I’m going to agree.
The person in question is an exceedingly rare case who just happens to have chosen to be a track and field athlete. They had to be put in competition with one of the sexes, and the athlete said she’s a woman.
Not a voluntary transgender or a doped up gay man trying to foist their way to Olympic gold, but a genuine biologically deviate man-girl. What are you gonna do?
What you would do is apply an objective standard for determining whether Semenya is a man or a woman rather than just taking her word for it. The problem with allowing hermaphrodites with male testosterone levels to compete with normal women is that it’s unfair to normal women.
In my opinion, if you put this issue to an informed group, with nothing to indicate what the person thinks, says or identifies as a woman, just the facts of anatomy and biology, ten out of ten of those people, if they were forced to make a decision, would say he is male.
A incompletely developed male with internal testes, but male nonetheless. Genetically a male. Male by anatomy (though imperfect). Missing any biological features at all of a female.
One of the most critically and astonishingly insane things our society has done has been to accept that people are the gender or race they say they feel they are.
I find that to be nearly frightening, not because someone says they are female when they are male, or black when they are white, but because it openly indicates a rot in the moral and intellectual underpinnings of man.
Personally, I don't find any of this any different than someone who puts their hand inside their buttoned shirt and declares themselves Napoleon. (while simultaneously acknowledging this person is different from Bruce Jenner or Rachel Dolezal, both of whom I think are mentally ill. This person DOES have a physical malformation.)
We should be helping people like this become normal.
That said, this does clear up something for me. I had no idea who this person was or that there was even some kind of gender issue like this.
I haven't watched more than about ten minutes of the Olympics (I don't watch television) but my wife had it on and went to bed, leaving it on the television and I walked by when some women's track event was occurring. I paused and looked, and I saw...a guy. I stopped, puzzled, thinking..."What is a guy doing running with women? Is he pacing them or something? Maybe it is me. Maybe it is just a masculine looking woman, maybe it is just my eyes..." But the more I looked, the more convinced I was it was a guy, and the more it puzzled me. It wasn't a warm up lap or anything, it was a real event, and that was a guy running with them.
I have to tell you, I was puzzled enough to go in to ask my wife, who I figured would be able to tell me, but she had fallen asleep. I went back out and looked, and thought..."It isn't my eyes...that is a guy running with the women." At that point, I shrugged my shoulders and thought "Oh well. I have other things to do..." turned off the television and completely forgot about it until I saw this thread!
Real simple: if DNA tests show unambiguous XX chromosome, then the person competes with the women. Otherwise, the person competes with the men, period.
“but a genuine biologically deviate man-girl. What are you gonna do?”
Tell Caster Semanya not to compete because it isn’t fair to biological women. Tough.
“I think the fundamental issue is this: We have a separate category for women because without it, no women would even make the Olympic Games (with the exception of equestrian). Most of the women’s world records, even doped, lie outside the top 5000 times run by men. Radcliffe’s marathon WR, for instance, is beaten by between 250 and 300 men per year. Without a women’s category, elite sport would be exclusively male.”
http://sportsscientists.com/2016/07/caster-semenya-debate/
That article is more sympathetic than I am, but there is no reason to have women’s sports if men can compete - and the amount of testosterone in Semanya’s body gives him too much of an advantage.