SallyShortyPnts wrote:
tridork wrote:
trail wrote:
tridork wrote:
Really?The discussion is about women that are living between a traditionally accepted woman's place on the continuum, closer to a man's place on the continuum.
No, the thread is about testosterone levels being measured in womens' sports and how it is going to change sport in the future. In 2011, IAAF determined that the most flagrant example, Caster Semenya, did have significantly higher endogenous testosterone than the established normal female population and had to undergo exogenous hormone replacement (reverse doping, for lack of a better word). Dutee Chand, an Olympic 100 meter hopeful, was able to have this ruling thrown out by the CAS until July of 2017 because men weren't subjected to the same natural testosterone level testing.
I have seen what appears to be at least three examples of what might be naturally high testosterone levels in high-performing Olympic women. My question is what do you think the future brings for hormone testing, given that CAS threw out the previous ruling that did not involve men?
I am not an expert in this domain by any means, but just thinking about it from a philosophy angle and coming back to what Monty said (no one has to compete against the alien division or something like that). I think it would be fair to put an upper limit on T levels for the womens' division. If someone is a physiological outlier such as Castor and tends more in the level of males, then a few women who are physiological outliers gets banned from racing in that net. For the "open division", we should allow all humans including the extreme physiological outliers with high T levels. Now would the WADA blood passport be possibly used to ensure that someone who is "high" is naturally high and not "topping up" to alien levels? I would hope that could be done. But in the Open/male division, all physiological outliers who are naturally that way from birth, should be allowed to race. In essence, Olympic sport is about the 1 in a billion humans gifted to do something better than others....you have to look no further than the men's high jump finals to understand that you need to be gifted certain traits to even be at the table. Olympics are about "gifted humans". But I think we do need a definition of what's the upper limit of what can qualify in the women's division before that human gets asked to compete in "open/male/alien".