If you believe
BBC yet again cheering on the destruction of women’s sports:
Two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya says she is “not going to be ashamed” of being “different”, and will “fight for what is right” amid her ongoing dispute with athletics authorities.
Some lede. Should read: Two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya, who competed against women, says he is “not going to be ashamed” of cheating women, and will continue to cheat amid his ongoing dispute with athletics authorities.
Semenya, 32, was born with differences of sexual development (DSD) and cannot compete in female track events without taking testosterone-reducing drugs.
What kind of differences of sexual development? Odd that the BBC doesn’t say. Why be so cryptic about it?
In a wide-ranging interview with BBC Breakfast’s Sally Nugent, Semenya says:
- She felt she was “different” from the age of five but “embraces” her differences
- She will not conform “to be accepted”
He “embraces” the differences that enable him to cheat women in sports.
He will not stop cheating women in sports.
- She wants to empower women to “have a voice”
Fuck all the way off.
“For me I believe if you are a woman, you are a woman,” said Semenya, who won Olympic 800m gold in 2012 and 2016 and is a three-time world champion over the same distance.
Is that how that works? And if you believe you are a dolphin you are a dolphin?
Anyway, that’s not a useful criterion, because no one can know what other people “believe.” It’s a black box. You could just be pretending to believe.
To me it’s interesting that everybody’s being so coy about the precise nature of Caster Semenya’s condition. 5-ARD is the one disorder of sexual development that laypersons have heard of, because there was a bestselling book about it! But when talking about Caster Semenya, nobody ever points out that this person has the same condition as the protagonist of Middlesex, and I think that’s because in the book, Eugenides makes it very obvious that Cal is a man.
My slogan to add to the long list below: ‘If he ‘s a woman, then every Donald is Donald Duck in disguise.’ (Well, I think it’s good for my first try.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_labor_slogans#:~:text=Boring%20from%20within%20is%20a,with%20regard%20to%20the%20AFL.
So this is different from CAIS, right? I seem to know fuck all about DSDs…
Yes, this is different. Speaking generally at first: hormones are a type of protein that are released into the body to circulate and reach distant tissues to cause some sort of changed behaviour; receptors are a protein that the hormone interacts with in order to bring about that effect. Hormones are the signal, receptors are the antenna, and both are proteins and are thus encoded by a gene somewhere in the genome. Proper function requires both genes to be functional; a mutation in either could wreck reception of the signal.
CAIS – complete androgen insensitivity syndrome – is the condition arising from a person having a functional SRY (Sex-determining Region Y) gene producing a functional androgenising signal (SRY hormone, aka testis determining factor aka the hormone that starts the process of developing male anatomy), but a fault in the receptor gene that either causes the receptor protein to be faulty or entirely absent. In the absence of the androgenising signal being received, the androgenising signal may as well not have been sent and the embryo defaults to the female development path. The resulting person will be a girl, though with some complications.
The thing is, the chain of events leading to a fully formed male or female body has many steps. 5-ARD is a different fault in a different step with different consequences… the affected person has functional though undescended testicles, and external genitalia that can be female or male (though usually with malformation), or highly ambiguous. Caster Semanya may outwardly have female anatomy, or not, but the point that is relevant to sport: having functional testes, even undescended, causes a male puberty.