South African World Champion is Both Male and Female

There seems to be two issues here.
  • Should she be allowed to compete with ordinary females? Note: I said ordinary (the most neutral term I know), rather than normal, which seems a bit more biased. I think the answer to this question is no, but the issue seems a bit muddy at best. Would we allow a female competitor to take testosterone or other steroids to enhance her physical abilities? As of now, the answer to this question is no because it is viewed as giving an unfair advantage. Hence it would seem that we should disqualify a female with high levels of testosterone due to an unusual biochemisty.

    This issue is a bit muddy because we would not disqualify a male who happened to have an unusually high level of testosterone due to his having an unusual body chemisty. We do not disqualify either male or female athletes due to having some advantage bestowed on them by their genetic heritage. It would be a nightmare if we tried to have many levels of competition based on body chemistry, although we readily accept boxing & wrestling competitons with divisons based on body weight.

  • Should she be required to make a choice & be forced to have the appropriate surgery & other medical procedures to make her body chemisty & anatomy more closely approximate one sex or the other? The answer to this question cannot be other than no. It would be outrageous to force surgery or other medical procedures on a rational adult who wanted to live as is.

    Interesting enough, one of my college friends recently died because he refused to take the advice of his cardiologist. He decided he would rather die or have a heart attack than give up tennis & other strenuous activities he loved. Jackie Onassis decided to stop taking Chemo-therapy because she decided that a shorter life without the side effects of the therapy was preferable to a longer life with the bad side effects.
I think that one of the most Fundamental rights is the right to make decisions relating to one's own body. I never understood the Roe/Wade ruling which invoked "the right to privacy." That seemed to me to be a contrived concept required to allow a decision the court wanted to make for who knows what reasons.
 
I read a piece on this in which somebody pointed out that elite athletes tend to be "abnormal" anyway. For example, elite female athletes commonly have higher testosterone levels than non-athlete women. They also tend to have narrower hips and smaller breasts.

Should these narrow-hipped, higher-than-average testosterone female athletes be allowed to compete against "normal" women?
 
An interesting bit of history.

Stella Walsh (a revised version of her original Polish name) won several events in either the 1928 or 1932 Olympics. Maybe in both. she was considered the greatest female athlete of her time prior to Babe Didredrickson (?? spelling).

A few years after the Olympics, she married some American (I think a very wealthy one). The marriage did not last more than a few months (not sure of how long).

She died while not being treated by a doctor and in some city not her home town. The circumstances required an autopsy. It was discovered that she was a man. It was discovered that her mother had been extreemely over protective and controlling while Stella was growing up. It has nver been clear what Stella knew about sex & gender differences.

It has been assumed that until her marriage, she had no clue. It must have been a surprising, embasrassing, & and sorry wedding night.
 
Dinosaur said:
There seems to be two issues here.
  • Should she be allowed to compete with ordinary females? Note: I said ordinary (the most neutral term I know), rather than normal, which seems a bit more biased. I think the answer to this question is no, but the issue seems a bit muddy at best. Would we allow a female competitor to take testosterone or other steroids to enhance her physical abilities? As of now, the answer to this question is no because it is viewed as giving an unfair advantage. Hence it would seem that we should disqualify a female with high levels of testosterone due to an unusual biochemisty.

    This issue is a bit muddy because we would not disqualify a male who happened to have an unusually high level of testosterone due to his having an unusual body chemisty. We do not disqualify either male or female athletes due to having some advantage bestowed on them by their genetic heritage. It would be a nightmare if we tried to have many levels of competition based on body chemistry, although we readily accept boxing & wrestling competitons with divisons based on body weight.
Click to expand...

  • The issue gets very confusing and muddy when you consider that virtually ALL world-class athletes are in one way or another biological freaks. When you have a pool of many millions of athletes and you pick out the best dozen or so, every single one of them is going to have one or more radical anomalies in their biochemistry/genetics that's responsible for allowing them to be as good as they are. It's a topic that makes many people uncomfortable, but to become a world-class athlete mere dedication to training etc. isn't enough - you also have to win the genetic lottery.

    Many of the best athletes in the world have bodies that naturally produce extremely high levels of the various hormones that lesser athletes take illegally. When they're caught "doping," they're kicked out in disgrace - even though their levels of the "illegal" hormones aren't any higher than what many of their non-doping peers are producing naturally. This is actually a major problem for the people who do drug testing for world-class athletes at venues like the olympics etc. It's not enough to simply check to see if the athlete has anomalously high levels of the various hormones etc. related to athletic performance, because almost EVERYONE there is going to have anomalously high levels. The challenge then becomes determining which of the athletes are achieving freakishly high levels due to genetics, and which are achieving freakishly high levels through artificial supplements.

    The question, then, is what exactly makes this "woman's" genetic anomaly any less valid than the genetic anomalies of all the people she's competing against. It's not entirely clear where to draw the line.
 
This person is probably an xy hermaphrodite, meaning they inherited a y chromosome from their father. This would explain the predominately male features. I dont think it is fair to allow someone who is largely male to compete against females, since men are so much stronger and faster. This person should be required to compete against other males, I dont think any new records would be broken. I would insist upon genetic testing to confirm this person is an xx female hermaphrodite, otherwise, if they do carry a y chromosom, they should be disqualified.
 
James R said:
This issue is a bit muddy because we would not disqualify a male who happened to have an unusually high level of testosterone due to his having an unusual body chemisty. We do not disqualify either male or female athletes due to having some advantage bestowed on them by their genetic heritage. It would be a nightmare if we tried to have many levels of competition based on body chemistry, although we readily accept boxing & wrestling competitons with divisons based on body weight.


.
Click to expand...

Professional athletes undoubtedly have genetic advantages that set them apart, otherwise they would not be playing at the level they do. I know Lance Armstrong has an abnormally high concentration of mitochondria in his cells, the result of his genetic inheritance. This gives him more energy than other competitors, probably especially in the final stretches at the end of a grueling races this allows him to excel where others falter. No one would consider disallowing him from competing because of his fortunate genetic inheritance, this is his natural endowment gained fairly that makes him an exceptional athlete, and no attempt to gain some kind of artificial advantage.

I cant say the same for someone who is obviously at least as much male as female. It would be like putting a wig and lipstick on Bruce Jenner, and signing him up to compete in the female competition. The reason we have seperate competitions for males and females is that it is no contest when males and females compete, males being so much more athletically inclined by nature. Allowing someone who is both male and female to choose to compete against females, gives them an unfair advantage of faster twitch muscle fibers, greater muscle mass and bone density, faster reaction times, and other male traits that women do not have. If they want to compete they should go against men to measure their real relative ability.
 
Salamander7:

The post you quoted in post #26 was not by me, but by Dinosaur.
 
wouldn't she just be considered a woman with a birth defect?

If we only had her bones, would they consider her male or female?
250px-Gray242.png

250px-Gray241.png
 
Salamander7 said:
Professional athletes undoubtedly have genetic advantages that set them apart, otherwise they would not be playing at the level they do.
Click to expand...

Allowing someone who is both male and female to choose to compete against females, gives them an unfair advantage of faster twitch muscle fibers, greater muscle mass and bone density, faster reaction times, and other male traits that women do not have. If they want to compete they should go against men to measure their real relative ability.
Click to expand...

If athletes have genetic advantages that set them apart why bother with competing at all?

Sounds to me like the genetic playing field just isn't level.

Funny that.

It is nice to observe them competing though isn't it? I'm sure it also makes a few people a lot of money. One way or the other.
 
sniffy said:
If athletes have genetic advantages that set them apart why bother with competing at all?

Sounds to me like the genetic playing field just isn't level.

Funny that.

.
Click to expand...
See, and I thought that genetics in combination with training is what athletics competiion is all about.
:rolleyes:
 
Females don't have balls. If one does, then s/he isn't really female, no matter how s/he lives his/her life or how hard s/he proclaims it. If s/he is part male (especially in the parts that count), then it isn't fair for force other females to compete against her/him without the same advantage of a "god-given" nutsack or "man-given" hormone therapy.

~String
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top