IIRC IIAF track & field recently instituted biological guidelines in order for transgender(s) to compete as a female

I couldn't read the actual article but I will have an opinion anyway. Define race categories by biological sex instead of gender which we are now instructed is a social construct. I have heard conflicting reports about how many "genders" there are now; 33, 63, 112, some other number? Clearly sport can't entertain this many race categories.

One "gender" is ambonec - identifying as male and female while also identifying as neither at the same time. Such a person requires psychiatric help rather than their own special race category.

What a load of bullshit! Does this mean I can say I think I'm a woman and use that time as my Boston Qualifying standard now?

The answer to the problem is simple and the IAAF has already created the necessary framework. All the complaints that issue is really hard stem from the complete hash we have made when trying to put the IAAF's framework into writing.

Basically you split everyone into two camps: 1-Open, 2- Low Testosterone (defined as https://www.iaaf.org/...or-female-classifica ). Doesn't matter what you identify as everyone clearly falls into one of the aforementioned camps and you can get rid of the all those he/she's in the IAAF's official release. Fundamentally gender/sex do not need to be brought into how these division are officially defined.

Obviously such a split would required testing above and beyond what can actually happen at the average race level. So the pragmatic solution is to handle it the same way we handle drug testing. We take it on faith you are following the rules in 99.9% of cases but have the ability to test if needed. At the highest level testing become routine and the penalties for cheating get higher.

Am I right in assuming they are two boys that identify as girls and have not had surgery to change their gender?

Yes that seems to be the answer.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

Should be pretty simple. XY chromosome and you compete as a male, XX you compete as a female.

Then you can end up like the situation in Texas with the wrestler. IIRC, who is female according to birth certificate but taking hormones, etc. to become male, wants to wrestle as a male but forced to wrestle as a female.

If only life was that simple.

I think there are 2 issues, one is the Semenya issue. She has done nothing other than be born and brought up as a woman, now she competes in athletics as a woman and is one of the best as she is intersex. This is a quite tough situation to solve, really there should be a 3rd category, male/female/ambitious, but really who is going to watch the ambiguous meets? It is as good as chucking them out of the sport.

The 2nd issue is with gender. People who are biologically men but identify as women and want to compete as women. This shouldn’t be allowed. Even post-op and everything it still should be be allowed if you ask me. We complain that dopers still have positive adaptations after they stop doping, how doesn’t a biological man still have some advantage from their pre-op days?

Obviously the above is just my opinion and not necessarily correct!

Semenya is a woman, she was born with the plumbing that says so. These other guys are not the same.

I am a millennial "Philadelphia Liberal" and I agree with this.


I am going to qualify it, though. We should have it based on ability in general and not the above gender lines. If you are a woman and can smash a large portion of the mens field you should be able to compete against those mens. What I mean by this...have qualification standards for levels of competition. Kinda like the categorizations by USA Cycling...but one standard overall.

Im pretty sure Katie Ledecky would destroy all of us.

Agree on chromosones.

also if you were born with a stick and berries - sorry mate - but you are a boy
if you were born with a cave - then sorry mate - but you is a woman
If you were born with both - then congratulations - you get to choose!
If you were born with none - not really sure about this one? this ever happen?
If you get yours altered by surgery - well sorry - can't change the original blueprint


IDC what you want to think you are. By all means do whatever makes you happy. I will 100% fully support that and will be the large guy at the bar who gets in some persons face who is giving you sh*t about it. Just be fair in competition no matter how you feel about yourself.

I read both the original news article and your link below. Maybe I am missing something, but what on what scientific basis does the IAAF base their argument for the T levels for their "female" classification?

Say I am a healthy 35 year old male (true) that falls one standard deviation above the mean (illustrative) in a certain athletic event among males my age. I then take action to meet all 2 of their requirements to be classified as female - a) "identify" as a female, b) reduce my T levels below 5 nmol/L for 6 months. Where would I now end up on the distribution curve for females? If it's more than 1 standard deviation above the mean, then their classifications are suspect. Have there been extensive studies on real life patients to support this rule change?

If I was a competitive female I would be watching this debate, and my competitors, very closely.

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Strava

The IAAF based their T levels on the many thousands of measurements they have been taken as part of standard drug tests (which gives them a huge dataset on elite athletes) and medical screening (covering the more general public). I would have to look it up but the range listed by the article is like 4 or 5 standard deviations from the mean which is why they can be so definitive with the 5 nmol/L cut-off.

More to the point r by using T you can remove all direct reference to gender and sex. Testosterone is an excellent predictor of athletic performance so the argument becomes separating groups based on inherent athletic potential without forcing people to fall into a clearly defined gender/sex groups. In trying to defend a classification as specifically 'female' any sports body is going to be fighting a losing political battle.

As to your point about men reducing T to compete in the lower bracket all you have to do it ban the drugs which facilitate this. These hormone therapy drugs are super easy to detect in a drug test so it would be easy to nail any would be cheats. I should acknowledge this would amount to a de-facto ban on birth control drugs which I wouldn't support, but I could imagine birth control being integrated into the TUE system such that it would still be fully available to those athletes who are using it as it was designed.

This has happened in a number of High School sports and there is your real 'war on women'. Boys who can't even qualify for the State meet in their correct sex can crush the girls by claiming transgender, whether true or not, when they still have all male parts, and who haven't even started hormone therapy to depress their T levels. If it isn't brought under control, the trend will continue as straight guys begin to view it as a means to a collegiate athletic scholarship. I wouldn't expect too many straight guys to pull that stunt but its only a matter of time. The biological girl athletes can only watch in sadness as their opportunities for medals and scholarships are diminished.

I hate seeing these threads pop up. Always without fail, instead of focusing on who this could benefit, the main focus is on the potential for the people to abuse it. There will always be people who try to abuse the system. Its happening all around us every damn day, but I bet there are less people who try to cheat than those who abide by the rules and compete fairly.

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Its time for me to put a wig on and go out and break some world records.

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2x Deca-Ironman World Cup (10 Ironmans in 10 days), 2x Quintuple Ironman World Cup (5 Ironmans in 5 days), Ultraman, Ultra Marathoner, and I once did an Ironman.

Please clarify under which conditions transgender males have no physical advantages over women. If after hormone therapy, which therapy and after how long? What drugs are necessary? Doses? Is undergoing a surgical procedure necessary? What is or is not required? Please quote the conclusive studies that show how this leads to transgender males not having a physical advantage over women and I will be on board and consider it not cheating.

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2x Deca-Ironman World Cup (10 Ironmans in 10 days), 2x Quintuple Ironman World Cup (5 Ironmans in 5 days), Ultraman, Ultra Marathoner, and I once did an Ironman.

It should be, as long as you never went beyond basic genetics in high school. If you've gone just a bit further, then you realize that there are folks born with only one sex chromosome (either X or Y), you have XXY, XYY, XXX, you also have males who are XX because of a phenomenon called translocation (on the Y chromosome) and you have females who are XY with a chromosome mutation on Y...

So, yes, it should be that simple, if we didn't know a whole lot more.

haha you don't need to pretend with us. We are all friends here. Change that back to regular black color ;-)

That'd be convenient, but isn't reality. There are "XX males." Complete with testes and testosterone production.

Edit: sorry, francois beat me to it.

So i guess Trump was wrong - we can't just grab them by the _ _ _ _ _ because you might end up grabbing them by the twigs/berries?

And apparently XX males occurs in only 1 out of every 20,000 newborns. LIkewise, only 1 in 4,500 newborns show ambiguous genitalia. So yes, we need to recognize that there are genetic differences but 99.9% of the world is XX or XY. Should public policy be driven by the rare exceptions? That is a fair question on which reasonable people can differ.

This is a dumb question - because I have never googled it and I am at work and definitely not going too and nor would I want to see the pictures if I did... but what parts does an XX male have? since they are XX, what physical/chemical changes are different than an XY? If they are XX, would they not simply be a girl? I do not know where the line is drawn and I am actually curious (science guy)