Olympic committee announces a broad ban on transgender athletes and athletes with differences in sex development in Women’s events (gifted link)

The International Olympic Committee banned transgender athletes from competing in the women’s category at the Olympics, after telling its members to conduct mandatory genetic testing for women’s competitions.

Under the new policy eligibility will be determined by a one-time gene test, according to the I.O.C. The test, which is already being used in track and field, requires screening via saliva, a cheek swab or a blood sample.

The I.O.C. ruling eliminates from women’s competition a minority of athletes who do not have the typical female XX sex chromosomes, and have one of several conditions that together are known as differences in sex development, or DSD. Such people can be female to outward appearances, and some do not know they have DSD. But their unusual genetics can result in high levels of testosterone, and possibly greater muscular development, giving them some of the athletic advantage that men have.

Track and field has been at the forefront of the debate since the South African runner Caster Semenya exploded into the public consciousness by winning gold in the 800 meters at a world championships in 2009. Her victory prompted a backlash from rivals who complained about Ms. Semenya’s appearance, leading to the governing body at the time ordering sex tests. At issue was a rare trait giving her naturally elevated levels of testosterone.

Ms. Semenya has for years battled against previous rules demanding she and others reduce their testosterone, losing a challenge at sport’s top court in 2019. She was among nine African athletes to sign a letter sent to the I.O.C president, Ms. Coventry, in which they detailed “cruel and degrading treatment” they faced due to eligibility regulations for women with sex variations, describing invasive examinations, forced surgeries and harmful hormone treatment that have led, they say, to physical and emotional trauma and come at significant financial cost.

“I have carried this weight. So have other women of color who deserved better from sport,” Ms. Semenya said in a statement to The New York Times. “Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress — it is walking backward,” she said, adding, “This is just exclusion with a new name.”

This is exhausting. Trans athletes and athletes with DSD are not dominating sports and women and women's sports do not need protecting. We stopped doing sex testing because it's not a black and white, XX or XY category. So much effort to hurt so few people.

The Olympics Has a New Sex Testing Policy. The Evidence Doesn’t Add Up

An article from a journalist that did research and a podcast on the history of sex testing. It's a very good read with history and someone who dug into the actual data. Did you know that there's eugenics under here? Trans women may be the current scapegoats but women with DSDs have been targeted for decades due to racism and the failed study premise of a South African researcher who was predictably racist as fuck.

I encourage folks to read because I could only highlight and quote so much.

We last saw this particular policy emerge in the 1960s, when every woman who competed in the Olympics was forced to go through an unreliable genetic test looking for Y chromosomal material — a test that about 1 in 500 women failed. (Surprise! Lots of women have Y chromosomal material in their cells.) The women who passed this test got a "femininity certificate" they had to carry with them to every single competition. Those who "failed" were told to fake an injury and leave.

The earliest proponents of sex testing in the 1930s were convinced that many of the women who were competing in sports were secretly men. Sometimes these claims were more figurative — most western cultures had a really different conception of sex than we do now. (Remember, this was before scientists knew much about sex chromosomes in humans.) The prevailing idea of sex at the time was something called "balance theory" — this idea that every person was born with a little bit of male stuff and a little bit of female stuff inside of them, and that that balance could shift. So if a woman was always a little bit cuspy — maybe only 70 percent woman — if she did manly things, like sports, she could actually turn into a man.

The eugenics of it all
When you start looking into the modern era of sex testing, and the athletes who have been impacted, it doesn't take long to notice something. Every woman who I am aware of who has been flagged and singled out under gender verification policies since 2009 is a Black or brown woman from the Global South. Most of them are from Africa.

But advocates for sex testing policies counter that the science is on their side here, because research shows that DSDs are more common in Africa.

...

the idea that DSDs, this broad category, were more common in Africa, this hugely diverse place, doesn't make sense.

The place that this claim comes from originally is a masters thesis from 1970, by a South African researcher named Hatherley James Grace titled, "Intersex in Four South African Racial Groups in Durban."

Even just those basic facts might give us pause. This was a white geneticist working in apartheid South Africa on genetic differences between white and Black Africans. And he states explicitly that his goal is to prove that what he calls intersex conditions are more prevalent in Black Africans.

The paper in fact laments the fact that he could not prove that Black Africans were more likely to have these variations in sex biology. Of course he blames Black folks for this, for not self reporting their conditions enough.

It's almost like it's always eugenics and racism underneath it all.

Sex test used in IOC’s new transgender ban more likely to exclude from Olympics intersex women who were assigned female at birth

People with androgen insensitivity don’t respond as much to androgens like testosterone. Some believe that having high levels of testosterone can give athletes a competitive advantage. Athletes with this condition gain little or no advantage like muscle growth from androgens. This also means their visible sex characteristics, including their genitals, appear mostly or entirely female. The new IOC policy has an exception for “complete” androgen insensitivity but doesn’t say how athletes would demonstrate this.

The policy also doesn’t mention partial androgen insensitivity, where androgen receptors respond to testosterone but probably not enough to gain a significant advantage in performance. Nevertheless, athletes with partial androgen insensitivity will presumably fail the test and be excluded from participating under the new policy.

People with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency make and respond to testosterone but make little or none of a more potent androgen called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT. If they have no DHT, their genitals appear more female and they gain less athletic advantage from androgens. People with this condition who have a Y chromosome will fail the new sex test and be excluded.

People with mosaicism are born with some cells that have a Y chromosome and some that do not. Women can develop mosaicism during pregnancy, when fetal cells with Y chromosomes cross the placenta into her body. The woman will have some cells with a Y chromosome, perhaps for the rest of her life. Such cells could cause a previously pregnant athlete to fail the new test.

Just a few ways the new test is not that great