It will takes weeks to determine her "gender"...
(Tim, w/thanks to David Wegener) The story's lead line is: "A day after winning her first 800-meter world title amid a gender-test controversy, the father of South African teenager Caster Semenya dismissed speculation his daughter is not a woman."
So they're going to test her. How? Again, the story reports:
The gynecologist, endocrinologist, and internal medicine specialist I understand, but the psychologist? The "expert on gender?"
What in the world?
Well, I guess we should have known when the talk was about gender--not sex. As I've tried to say, but found few hearers, gender is always a social construct, whereas sex is body parts. So where will they end of up on this one?
Likely the psychologist and gender expert will break the tie.
With tongue firmly in cheek, our track and field correspondent, David Wegener, writes:
* * *
I was a bit worried when I read this story. So I called up my friend, Gwen, and he said, "this is a medical issue." That made me feel a little better.
But there was still this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. Thankfully, Herman wrote me on Facebook, "how could anyone think this is even possibly a matter of cheating?" She continued, "the South African coach has complete confidence in his 800-meter runner." Whew! Full assurance was near.
Finally Sid left me a voicemail: "They've got a gender expert on the case. We can all sleep well tonight." That sealed the deal.
South African teen wins 800 amid gender-test flap
Here's the money quote:
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-worlds-gendertest&prov=ap&type=lgns
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Picture:
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Football/Pix/pictures/2009/8/19/1250711480052/Caster-Semenya-001.jpg
How long it would take for one person to check her chromosomes?
But really, isn’t this a private matter of personal identity, and not one that should be open to public scrutiny, and imposed according to outdated, oppressive beliefs?
Who cares if the body is male if the occupant thinks they are female?
And if men can legally become women, and a “man” can have a baby, then I say let former men [who were born in the “wrong” body] leave real women in the dust in all the female sporting events, and show them the idiotic situation the God haters have imposed upon everyone. Beat the social engineers at their own game.
> Weiss said the testing was ordered because of “ambiguity, not because we believe she is cheating.”
If she is a woman, then it only goes to show society’s schizophrenia, requiring proof. We’ve had ambiquity for decades, and it has been dubbed freedom. Get over it.
“She was always rough and played with the boys. She liked soccer and she wore pants to school. She never wore a dress.”
Where has this guy been the last 40 years?
Did you see the related article “Male or Female? Gender tests are not always easy”?
“A handful of athletes have typically dropped out or been thrown out of the Olympics for failing gender tests over the years. But no evidence supports the idea that such competitors have an unfair athletic advantage.”
It this really saying what it sounds like -- that men posing as women don’t have an unfair athletic advantage? Another popular myth of the traditionalists debunked! If there is no “evidence” of any advantage, then why don’t women compete with men directly?
I guess we’ll be doing “gender tests” for preachers someday. Some women will claim to be men.
My guess is none of the "expterts" involved in all this testing bothered to attend CBE's conference this summer and sit in on the workshop which was supposed to teach us how much we can all learn from the "intersexed".
Kamilla
Pope Joan, anyone?
Well, after looking at a bunch of pictures, even from the neck up, the face is much more masculine in appearance than the other runners.
Even the obviously female runners have made themselves much too manly for this hick's taste.
"How long it would take for one person to check her chromosomes?"
Only as long as it takes to pull down her genes.
Sorry
smiling broadly
I'm not even sure an internal medicine specialist is needed. I did have one the other day where I wasn't sure I was in the right room (knowing that my patient was supposed to be a female), but a quick lifting of the gown cleared it up. If it got much more complicated than that, I don't know many internists who would want to join the debate.
Of course, they're giving the game away by allowing the South African sports authority to determine "her" sex. Five minutes with a gynecologist and a quick DNA test looking for Y chromosomes tell you how God made her(?), and the international body is telling the world that it's somehow "complicated" or difficult to figure this out?
Could it be that the idolatry of high level sports has reached the level of intentional mutilation of a child? Scary.
Adam,
You're right, I think a good plastic surgeon might be able to tell if there had been surgical alteration, but I don't think that's the question in this instance. All it should take is a geneticist and some chromosome studies (which are instant on-the-spot tests, folks).
Kamilla
OOpsie! Big oopsie - chromosome studies are NOT instant tests. Even in the large teaching hospital where I work, they are sent out to a specialty lab.
Kamilla
This situation brings to mind a line from an Ogden Nash poem:" There was a man and a woman and a tertium quid..."
I looked into this a little more, and apparently at least one athlete has been caught with a DNA test. In short, people HAVE done mutilation (especially in the Warsaw Pact) surgeries to try and win medals.
To be fair to this runner, there are others who also would make me do a double take--Maria Mutola and Jarmila Kratochlova (1980s, Czechoslovakia) come to mind. That said, the double take goes a little further here.
Dear Adam and Kamilla and Tim et al:
I think we're going to see that Caster was born and raised as a girl. She has female body parts.
However, I think we're also going to see that she has taken some type of steroids (testosterone, whatever) so that her hormone make-up has now crossed a line.
Adam and Kamilla,
I need some help here in expressing myself. I don't know much about hormones. Every time I'm in a discussion and the topic turns to hormones, it's usually with a group of women, and a switch turns off in my brain and I start looking frantically for a way to get out of the room. Is there a child who needs a dirty diaper changed? I'll do that. Did I hear you have a leak in your roof? Sure I'll be glad to check. Let's do it now. Darkness doesn't matter. Timing on your cam-shaff a bit off? Hey, this can't go on. Let's get under your hood.
The IAAF has disqualified "women" like Caster in the past. They were so juiced that they were disallowed from competing as women. I can't remember the name of the "woman" I'm thinking of but she was a sprinter from an Eastern European country, cold war era. No one improves like Caster did (just recently an unknown South African teen-ager) and gets to this level (world class, sixth fastest time in history for women in her event) this quickly without juice.
And then there's her body. Just look at the pictures. If you want to read some interesting articles, type "steroids" and "East Germany" into a search engine. In the 70s and 80s testing for steroid use among athletes (I'm mainly thinking of track and field and swimming) was either non-existent or lagged woefully behind those who juiced and had learned how to cover their tracks (pun intended). During this time, the East German government gave their athletes steroids without telling them. They told them they were getting "vitamins." Crazy things started happening. They got a lot better in their event but they also started to see physical and emotional changes, many of them unwanted by the athletes.
What are some of the results of this era?
First, look at performances. The times that "female" sprinters ran and the distances that they threw have not been approached by athletes since then. Sanya Richards is the fastest female 400-meter runner in the world today. She won the World Championships this week in Berlin in 49 seconds flat. The world record is held by an East German (Marita Koch) in 47.60 seconds. No one has gotten near this mark. Koch ran it in 1985. You can also look at the Women's World Records for the 800-meter run, the long jump, the shot put, the discus, the 4x100-meter relay, and the 4x400-meter relay. All were set by Eastern European athletes in the 1980s. No one gets close to those records today.
But it's not just the evil communists who did it. Remember FloJo from America? She holds the world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints. Her times have not been approached and they were set in 1988.
FloJo died before she reached the age of 40. Most believe she was using human growth hormone.
Lots of tragedies on both sides of the Atlantic. Everyone in Track and Field knows all this, but what to do? We can't go back and test the athletes and prove things now. Some have said we should have two sets of world records: before 1990 and since 1990. Or before 2000 and since 2000.
Second, we have health issues. Long-term medical studies have been done on the East German athletes who unknowingly received the steroids. The study covered both men and women. What did they find?
-one in four (male and female) athletes got some form of cancer.
-one in three showed some form of auto aggression: cutting, suicide attempt, etc.
-one in nine withdrew from the study for psychological reasons.
-most of the children of those who took the steroids have disabilities. This holds for fathers and mothers, but it is especially correlated with mothers who were given steroids during their athletic careers.
Without minimizing the other findings, the last is the most depressing thing. "Male and female He created them."
Sincerely, David
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