Martina takes another stand

Let's be honest here - Semenya almost certainly has a disease. She has natural physiologic traits in the sense that it is something written into the fabric of her DNA, but it's an 'abnormal pathology' the same way Marfan syndrome is. We could treat it if she wanted, but she doesn't and that's fine. The big difference from those two conditions is there are only a few, relatively small long-term health risks (increased risk of germ cell cancers, cardiovascular risk, etc.) and not the risk of sudden death that prevents Marfan syndrome patients from playing. The thing with Marfan is it just gives height, not overall raised performance ability, but even in that case it ended up over-represented in sports because of the physical traits. So is either disease "cheating"? No, but as I wrote earlier, her particular flavor of pathology almost certainly gives her hormone levels that are unequivocally male, which kind of obliterates the purpose of men/women divide in elite sports.

Performance is much more complicated than just testosterone, but it is the biggest hormone in play in terms of athletic ability. (citations: Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance. - PubMed - NCBI, A longitudinal analysis of salivary testosterone concentrations and competitiveness in elite and non-elite women athletes. - PubMed - NCBI, Androgens and athletic performance of elite female athletes. - PubMed - NCBI and so many more). As at least one of those citations shows, even endogenous cycling testosterone within XX, genotypically average females can make a minor performance difference. Getting caught up in the weeds beyond that if you're not an active researcher, at this point, is letting perfect be the enemy of good.

As far as physiology goes beyond just testosterone? Yes kinda, but it all comes back to two hormones and their processing. There is a type of condition, 5 alpha reductase deficiency, where both hormones are present but a downstream metabolite of testosterone doesn't get created. This leads to a physiologic male with female external genitalia, and they develop in puberty like a physiologic male because testosterone is intact - the muscle mass, the height, the fat distribution, etc. The only biologically female part about them is the external genitalia. Again, I can nerd out about this more in DM, but this type of person presents a tremendous challenge to the typical sex division in elite sports.

(And if you want to get caught up in in the specific term proven, science hasn't proven that gravity is a thing and in fact has proven it isn't the law we once thought it was. But because it's practical to use those principals in everything except high-end physics research, we do. I'd argue testosterone and athletic performance are at a similar crossroads. We clearly need more research, but we also have to work in a world before that research is completed.)

 

( I kid. That was really insightful. Thanks, Smash.)

 

I'm just a nerd who spent way too much time thinking about this over the last six weeks during my repro and endo blocks. We understand this biology a lot more than people want to admit (what we don't understand very well is the psychological aspect, but that's irrelevant to the particular question of physical performance ability). That doesn't lend itself to easy answers in the very rare cases like Semenya, though.

 

It just seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. Trans women are women, trans men are men, they compete in the women's and men's leagues respectively. If there comes a time when cis women can no longer hope to gain the wide-ranging social benefit of sports because they are crowded out by trans women, then we can deal with it then, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Meanwhile, if some isolated athletes are way more athletic than the others they compete against, so what? That's always going to be part of sports.

 

Well, they did change a bunch of rules upon his arrival to neutralize him.

 

Classic celebrity bullshit. I remember covering Martina when she spoke of the injustices heaped on blacks by society. Meanwhile, at the time she lived in a town (Aspen) where you needed an airplane to find a black person.

 

Not sure I follow you. So in order to sympathize with the black community you have to live in the South Bronx?