Let’s see: the last time I mentioned Semenya was at the end of last year, musing about what to do about another mutant in sports, Jeremiah Johnson, then a 12-year-old junior high school running back from Fort Worth, Texas who weighed 5-foot-11 and weighed 198 pounds, counting his facial hair. (I’m afraid to check on what size he is now.) The question is how schools and sports organizations should treat outliers who break all the rules naturally, and clobber the competition. Semenya, you will recall (we have discussed her a lot) is intersex, meaning that she has some of the primary and secondary characteristics of both sexes. It also gives her testosterone levels about 15 times higher than her female competitors. Though she has won many international competitions and set many women’s records (in the 400m, 800m, 1,000m and 1,500m races). A Swiss ruling in 2019 banned Semenya from international races between 400 meters, and Switzerland’s highest court backed the decision. To compete, she would be required to suppress her natural male hormones, which she refuses to do.
Writing about both Johnson and Semeya, I wrote last year,
“We can’t have special leagues and categories for however many gender categories science identifies and activists fight to have recognized, and there is no justification for creating artificial standards to eliminate outlier performers. The “solution” imposed on Caster Semenya—force her to take drugs that eliminate her natural advantage—is horrifying. How is this different from banging brilliant kids on the head until they have brain damage and no longer dominate their less gifted fellow students in school? What right do the sports czars have to declare an unprecedented, unique competitor unfit to compete because her, or his, unique qualities are advantageous? Why are so many woman condemning Caster as a cheat, when they should be defending her as a human being with as much right to compete as she is as anyone? Because she’ll win? Because it’s unfair that God, or random chance, or her own dedication rendered her better at her sport than anyone else?”
The unique physical characteristics of many, many other elite athletes can be said to have bestowed the exact same kinds of “unfair” advantages that allow Semenya to excel. The only question should be: Are these her real, natural abilities? If so, it is unethical to punish her for being born superior. Meanwhile, biological men transitioning into womanhood are allowed to dominate women’s sports competitions in the U.S. This makes no sense at all.
Semenya hasn’t been competing, and is fighting the track and field body’s ban on her competing. This week she said, “I have realized I want to live my life and fight for what I think and I believe in myself. I don’t care about the medical terms or what they tell me. Being born without a uterus or [with] internal testicles. Those don’t make me less of a woman. I am a woman and have a vagina just like any other woman.”
Oh, wait, the old knight is asking to offer a comment…
Uh, Miss? You cannot say you have a vagina like any other woman, as a matter of context. It’s a little like the Incredible Two-Headed Transplant saying, “Hey! I have a head just like everybody else!” But the testicle part is just handing critics a stick to beat her with. Riley Gaines, the rebel former college swimmer who is now an activist opposing trans males in women’s sports, pounced, tweeting, “‘My testicles don’t make me less of a woman’ – Caster Semenya Of course, this outlandish statement went totally unchallenged this morning Semenya is not a woman with high testosterone levels. He is a male with normal testosterone levels.”
Well, that’s not fair either. Intersex individuals have every reason and right to “identify” as the gender they feel most comfortable identifying as, because they are, as the term implies, both sexes at once Semenya is not the equivalent of the formerly male competitors now making a mockery of women’s ports in the U.S. and elsewhere. She’s naturally gifted, she has a vagina she was born with, and she’s not cheating by insisting that she be allowed to compete as she is.
I have nothing but sympathy with Semenya’s plight. But now what?
Ethics Alarms 
The only valid reason I would consider for banning Semenya would be risk of injury to other competitors. Since she is in athletics it would not apply. She’s way outside the norm, well yes, but in line with what you said we don’t ban basketball players for being too tall.
Except Semenya is genetically male with XY chromosomes and undescended testicles. There is nothing female there, just under-developed male parts. From Wikipedia, people with his/her (?) disorder go through puberty the same as other genetic males; deeper voice, facial hair, and increased muscle mass. You might as well call John Bobbitt “intersex”.
Not to be arch, but did you miss the fact that Senenya has a vagina and does not have a penis? See, John Bobbitt did have a penis, and never had a vagina, unless you think getting that cut off creates a magic vagina. This is the essence of intersex. In a lady’s shower, she would look exactly like the other women…unlike, for example, Lia Thomas. It’s a complex issue, and willfully pretending it isn’t doesn’t help.
Oh where oh where is Zoebrain?
You can think of all people starting off female.. The hormones of males XY usually direct the vagina to atrophy and disappear and testicles and penis to form. In cases like this, the development had issues. This person is a male with a birth defect. All males used to have a partially formed vagina.
I studied intersex issues when I was in high school. It was considered a confounding problem then, before all the politics. They are neither male nor female, but both, and typically, they get to choose which. As she argues, she is who and what she is, and should be allowed to compete that way. As a legal female since birth, saying she has to compete as a male because of hormone levels makes no sence, logically or ethically. We don’t divide sports by “hormone levels” except in her case, apparently.
Someone who is intersex has some of the anatomy of a male and some of the anatomy of a female. In sport they would find that their being part male would give them an advantage over someone who has a female physiology only.
So is the person enough of a female so that the male characteristics aren’t giving them an unfair advantage? I think that it shouldn’t be what that person looks like in a shower, but rather is a person with that condition normally able to give birth. If they are then they are female enough to be classified as female, but otherwise not. They would have to either compete as a male or we could have special classifications for them similar to the about thirty categories in para athletics.
The point is that natural-born advantages are still natural. You have to explain to me why a Wilt Chanmberlain or a Babe Ruth—or Mark Spitz, with his hyper-extending elbows, or Tom Dempsey, who kicked field goals with a foot that was more like a hoof, is any more unfair than Castor’s internal testicles. If a guy was born with an arm like a tentacle who could throw a baseball 200 miles per hour, would you ban him? Defining what an intersex individual “is” is just subjective terminology, like deciding whether a panda is more like a racoon than a bear.
Here’s a good article on the issues…
A lot of sports are divided into classes, e.g. boxing, wrestling and rowing into weight classes, many sports into age classifications and just about all sports into male and female. If the sports authorities decided to have a special category in basketball where the maximum height was six feet tall then Wilt Chamberlain would not be eligible. In cricket the former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming had very large hands which enabled him to take a very large number of catches. But cricket does not have any rules about the size of hands; it is divided into both sex and age categories only. No sports have categories that separate those with hyper-extending elbows, hoof like feet or very large hands into separate categories. But as most sports have a female category then anyone competing as a female should be fully female.
Castor has been competing as a female in a sport divided into male and female categories. It is widely acknowledged (except by those that support the Lia Thomases of the world) that males have a large advantage over females and therefore should not be competing as females. Anyone who has a mixture of both male and female physiology therefore has an unfair advantage over those who are wholly female.
Anyone who has a mixture of both male and female physiology therefore has an unfair advantage over those who are wholly female.
But you made the argument: no sport prohibits individuals with qualities of both sexes. Castor was determined to be female at birth. She’s legally female. She was raised female. She thinks of herself as female. She did not go through “male puberty”. She’s female.
Whether she went through “male puberty” is a statement that is fairly based on definitions and/or facts not admitted.
There are some conditions, such as androgen insensitivity, where an otherwise genetically male individual (XY chromosome) does not reactive to androgen hormones (mostly testosterone), and develops superficially female genitalia prior to birth as a result.
However, because they do are nearly completely insensitive to testosterone, they go through a “female” puberty, and do not experience the muscle growth and skeletal changes that a male teenager would experience. Such individual would have testicles in lieu of ovaries (similar to what is being said about Semenya), and thus be genetically infertile), but would otherwise be physiologically female, and have no innate advantages.
The facts so far admitted seem to say Semenya has high levels of testosterone, possibly due to having a Y chromosome (may XY, but there are variations!). Her levels are known to be higher than the average female, but maybe similar to the average male. She does not appear to be androgen insensitive, as she is apparently competing at the standard male level. Despite her external genitalia, she may still have experienced a “male” puberty, where surging testosterone prompts development of male secondary characteristics including muscle growth and skeletal structure.
The facts on this point are not clear, but in argumento assuming as much, she would thus have a similar advantage as a trans male-to-female athlete against other female competitors, as both developed the secondary male traits associated with athletic success.
Thus, it may boil down to a matter a semantics. Did she, by growing up in good faith as a women, go through “female” puberty (but due to an unknown condition develop male traits); or did she unknowingly go through “male puberty”?
This is clearly a case for the ethics incompleteness theorem, as no rule could possibly account for all variation of natural intersex conditions. Our analysis of the specific scenario is also very limited by the facts known. Being born with natural (if incomplete) female primary characteristics seems like a nice, objective standard for competition in female sports, but it does muddy the waters, it opens the door for individuals with Y chromosomes. As much it could make genetic makeup no longer an objective standard to exclude a transgendered person; transgendered persons who at a young age received puberty blockers or even hormones of the opposite sex, and developed exclusively the secondary characteristics of that sex, could arguably not be excluded. (Yet automatic inclusion would predictably promote such treatments, leading to young children to make life altering medical decisions long before the age of informed consent).
Fair assessment is required on a case-by-case basis. Fair assessment is unfortunately in short supply.
The solution? Dismantle “women’s sports.” Just have “track and field.” The fastest time, tallest height, longest throw wins. Sorry girls. You lose. Deal with it.
You got what you wanted: equality with men. Have fun.
Is it fair that Semenya has testosterone levels 15 times higher than the typical females but gets to compete against typical females? No.
Is it fair that Semenya was born intersex? No.
Is life fair? No.
Is there a better solution to letting Semenya compete in women’s sports? No.
Does letting Semenya compete in women’s track and field pose a danger to the other athletes? No.
Will Semenya‘s wins always be viewed with an asterisk by most people denoting that her wins don’t really count? Yes.
Is that asterisk fair? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter if it is or isn’t, it is just how things work.
We are only talking about this because of all the actual men being allowed to play women’s sports because people have lost their damn minds. How about we split the difference and start discussing reality instead of crazy people’s delusional fantasies and see if we cannot find a rational ground to stand on?
Second.