Gender testing for track star

[Stephen Morgan]

Marathon swimming comes to mind.

The woman who has swum the Channel most times is a woman. The man who holds the record for the quickest crossing is a man. This also applies to crossings the other way, two way crossings, three way crossings and four way crossings.

That's a bit like saying that men look ridiculous in spike heels because they are somehow lacking in talent and ability. The statement is untrue (whether or not you happen to agree with it, which is frankly irrelevant. (May I call you Frankly? Thank you.))

But the ridiculousness of appearance isn't objectively quantifiable, like athletic performance is.

And, of course, I've been called worse.

quote]Hmm. I would refer you to those rare occasions when women have competed with men in ... sports for ... men ....

Fixed, and at no cost to you.[/quote]

Sports may be for men, but that doesn't effect the fact that men are better at them. As I said, even in dressage, a sport with an over whelmingly female fan base and grass roots, men are about equal with women at the top, in elite competition.

Nijinsky was a legendary male dancer, but it's hard to say how he might have held up against the modern greats, or en pointe. His lasting influence will likely be through his choreography and collaborations rather than his physical dance presence or technique, which, though so fabled, (like the good doctor's bedside manner) is largely undocumented.

I'm not sure how you document physcial dance presence. And although I know very little about ballet, I know very few choreographies call for male dancers to go en pointe.

Perhaps an even better model than competitive sports might be?

Better as a model for inter-sex relations, maybe.

I wasn't clear - I was trying to point out that the castrati had to physically feminize themselves to approach or surpass (debatable) the superior abilities of women,

Well, firstly castration isn't effeminising, secondly while it may be debatable whether the voices were actually superior, it was though to be so at the time (only one recording of a castrato was ever made) and they undoubtedly had a wider range than female singers. Womens cvoices, however, are not superior to mens. Each has its own place in the choir. The unique sound of the castrato is now extinct, but the most well thought of singers are still normally men, as with the three tenors not too long ago. But to compare male and female voices is somparing apples and oranges. If we must, though, then the best singers are not only male, but Welsh.

wiki:

Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents a boy's larynx from being transformed by the normal physiological events of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by both sexes) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way. As the castrato's body grew, his lack of testosterone meant that his epiphyses (bone-joints) did not harden in the normal manner. Thus the limbs of the castrati often grew unusually long, as did the bones of their ribs. This, combined with intensive training, gave them unrivalled lung-power and breath capacity. Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice, as well as higher vocal ranges of the uncastrated adult male (see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, sopranist, countertenor and contralto). Listening to the only surviving recordings of a castrato (see below), one can hear that the lower part of the voice sounds like a "super-high" tenor, with a more falsetto-like upper register above that.


I can't comment on whether the castrati voices were actually superior to female voices, but it was though to be so at the c

[Stephen Morgan]

Grace is valued in football, it is after all the beautiful game.

Thats right.

You can't dive without grace.

Following the cricket?

[barracuda]

the ridiculousness of appearance isn't objectively quantifiable, like athletic performance is.

You might wish to review the OP and some of the attendant responses.

And, of course, I've been called worse.

Shirley, you jest.

Sports may be for men, but that doesn't effect the fact that men are better at them.

See: Floor Exercise, a sport in which women vastly outperform the men. I would say that generally when women are superior at an athletic activity, it has been called something other than sport. Dance, in one instance. Sport culminates in art, but for dance that is the starting point.

I'm not sure how you document physcial dance presence. And although I know very little about ballet, I know very few choreographies call for male dancers to go en pointe.

You document dances with film or video, at least since the advent of film or video. Nijinsky refused to allow this, taking into consideration the poor quality of film technology at the time, for fear the results would mis-represent his troupe.

One of Nijinsky's fabled feats was his ability to dance en pointe, an ability which until then had been thought to be available only to women. My point was that at least part of his legendary ability was being able to physically do something that was a commonplace amongst female dancers. There are dances which call for male pointe work, but the weight of the male makes injuries much more prevalent and dangerous, another reason there is no male analogue for the prima.

Well, firstly castration isn't effeminising, secondly while it may be debatable whether the voices were actually superior, it was though to be so at the time (only one recording of a castrato was ever made) and they undoubtedly had a wider range than female singers. Womens cvoices, however, are not superior to mens. Each has its own place in the choir. The unique sound of the castrato is now extinct, but the most well thought of singers are still normally men, as with the three tenors not too long ago. But to compare male and female voices is somparing apples and oranges. If we must, though, then the best singers are not only male, but Welsh.

wiki:

Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents a boy's larynx from being transformed by the normal physiological events of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by both sexes) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way. As the castrato's body grew, his lack of testosterone meant that his epiphyses (bone-joints) did not harden in the normal manner. Thus the limbs of the castrati often grew unusually long, as did the bones of their ribs. This, combined with intensive training, gave them unrivalled lung-power and breath capacity. Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice, as well as higher vocal ranges of the uncastrated adult male (see soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, sopranist, countertenor and contralto). Listening to the only surviving recordings of a castrato (see below), one can hear that the lower part of the voice sounds like a "super-high" tenor, with a more falsetto-like upper register above that.


I can't comment on whether the castrati voices were actually superior to female voices, but it was though to be so at the c

Don't be so picky about your wiki. From the same page:

"Women were banned [from the choir] by the Pauline dictum mulieres in ecclesiis taceant ("let women keep silent in church"; see I Corinthians, ch 14, v 34)."

Castrati were a mere replacement for the higher-registered, more beautiful female voices. Here is the recording you referenced, of Alessandro Moreschi in 1902. There are reasons the castrati are no longer the stars they were, even aside from the freakishness of the practise, which have to do with a more modern taste in classical voices. Though these days sometimes they hide even from themselves.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Grace is valued in football, it is after all the beautiful game.

Thats right.

You can't dive without grace.

Following the cricket?

Fuck off and die.







(Crawls away to weep.)

To be honest I'm kind of glad England won with Freddie retiring and all. Shit I can't believe I just said that.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Marathon swimming comes to mind.

The woman who has swum the Channel most times is a woman. The man who holds the record for the quickest crossing is a man. This also applies to crossings the other way, two way crossings, three way crossings and four way crossings.

Maybe I should have said ultra marathon swimming.

[barracuda]

The ugly side of Semenya gender saga

Caster Semenya is too ugly to be a woman.

That's not the only issue in the complicated story of Caster Semenya, but it's the main issue. Nobody thinks she's too fast in the 800 meters -- which she won by almost 20 meters a few days ago at the world championships -- to be a woman. She didn't break the world record, so it's not like she's too good.


Caster Semenya did not set any records while winning the 800 in Berlin. (AP)
 
She's just too ugly.

Close your eyes and picture her as Naomi Campbell, or better yet, as former 800 world-record holder Mary Decker. She's still running the 800 in 1 minute, 55.45 seconds, still winning the world title by an enormous margin. But if the face that crossed the finish line first were beautiful, there would be no outrage here, because her winning time and even her margin of victory were plausible. Remarkable -- but plausible.

On a prettier woman.

But Caster Semenya is fast and dominant and she's not what the world would call beautiful. So that's the answer: She's guilty of some form of gender cheating. How do we know? Because she's too ugly to be a woman.

The world is thinking that, and you know it.

And the heartbreaking thing is this:

She knows it, too.

Heartbreaking. Even if she's guilty of doping, of ingesting so many anabolic steroids or so much testosterone that she has morphed into something between male and female, it's heartbreaking. Cheaters -- if that's what she is, and I don't think she is -- have a lot coming to them in the form of ridicule and scorn, but they don't have this coming to them. The world calls you a cheater, and that's justice. The world thinks you're hideous? That's not justice. That's abject cruelty.

She's 18 years old. Good Lord, it's hard enough being 18 when you're considered attractive. Imagine being 18 and being told, basically, that you're too ugly to be a girl.

That's why this entire ordeal is a failure of epic proportions. Never mind that women have run the 800 faster than Semenya, whose 1:55.45 clocking isn't even one of the 10 fastest of all time. That's not the failure here. The failure is that, in this era of sporting fraudulence, we have taken our natural inclinations to be cynical and accusatory and morphed into a cold, callous pack of jackals.

I blame us for being so cruel, but I blame South African and international track authorities -- the International Association of Athletics Federation -- for letting it come to this. If there were questions about Semenya's gender, they should have been asked and answered before she raced. If she was female enough to enter the race, she should be female enough to win it. She didn't get any less feminine in the 1:55.45 it took her to win. Her gender never would have been questioned had she finished seventh, because she wasn't too ugly to enter the race. She was just too ugly to win it.

The issues here aren't just too sensitive to be debated in public; they're too complicated, too. The general population -- and believe me, I'm in this mix -- is simply not smart enough to understand this conversation, much less to engage in it. The easiest answers to digest intellectually would be either that 1) Semenya is a man hiding his current or former manhood or 2) she has taken gender-altering drugs that allow her to run with the power of a man.

Nobody thinks it's the first option. This isn't that scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, where the beautiful police detective has been stashing "Captain Winky" under her skirt. Nor is Semenya the track version of Renee Richards, who was born "Richard Raskind" but became Renee Richards -- and a top 20 professional tennis player -- after having a sex change in 1975.

The second option, about drugs, is a possibility. I can't pretend it's not. The coach of the South African track team is Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, who once coached the drug-riddled East German team. One of his athletes, shot-putter Heidi Krieger, was so masculinized that she underwent sex reassignment surgery and now lives as a man named Andreas Krieger.

The Telegraph of London reported Monday that tests on Semenya have shown her to have three times the normal female level of testosterone, which isn't as damning as it sounds. The typical man has 40 or even 60 times the amount of testosterone as the typical woman, so Semenya is hardly "manly" from a chemical standpoint.

More to the point, world-class female athletes tend to have elevated levels of testosterone. Naturally gifted athletes, male or female, are born with elevated levels of something, somewhere. It's why they're "naturally gifted." Unless Semenya has become a years-long science project for Arbeit, it's inconceivable that she could consume enough steroids or testosterone to be transformed by age 18 into the next Heidi/Andreas Krieger.

The truth is probably somewhere else, and again, the search for it is complicated. The New York Times commissioned a Northwestern University bioethicist to write an essay on the Semenya matter under the headline, "Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification?" Almost 900 words later, I still don't know where the damn rulebook is. I don't even know what was in those 900 words. All that discussion of genes and chromosomes and hormones, not to mention the size of an enlarged clitoris, sailed over my head, and I'm a semi-intelligent person trying to understand.

People congregating on the Internet sacrifice their intelligence at the altar of groupthink, where nobody even wants to understand. They get off on being vicious and cruel, which is what's happening here with Caster Semenya. People don't understand the science behind her physiology, but they understand this: She's not very feminine, and she is very fast. Conclusion: She's too ugly to be a woman.

People are saying it. The IAAF is investigating it. If she wants to keep her gold medal, Semenya will have to undergo a series of humiliating tests to prove she's womanly enough. A week ago her name was unknown outside her village in South Africa. Today she's famous. Thanks to the bumbling of South African and IAAF authorities, the world knows her as the ugly trackling -- the girl who is too ugly to be a girl.

Everywhere, people are laughing.

Somewhere in South Africa, a little girl is probably crying.

[lucky]

News just in..... x3 the normal levels of testosterone in woman....

[barracuda]

But what does that mean in terms of eligibility, lucky? From the article I posted above:

The Telegraph of London reported Monday that tests on Semenya have shown her to have three times the normal female level of testosterone, which isn't as damning as it sounds. The typical man has 40 or even 60 times the amount of testosterone as the typical woman, so Semenya is hardly "manly" from a chemical standpoint.

[Stephen Morgan]

Marathon swimming comes to mind.

The woman who has swum the Channel most times is a woman. The man who holds the record for the quickest crossing is a man. This also applies to crossings the other way, two way crossings, three way crossings and four way crossings.

Maybe I should have said ultra marathon swimming.

Four times across the Channel would be upwards of eighty miles, even at it's narrowest point. How ultra are we talking?

[barracuda]

Perhaps Joe means someone like Tammy Van Wisse.

[Stephen Morgan]

barracuda: See: Floor Exercise, a sport in which women vastly outperform the men. I would say that generally when women are superior at an athletic activity, it has been called something other than sport. Dance, in one instance. Sport culminates in art, but for dance that is the starting point.

Things aren't called sports when they can't be measured accurately and therefore used in competition. And saying women are better at the floor exercise is like saying women are more attractive than men, because I never want to have sex with men.

One of Nijinsky's fabled feats was his ability to dance en pointe, an ability which until then had been thought to be available only to women. My point was that at least part of his legendary ability was being able to physically do something that was a commonplace amongst female dancers. There are dances which call for male pointe work, but the weight of the male makes injuries much more prevalent and dangerous, another reason there is no male analogue for the prima.

Yeah, being heavier makes pointe work more difficult, but then there are ballet moves which require female dancers to be lifted into the air, in this case you aren't mentioning that most female dancers would be incapable of lifting their male opposite numbers, while men have never been incapable of pointe work, only disinclined as choreographers have seen it as a more effeminate style.

Castrati were a mere replacement for the higher-registered, more beautiful female voices. Here is the recording you referenced, of Alessandro Moreschi in 1902. There are reasons the castrati are no longer the stars they were, even aside from the freakishness of the practise, which have to do with a more modern taste in classical voices. Though these days sometimes they hide even from themselves.

The castrati are no more mostly because even the Catholic church realised sexually mutilating youngsters might not be a massively good idea. An example of the marketplace of ideas: no-one wants to be in a religion where that sort of thing happens to your kids. As for more beautiful female voices, it's imply not the case. And I find this orchid-supremacism deeply offensive.

[barracuda]

[Things aren't called sports when they can't be measured accurately and therefore used in competition. And saying women are better at the floor exercise is like saying women are more attractive than men, because I never want to have sex with men.

That's ridiculous. All sorts of sports rely upon judges and officials to make decisions based upon opinion which determine the outcome of the event, even your footie. And please don't tell me about your personal sexual preferences in the context of this discussion. Yuck-o.

Yeah, being heavier makes pointe work more difficult, but then there are ballet moves which require female dancers to be lifted into the air, in this case you aren't mentioning that most female dancers would be incapable of lifting their male opposite numbers, while men have never been incapable of pointe work, only disinclined as choreographers have seen it as a more effeminate style.

But men, while having the capacity to perform pointe in a limited way, are much more prone to injury by the practice. And there is nothing inherently more or less feminine about standing upon one's tiptoes, is there Stephen? Once again, my point is that men have a variety of physical limitations which are athletically surpassed by the innate physical superiority of women in these areas. And like Nijinsky, men tend to feminize themselves to compensate and compete.

The castrati are no more mostly because even the Catholic church realised sexually mutilating youngsters might not be a massively good idea. An example of the marketplace of ideas: no-one wants to be in a religion where that sort of thing happens to your kids.

It's nice to see you concede a point here, that is, that the primary reason for the use of castrati in the choir was because of a traditional restrictive policy against women by the church.

As for more beautiful female voices, it's simply not the case. And I find this orchid-supremacism deeply offensive.

It's difficult for me to put my sorrow and regret here into words. A song and a smiley will have to suffice:

[Joe Hillshoist]

Marathon swimming comes to mind.

The woman who has swum the Channel most times is a woman. The man who holds the record for the quickest crossing is a man. This also applies to crossings the other way, two way crossings, three way crossings and four way crossings.

Maybe I should have said ultra marathon swimming.

Four times across the Channel would be upwards of eighty miles, even at it's narrowest point. How ultra are we talking?

Pretty much what 'cuda said.

I was thinking of Tammy Van Wisse and Susie Maroney specifically.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The ugly side of Semenya gender saga

Caster Semenya is too ugly to be a woman.

That's not the only issue in the complicated story of Caster Semenya, but it's the main issue. Nobody thinks she's too fast in the 800 meters -- which she won by almost 20 meters a few days ago at the world championships -- to be a woman. She didn't break the world record, so it's not like she's too good.

Brilliant article 'cuda, thanks for finding it.

It nails the whole debacle for what it is.

(BTW If Mary Decker is a standard for beauty then this whole argument disappeared up its own arse ages ago. Whinging over rated loser that she was.)

[OP ED]

i've been outrun by uglier women before.