Bat21 says:

o_0

bob says:

Rick… Let’s call a spade a spade.

MikeN says:

So where is the “confirmed” part of the story?

Dallas says:

No we do not need a third category.

This is a corner case and the Republicans need to settle down.

Just tell the children “He is blessed with great athletic skills because she practiced all her life”.

By the time they figure it out, you fake a heart attack or something to distract them.

Common_Sense says:

I agree with #4 — this isn’t a derogatory term.

I see it now — what we need are categories based on advantage — or rather, disadvantage:

1. The “all-comers” race
2. The “all-comers drug/genetic engineering free” race
3. The “all comers of disadvantaged gender” race (which could change by sport – ultradistance female swimmers might actually have an edge based on buoyancy despite lower overall strength, for example)
4. The “all comers of disadvantaged gender, drug free” race…
etc
etc
ad nauseum

Make watching sports about as much fun as a dog show, with all the various sub-competitions and categories.

BTW: #9 Dallas – way to try to turn this into a domestic political fight by assuming without evidence that Republicans have some specific viewpoint unique to them on this issue. Where’d that come from?

Jetfire says:

They’re not hermaphrodites anymore. They’re called Intersex person now.

Greg Allen says:

Not every person neatly fits in too either male or female.

You can mock this as some pc-thing but it is well-documented medical and social fact.

So, should trans or mixed-gendered athletes be banned from sports? Of course not! Sports is as a positive and healthy for them as anyone else.

Maybe at the higher level competitions could have estrogen and testosterone monitoring. It seems like these hormones have more impact on athleticism than genitalia or chromosomes.

bobbo, words are defined, labels get hanged says:

#11–common==quibble if you wish but Dallas is recognizing the repuglican wisdom that men are men and women are women. Anything other than that is a perverted choice of the individual denying Jebus in their life. Just because you met one repuglican who understood Darwinian variability doesn’t mean the politically active majority of that party does, or that Dallas’s reference wasn’t accurate and understood as such by us.

There are two “categories” in the non-handicapped olympics right now==male and female. Both are defined. This person meets that defintion or this person does not. So–all your categories are not actually needed, but with two defined categories, some people will be disqualified, fair or not.

Rick says:

Hysteria was also once the “medical term” used to describe something we no longer really believe is something women “get” because of their uterus. Transgender is still something that has to be diagnosed as a disorder before anything like hormone replacement therapy can happen. I don’t understand transgender as a concept, but I have a real life case of it square in front of me and I have no doubts it is a real thing that isn’t some fluke, game, or choice. I suppose I’m now one of those over-sensitive people because I was once one of those insensitive people who would recoil when I offended someone with the wrong term…always telling the offended people to lighten up or to get over themselves. Turns out, that’s a bullshit way to treat people.

But…no, the community of people dealing with gender issues does not appreciate the term “hermaphrodite” anymore than most african americans like to be called “coloured”…and, that community has as many variations and twists even just within it that it is very hard to even nail down what group of people is being referenced (as #18 above points out).

I surely mean no flame war, and didn’t. I just know what an intellectual and open minded bunch reads here and this one pushed a button that reminded me that there are still lots of places such enlightended people can find something new to know.

uh, yeah.

bobbo, its all definitional says:

Small facet? 10 yards ahead of the pack and pulling away? “ok”

Greg Allen says:

>> Scients said, on September 10th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

>> Or if someone is XY but develops as a female (like Jamie Lee Curtis) because they have no receptors for testosterone, are they considered male or female?

Jamie Lee Curtis is genetically a male? I had no idea. When she was on her fitness craze, she did seem to get kind-of metro sexual.

>> Testing people in this way is ridiculous. Some produce more testosterone than others, and that could be an unfair advantage! Some people produce more but have fewer receptors-that’s not fair! What about men? Some have higher/lower testosterone–not fair!!

You raise solid issues and could probably convince me.

While estrogen and testosterone are both present in both women and men, aren’t they typically present at sigtificantly different levels?

I tried to find a graph on Google with no luck.

Do you know?

By the way, this isn’t an issue of “fairness” but a way to medically define the handful of transgender athletes only at the highest level of sports.

sargasso says:

Met plenty of tweed trouser wearing bearded pipe smoking hermaphrodite English ladies in my youth. All could chop their own wood, shoot and skin a rabbit with a knife, tell a yarn, would drink a man unconscious and have their way with him. Eventually they were revealed as actual men, and banned from teaching. Just, a memory.

Gigwave says:

I’ve heard that Jamie Lee Curtis rumour before. [citation required]

Scients says:

#23 – Yes, there are basic ranges for testosterone for women and men (same with estrogen.) However, these ranges vary (sometimes wildly) from one lab to another and even moreso from one country’s set definition to another’s.

What if we tested Serena or Venus Williams, because they’re obviously more “torn up”/”ripped” than other female tennis players. I’d bet you money they produce a markedly higher level of testosterone than other women. This level could easily fall outside of normal ranges, but because both of them still retain what our society deems as female-like characteristics (mainly breasts and finer facial features) we automatically assign them in the female category. That and they say they’re female, which they are.

So if this athlete says she’s female, has grown up as female, has no inkling of the fact that she has male organs, but somehow doesn’t look feminine enough for people’s standards, her abilities that may or may not be directly related to testosterone production* are questioned.

You could expand this further towards cognitive abilities–can someone better utilize glucose in the brain than another? If someone produces a higher ratio of Glutamine to GABA, so their brain expresses a marked increase in certain regional “activity” on a scan, are they at an unfair advantage in a spelling competition?

*Many many studies have shown that there is a correlation between testosterone and muscle production. However, this does not imply causation for several reasons.

First, the human body’s functional use of testosterone varies from person to person, just as metabolism of food, drugs, etc. varies from person to person (otherwise, no one would have allergies, side effects, etc.) A female who produces less testosterone than her peer can still produce more lean muscle/kg body weight because she uses it more efficiently. I would go as far to say that this athlete could on a good day have normal testosterone levels (which may be the norm if she is in fact an XX intersexual) but just utilize it for muscle production more efficiently.

Second, more testosterone and more muscle does not equal athletic prowess. For example, millions of women in our country have PCOS, an endocrine disorder that usually involves highly elevated testosterone (as well as infertility, hyperlipidemia, and amenorrhea.) Look up what happens in this disease–yes you might put on some muscle weight, but for the vast majority of women with this disease, there is excess fatty weight gain around the middle, male-pattern baldness, hirsutism, acne, and fatigue.

Third, testosterone is not all that makes up the athleticism equation. Consider metabolism again. If someone has a greater affinity for utilizing linolenic and linoleic acid, or CoQ10, or N-acetylcysteine, or any other supplement, or even PROTEIN…if someone has lower cortisol levels on average, produces more epinephrine (to give that nice athletic “high”)…if someone has any one of literally MILLIONS of modifications in their system that occur in each and every human on this planet, their athletic/cognitive/anything abilities will differ.

This of course isn’t taking good old will power into the argument at all.

Finally…bobbo, if perhaps we should consider testing Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt for excess testosterone outside the “male range”–if it’s outside the range, they can’t possibly be male. Even if they found out they were XXY, would they still be male, even though they are XX as well?

This is my point–testosterone/sex hormones alone are not an indicator of athleticism nor socially conditioned sex identities.