be advancing the "scrotum rights" of males with DSDs - as well as with trans identities - to participate in women's sports and to dicktate to the world that the only thing that makes a person a woman is identifying as one and having identity documents that say "female."

Perhaps I've missed something, but when it comes to lesbian rights and matters pertaining to lesbians and homosexuals more generally, Semenya is silent - and always has been. SA long has had a huge problem with the custom of black men individually and in gangs subjecting "sporty girls" and those perceived to be lesbians or bi to "corrective rape." The constant harassment, discrimination and violence that black lesbians - particularly ones seen as butch, masculine and "mannish" - routinely endure in SA Semenya has been in the headlines for as long as Semenya has been a public figure. To my knowledge Semenya has never uttered a word about this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/05/south-africa-lesbians-human-rights

[–]ZeWombat 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I follow Semenya closely and try to listen to/read every public statement Semenya makes.

Thank you for your detailed, and easily understood explanations of everything Semenya. I really appreciate you taking the time to address each of the points made by OP.

Has there ever been any real discussion of stripping the medals from Semenya?

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you for the thank you. I feel like a broken record when it comes to Semenya, an individual I really don't wish to pick on. But so much disinformation about Semenya is out there, and it really sticks in my craw when it gets presented on feminist sites as the gospel truth. Aargh.

I keep correcting the record because I think it's really important to the get the truth out due to the shameful way the Semenya saga - and Semenya's legal team and Semenya himself - have been allowed to get away with telling big fat lies for 11 years now in their efforts to destroy female sports as a category with coherent, clear borders.

The lies Semenya and team Semenya have told go far beyond Semenya's own case. People constantly say that Semenya and the incursion of TIMs into female sports are two entirely separate issues, but I think that's a grave error. All the arguments that Semenya and Semenya's legal team have used in Semenya's long legal battle against the IAAF - and in the court of public opinion more generally - are precisely the same arguments TRAs like Ragehell McKinnon, CeCe Telfer and the CT boys use to make the case that any boy or man who claims to "identify as a girl/woman" automatically has a "human right" to participate in female sports.

The TIM editor of Outsports in the USA has even gone so far as to claim that requiring Semenya and any other males - be they DSD males or trans-identified males - to lower their testosterone somewhat in order to compete in female sports as the IAAF, IOC, NCAA and other sports governing bodies currently do is nothing less than new form of "female genital mutilation" meant to oppress, discriminate and penalize "women with testicles." I kid you not.

What's more, I am incandescent with anger about and how Semenya and Semenya's reps have always responded when they been pressed for the truth during the whole fraud: for 11 years now, they've fobbed off questions by pretending to be coy, bashful and demure, taking the position that inquiring about Semenya's physiology is invasive, demeaning, disrespectful, sensationalistic, sexist, misogynistic, racist, prying and very bad manners. They say Semenya's sex is nobody's business but Semenya's, and only "genital fetishists" and racist sexists would be curious about what's really going on.

I also think it's important to speak the truth about Semenya because of the injustice done to all the female runners forced to compete against Semenya since 2009. And because of the way so many adults of all races with eyeballs over the past 11 years have been shamed and castigated as sexist white supremacists with colonial mindsets intent on "policing black women's bodies" simply for recognizing that Semenya is a fucking male! FFS, saying Semenya is typical of what "strong black African women" look like is so insulting to black women from Africa and everywhere else on the planet. All the black women I know regardless of country of origin and residence are outraged by Semenya being held up as a model of "black womanhood" because it insults their intelligence and basic powers of perception as much as it does everyone else's.

Finally, I try to get the facts about Semenya out because it really bugs me that Semenya, a male with a male-only DSD, fully functioning testes and no female reproductive organs, has the audacity to serve as the public face and spokesperson for a South African brand of menstrual cups:

http://www.lionessesofafrica.com/blog/startup-story-of-shamila-ramjawan

https://twitter.com/caster800m/status/829011501012893696

Has there ever been any real discussion of stripping the medals from Semenya?

If you mean from sports governing bodies and officials, not that I know of.

[–]ZeWombat 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

God Damn You!! 🙂 I thought I was pissed off about them claiming that I (a female person post-hysterectomy) am exactly the same as a trans woman. Now you tell me that Semenya is the spokesman for menstrual cups. I'm tempted to respond to the twitter announcement and ask if he can personally recommend the product.

Please don't let yourself feel like a broken record. Semenya is, for many people, the foot wedged in the door for the rest of the TIMs in women's sport. This info needs to get out there. Even among us GC ones, there's still lots of misinformation.

[–]Anna_Nym 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I think they're separate issues. Semenya is not the first athlete with a DSD to have been sex tested and treated poorly. The history of sex testing is pretty horrible, and it sounds like it was fairly degrading for female athletes. That's why sex testing was stopped in... I think it was the 90s. However, as we see with Semenya and the other XY, androgen-sensitive women, that doesn't work either. Sex testing needs to be done in some way.

Semenya did start her career in good faith, but I don't think it's true to say she has a female body. She is both androgen-sensitive and XY. She is biologically male and knew that when she raised her challenge. Some people with 5-ARD (her DSD) can produce viable sperm in their testes and father children with medical intervention.

I know the IAAF and IOC have tried to put in reforms to create a more dignified and humane process for identifying athletes with DSDs. I don't know what those reforms are. Unfortunately, I think athletes with DSDs need to be identified at the junior level in order to have a humane process. It seems like the local federations should be able to do this.

I don't think Semenya's treatment can be compared to transwomen, though. As you acknowledged, there is no need to sex test transwomen because they're open about being biologically male. But they do need to be monitored for compliance with T-reduction. Unfortunately, I think it's looking like the initial claims that T-reduction would be sufficient to remove their biological advantage were false. It is infuriating that quality studies weren't done BEFORE changing eligibility standards.

(I personally wonder whether Semenya would still identify as a woman if she grew up in the US or if she didn't have such a financial incentive to preserve her eligibility to compete in the women's category. But we'll never know.)

[–]GConly 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Semenya did start her career in good faith

He always presented as male even as a kid

As soon as Semenya hit puberty it would have become obvious this wasn't a female. The total lack of menstruation, height, muscles and broken voice would have even a totally uneducated rural farmer heading to a doctor.

She is both androgen-sensitive and XY.

No, he is not androgen insensitive. He has a 5 alpha reductase deficiency. He reacts normally to normal testosterone, he just doesn't make the type of testosterone needed to develop a penis, drop his balls, grow facial hair or go bald.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency

He'll have all the other benefits/effects of normal testosterone.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The history of sex testing is pretty horrible, and it sounds like it was fairly degrading for female athletes. That's why sex testing was stopped in... >I think it was the 90s. However, as we see with Semenya and the other XY, androgen-sensitive women, that doesn't work either. Sex testing >needs to be done in some way.

The buccal swab testing introduced in the 1960s was not "pretty horrible" or "degrading for female athletes" across the board. Having a cotton swab inserted into one's mouth and swiped the inside of the cheeks is takes a few seconds, involves no pain, and in no way can be characterized as "horrible" or "degrading" or otherwise onerous. I personally know many female athletes who had these tests in the 60s, 70s and 80s - none felt degraded by them at all.

Because I come from a family with some serious genetic conditions, I have also had my own DNA tested both through buccal swabs and blood tests on several occasions; and when I was pregnant in the 1990s I underwent the invasive procedure of CVS so fetal DNA testing could be done. So I can personally attest that there's nothing inherently "horrible" or "degrading" about getting DNA or sex chromosomes tested even when it involves being on a gynecologist's table with a speculum inserted up the vagina and a device inserted through the cervix to get a piece of placental tissue indicative of embryonic sex.

The DNA swab testing of athletes competing in female sports was discontinued entirely at the behest of athletes competing in the female division who were discovered to have XY sex chromosomes. They were the ones who loudly objected to the testing, not athletes who were found to have only X chromosomes. AFAIK, there was no outcry whatsoever about routine buccal swab DNA testing from XX female athletes - and I bet if a poll were conducted today, most elite level female athletes past and present would have no problem bringing back mandatory sex chromosome testing by buccal swab or similar simple means.

I know the IAAF and IOC have tried to put in reforms to create a more dignified and humane process for identifying athletes with DSDs.

The IAAF and the IOC have actually bent over backwards to accommodate male athletes with DSDs. These male-dominated sports bodies came up with policies allowing men with certain developmental disorders that affect their genitals to compete in female sports without ever consulting women! If women had been consulted, there would have been a huge hue and cry. Women would've pointed out that males who have atypical-looking or missing genitals due to birth defects or injuries are not women! They are men with medical anomalies or problems. Only men would say that a man with a small or missing penis or undescended testes is a woman.

If you believe Semenya has been treated in a manner that undignified, inhumane and unfair, the blame for that can't really be put on the IAAF or IOC. Very intelligent, conniving South African sports authorities and politicians put Semenya on the world stage as a female when they all knew full well that Semenya was a male with DSD and that Semenya's sex would be questioned. And when other powers in SA - including Nelson Mandela's personal physician - told them not to do it, it's wrong. The SA sports authorities and politicians who went ahead with the cheat did it to get glory on the athletics field - and, just as important, to score points in the much larger ideological and PR wars in the arenas of geopolitics and ideas being waged by "the Global South" against "the Global North" in the post-colonial and post-apartheid era.

Caster Semenya might have been a rube in the beginning when initially roped into the fraud back as a teenager, but since at least August 2009 when Semenya was fully checked out medically in South Africa both Semenya and South African officials have known full well exactly what Semenya's sex and DSD are. For 11 years now Semenya has decided to go along with the con because it's in Semenya's own selfish interest to do so. All the while, Semenya has actively participated in perpetuating the fraud - and gaslighting the world - by constantly claiming not just to be a woman, but to be to a woman perpetually and unfairly victimized by racist beauty standards and white supremacist, Eurocentric notions of what female bodies look like. All along, Semenya has shown not one ounce of concern for all the women Semenya has cheated against, nor any sympathy for those female athletes of all colors who've been pilloried as racist and sexist by daring to point out what everyone can see: Semenya is male.

One of the first DSDs athletes caught out by the buccal swab DNA testing was women's World Cup alpine skiing champion Erik/a Schinegger. Shortly before the 1968 Winter Olympics - in which Schinegger was expected to win the gold in every race entered - Schinegger was found to be a male with a a DSD. The discovery was a shock to Schinegger, and it ended his competitive skiing career. But he did not experience the simple measure by which he found out his sex - a cheek swab, after all - as horrible, degrading, undignified or inhumane the way you're characterizing it.

Schinegger did the right thing when he found out about his DSD. Semenya did not.

https://youtu.be/8mgQ97TKxc8

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I personally wonder whether Semenya would still identify as a woman if she grew up in the US or if she didn't have such a financial incentive to >preserve her eligibility to compete in the women's category. But we'll never know.

Researchers say that globally the vast majority of males with 5-ARD - 85% - who were mistakenly thought to be female at birth choose to accept and embrace the fact that they are males once they reach/go through from puberty. In countries where females have limited rights and freedoms, the percentage is often closer to 100%.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One thing that bothers me is that Caster was treated much more disrespectfully and invasively than any of these biological >males ID'ing as women have been. More than once competition staff (sometimes not even medical staff) demanded to see >her genitals before she could compete. She did not consent to the sex test that revealed her condition- her own coach lied >told her the test was for something else.

This is just repeating the party line - and lies - put out by SA authorities that the mainstream media has willingly repeated and colluded with for a decade now.

In 2009, in South Africa, 18 year-old Semenya was sent to a female gynecologist for a standard workup - which included blood tests, a standard internal pelvic exam that all females get sooner or later, and some sort of scans like ultrasounds to determine what internal organs Semenya had and didn't have. Once it was clear that Semenya was a male with a DSD, consultants with specialties in DSDs were probably brought in to review the lab results showing Semenya's sex chromosomes, testosterone levels and 5-ARD (a genetically-determined enzyme deficiency) as well as the scans and the records of Semenya's physical exam(s). DSD consultants might have physically examined Semenya too - though from what was revealed of Semenya's testimony in the CAS decision released in June 2019, to this day Semenya speaks and complains solely about the one pelvic exam done by the SA female gynecologist initially, suggesting that this might be the only one Semenya has ever gotten.

But there was no single "sex test that revealed her condition" the way the you are making it appear, OP. Speaking as though there is something known as "the sex test" for persons with DSDs just buys into the misuse of language that team Semenya long has employed - and the TRAs are now employing - to spread misinformation and sow confusion. Suggesting that there is such as thing as "the sex test" that people with DSDs go through also does a disservice to persons with DSDs and the specialist medical practitioners who diagnose and treat them.

From the CAS decision, Semenya appears to have experienced getting a standard female pelvic exam to be invasive, undignified and traumatic because Semenya had never such an exam before and apparently never expected ever to have one. Which is a rather odd reaction for an 18 year-old woman to have, especially in a country where black girls are initiated into the grim realities of what it means to be female early in life. (SA black girls long have had one of the highest rates of teenage motherhood in the world; and thanks to widespread rape, coercive PIV sex and forced child marriage, young black females in SA now have high rates of HIV infections too.)

Yes, many girls and women find getting pelvic exams uncomfortable, undignified, invasive and even traumatic. But girls and women know such exams are part of routine female health care and are necessary for all sorts of reasons, so most of us learn at an early age to "woman up" and endure pelvics - and a whole lot of other poking and prodding as well - as a perhaps unpleasant but otherwise unremarkable part of being female. By contrast, Semenya says getting standard female workup from a gynecologist came as a total shock - and a decade later, Semenya still complains about getting a pelvic in 2009 in a way that suggests Semenya sees having a pelvic not as an ordinary female experience in this day and age, but as an ordeal that was uniquely offensive to Semenya's special sense of human dignity.

If Semenya really did see Semenyaself as female from birth, you'd think Semenya would've been champing at the bit to see and be checked out by a gynecologist even if it meant getting an unpleasant pelvic simply to solve the mystery of why Semenya had managed to reach age 18 without ever having a menstrual period. Throughout the world, all teenage girls - even those raised without proper education about their bodies and/or without access to good regular medical care - know that periods are normal for girls/women starting in their tweens or early teens. Most girls would be freaked out to reach 15, 16, 17 or 18 without getting their period. Instead, Semenya seems not to have been bothered by never having periods at all, not even for a second.

Seems to me, Semenya reacted to getting a standard female pelvic exam the way a person raised male would, not as a young woman worried about her lifelong lack of menses would. After all, whereas girls and women learn early that internal exams of our privates are our lot in life, males take it for granted that they will never need an internal probe at all - or if they do, it won't be until relatively late in life when they finally need prostate checks and colonoscopies.

A decade after having a standard, garden variety gynecological exam in 2009, Semenya still complains about it in a way that suggests Semenya continues to see having a pelvic as something other than an ordinary female experience that most women take in stride in this day and age. Semenya seems to see getting a female pelvic exam as an special ordeal that Semenya alone was singled out to have, and that no one else on earth has experienced. Semenya experienced a standard pelvic exam as uniquely offensive to Semenya's superior sense of dignity as a human being because, I surmise, Semenya believes - and long has believed - at the most fundamental level of Semenya's being that Semenya is above dealing with any of the inconveniences, indignities and drawbacks that female people routinely experience as a matter of course due to having female biology.

[–]MarkTwainiac 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

More than once competition staff (sometimes not even medical staff) demanded to see >her genitals before she could >compete.

If sports officials were going around demanding to see Semenya's genitals before competitions, SA officials would've had those competition staff members run out of their jobs in a flash and these incidents would've made worldwide headlines as proof of more human rights violations by the mean sports authorities against poor Caster. And SA and Semenya would've hauled all parties involved into court, as they have done over many other matters.

However, it is true that sometimes Semenya's genitals were seen by approved sports officials - but that's because all international elite athletes are subject to strict anti-doping regulations that require them to provide urine samples to sports authorities in full view of an official. The official watches an athlete urinate to make sure the athlete is not sneaking in urine from another source; it has nothing do with inspecting genitals to check or verify an athlete's sex.

Having to give urine in full view of officials is part of being an international athlete - it's not a custom invented to oppress poor Caster Semenya and Semenya alone the way team Semenya often make it out to be.

Interestingly, in August of 2019, several months after the facts of Semenya's male sex and nature of Semenya's male-only DSD were known the world, Semenya in a talk at a women's leadership conference were Semenya was the headliner, said publicly that as a child, other kids frequently questioned whether Semenya was a boy or a girl - and when that happened, Semenya voluntarily would pull down Semenya's own drawers to show other kids the absence of a visible penis and testicles. I imagine these voluntary displays on Semenya's part stopped once puberty hit, because in puberty the genitals of males with 5-ARD typically change so as to remove any doubts about their sex (in Costa Rica, where 5-ARD is common, the condition in males is known as "penis at 12").

[–]slushpilot 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Erik Schinegger also built an athletic career in good faith.

Just like Semenya, he was raised as a girl, won several competitions and was on the way to the Olympics. Then he was confirmed to be actually male, and he did the noble thing by stepping aside. He understood that his dominance in the women's side of the sport would not be a fair win. I respect him very much, for that is true sportsmanship.