Tag Archives: testosterone

Testosterone, Testing, and Terrible Decisions

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Imane Khelif

Laurie and Debbie say:

The testosterone police have been around in sports for many decades, and they are always most toxically active around the Olympics. This year, the athlete they wanted to make into a victim was Imane Khelif. Greg Beacham, writing for the AP Wire, says:

Khelif was assigned female at birth and it says so on her passport, which is the International Olympic Committee’s threshold for eligibility for boxing because of the rift between the sport’s governing body and the IOC.

Khelif is a formidable athlete with respected fighting skills, contending in top international events — including major amateur boxing tournaments over the past six years, such as the Tokyo Olympics. She’s won a few regional gold medals.

Her gender has only been questioned by an extremely dubious Russian sports policing body, which even the gender-obsessed International Olympic Committee despises. Nonetheless, her gold medal became a viral source of controversy with “experts” like J.K. Rowling and Megyn Kelly feeling fully qualified to dispute Khelif’s win and to describe her as “trans,” which is both inaccurate and dangerous, as being trans is illegal in Algeria.

Castor Semenya looking victorioous after a race
Castor Semenya

We have been writing about testosterone in sports since 2016, particularly here, here, and here. These articles generally focus on Dutee Chand (from India) and Castor Semenya (from South Africa). Here’s the brilliant Elizabeth Adetiba writing about Semenya in 2020:

Based on the tones of disgust used to discuss her physicality, one might think that Semenya is the only runner to ever possess a body that so greatly differed from everyone else’s in the field. It seems the sports world has forgotten the peculiarities of Ira Murchison’s stocky, 5’4 frame, which earned him both the nickname “Human Sputnik” and an Olympic gold medal in the 4×100. Or that world record-holder Usain Bolt was taller with longer legs than any of his competitors.

Unlike those men, Semenya’s body is often deemed unwanted and out of place, most notoriously by her sport’s governing body.

To be clear, none of Khelif, Semenya, Chand, and most of the other athletes in these stories are transgender. All of them are “women,” by which we mean that they were assigned female at birth, that they have always thought of themselves as women, that their birth certificates, their families, and their countries all see them as women. Only the mostly male, mostly white arbiters of the Olympics and other sports have the temerity and cruelty to question these simple identifications.

Christine Mboma, from Namibia, is one of the newer additions to the ranks of Semenya and Chand.

In 2021, the 18-year-old set an unratified world under-20 and African senior record of 48.54 s in the 400 metres, which made her the seventh-fastest woman of all time at the event. The mark was established in June, while Mboma had previously twice broken a world U20 record in April of that year.

Prior to the Tokyo Games, World Athletics had announced that Mboma and fellow Namibian sprinter Beatrice Masilingi would not be allowed to compete under the female classification in events between 400 metres and one mile due to its regulations on testosterone levels for athletes with XY disorders of sex development.

That unreasonable limitation was later extended to preventing Mboma from running at all unless she took testosterone reducing drugs, which she has elected to do rather than lose the discipline she loves.

An interesting contrast here is the late 1990s story of “male” athlete Chris Boardman.

In 1998 Tour de France, when the Tour began in Dublin, Ireland, Boardman won the prologue, but this time crashed out of the race on stage 2. In 1998 he was diagnosed with osteopenia due to low testosterone levels. Treatment to prevent a worsening of his condition would have required him to take testosterone, which is banned under anti-doping rules. The UCI refused to allow Boardman an exemption on medical grounds. Faced with either retiring to allow treatment for his osteoporosis, or continuing to cycle without taking testosterone, Boardman chose to continue in cycling untreated for a further two years, hoping to finish his career on a high note at the 2000 Summer Olympics.

Most of the victims of the ridiculous testosterone rulings are Black and Brown women, which makes Boardman’s case particularly interesting. Khelif, Semenya, Mboma, and so many others are punished for having naturally high testosterone. Boardman was punished for having naturally low testosterone. Just as Mboma has been forced to choose between taking medication she does not need or giving up running, Boardman was forced to choose between foregoing medicine he did need or giving up cycling.

Chris Boardman

The entire process is free of facts and data, and is simply powerful petty people exerting control over people who can do things the arbiters can’t do, like win medals. In an ideal world, testosterone levels would simply not be a factor in athletic competition, and everyone would acknowledge that there are no bright lines around gender and people should compete against the group most suited to their skill level. Until we reach that ideal world, however, we advocate for setting a single level of testosterone for people of all genders, and making no differentiation between unnaturally high testosterone in “women” and “men.”

For more on the whole sordid history and complex picture of gender in sports, check out our articles linked above, and also the CBC podcast series Tested, which brought Mboma to our attention. And thanks to Stef Schwartz for the Boardman story, which helps clarify just how inutterably stupid and cruel the entire testosterone-level standard game is.

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Men Making Women’s Decisions: In Person, In Sport, In Politics

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Laurie and Debbie say:
..

We started with a story we found on Twitter. Here’s Meg Elison, author of (among other books), the highly-recommended The Book of the Unnamed Midwife:

Motherfucker comes to my table, unbidden. I assume he’s a waiter; he’s not. I’m having a drink and a snack. I look up and he’s got Fake Concern Face on. Without preamble he says, “If you took better care of yourself, you’d find somebody to love you.”

She shows off her wedding ring, gives him the finger and tells him to Leave Her Alone. But he can’t.

“I didn’t mean anything offensive by it. I just think we have these moments of clarity–“

I tell him if he needs to make a fat girl cry so he can have something to jack off to, then he better pay by the minute for it because there are professionals who provide that service. I am not one of them, and this is not an appropriate place to solicit me.

We’ve heard, and made, some pretty tough comebacks in our time, but this is one of the truest ones ever.

He still can’t leave, but she finishes him off:

He has the NERVE to “Namaste” me as he slinks out of this place where I was having a peaceful moment by myself. Friends, I yelled GO FUCK YOURSELF at his cringing back.

She also makes it completely clear that she was shaking and rattled, because she was verbally assaulted with no provocation. And you just know that guy went home and felt sorry for … himself. The best part is that he may never do that to anyone again.

He’s a small-time, basically trivial, example of a man thinking he both knows what’s best for a woman he doesn’t know, and that he has the right to interrupt her life to give her the benefit of his wisdom.

He matters for two reasons: first, because there are millions of him all over the country and the world, trying to make fat girls cry. Second, because he’s an individual example of wielding toxic societal power.

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Who do you think made the decision to turn down Castor Semenya’s appeal regarding women and testosterone in Olympic sports? The Court of Arbitration for Sport, which (if you can tell by names) is definitely majority male. They made this decision even though they know it’s difficult, if not impossible to implement. They also ruled that athletes who wish to compete in women’s events, but whose testosterone is over an arbitrary level, will have to take drugs to reduce those levels. The World Medical Association has urged its members in 114 countries not to cooperate with this:

We have strong reservations about the ethical validity of these regulations. They are based on weak evidence from a single study, which is currently being widely debated by the scientific community. They are also contrary to a number of key WMA ethical statements and declarations, and as such we are calling for their immediate withdrawal.

But again, men not only feel they can make decisions on women’s bodies, they are formally authorized to make those decisions, and they don’t have to respond to, for example, doctors who think their decisions are unsafe and unethical.

For some history on this controversy, read this post from about a year ago. We hoped things would get better after that.

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Ohio state representative John Becker, however, has managed to outdo both random San Francisco harassers and Court of Arbitration biased judges with his proposed “anti-abortion” bill. Ohio already has one of the most restrictive laws in the country (miserably superseded in the last week or so by Georgia’s indefensible law), but it isn’t enough for Mr. Becker, who wants to eliminate rape and incest exceptions, and also (while claiming this isn’t what he means) ban most forms of birth control. But then he completely loses touch with any reality:

The bill excludes treatments for ectopic pregnancies from the insurance coverage ban, which seems like a good thing—we should try to treat ectopic pregnancies!—until you realize that Becker’s notion of treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is fucking nonsense: “Part of that treatment would be removing the embryo from the fallopian tube and then reinserting it in the uterus so that’s defined as not an abortion under this bill,” Becker said.

The bill says the term “nontherapeutic abortion” does not include a “procedure for an ectopic pregnancy, that is intended to re-implant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman’s uterus.” Presumably, Becker envisions a world where doctors are trying to “fix” ectopic pregnancies by reinserting wayward embryos into the pregnant person’s uterus.

Except that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

“That doesn’t exist in the realm of treatment for ectopic pregnancy. You can’t just re-implant. It’s not a medical thing,” said Miracle.

Mr. Becker doesn’t, it would seem, know what a woman’s anatomy looks like, let alone what can and can’t be done medically, surgically, or even magically. All he knows is that “he’s no expert” but he is willing to try to convince his fellow legislators (most of whom are almost certainly men) that they all know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” and are more than proud of themselves for exercising their power on the living bodies of the women they feel compelled to control.

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Men aren’t going to stop tormenting women in restaurants, telling women whether or not we are women, or telling women what we can, or can’t, do with our own bodies, any time soon. So let’s all take up Meg Elison’s rallying cry and stand up against them.