Cut From Yahoo News:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Transsexuals were cleared Monday to compete in the Olympics for the first time.
Under a proposal approved by the IOC executive board, athletes who have undergone sex-change surgery will be eligible for the Olympics if their new gender has been legally recognized and they have gone through a minimum two-year period of postoperative hormone therapy.
The decision, which covers both male-to-female and female-to-male cases, goes into effect starting with the Athens Olympics in August.
The IOC had put off a decision in February, saying more time was needed to consider all the medical issues.
Some members had been concerned whether male-to-female transsexuals would have physical advantages competing against women.
Men have higher levels of testosterone and greater muscle-to-fat ratio and heart and lung capacity. However, doctors say, testosterone levels and muscle mass drop after hormone therapy and sex-change surgery.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said the situation of transsexuals competing in high-level sports was "rare but becoming more common."
IOC medical director Patrick Schamasch said no specific sports had been singled out by the ruling.
"Any sport may be touched by this problem," he said. "Until now, we didn't have any rules or regulations. We needed to establish some sort of policy."
Until 1999, the IOC conducted gender verification tests at the Olympics but the screenings were dropped before the 2000 Sydney Games.
One of the best known cases of transsexuals in sports involves Renee Richards, formerly Richard Raskind, who played on the women's tennis tour in the 1970s.
In March, Australia's Mianne Bagger became the first transsexual to play in a pro golf tournament.
Michelle Dumaresq, formerly Michael, has competed in mountain bike racing for Canada.
Richards, now a New York opthamologist, was surprised by the IOC decision and was against it. She said decisions on transsexuals should be made on an individual basis.
"Basically, I think they're making a wrong judgment here, although I would have loved to have that judgment made in my case in 1976," she said.
"They're probably looking for trouble down the line. There may be a true transsexual — not someone who's nuts and wants to make money — who will be a very good champion player, and it will be a young person, let's say a Jimmy Connors or a Tiger Woods, and then they'll have an unequal playing field.
"In some sports, the physical superiority of men over women is very significant."
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Originally posted by Conniekat8
I think you need to define fairness, as you see it, before you can logically continue the discussion that you're carrying on, and then discuss it within the defined parameters. If not, and you attempt to discuss fairness on a philosophical level, people are not necessarily respond on a philosophical level.
Hi Connie,
If you review my previous posts you will see that my position is that there is no reasonable definition of fairness that can simultaneously say that a man and a woman competing is unfair because of differences in size and strength while also saying that a bigger stronger woman competing with a smaller weaker woman is fair. I have asked repeatedly for someone to post such a definition and no one has obliged. My claim is therefore that people who claim that the one is unfair while claiming the other is fair are being logically inconsistant.
I can't recall their names off the top of my head, but I know there has been more than one top level athlete that has done this. I know one is a race car driver, who still has a ton of lucrative contracts and a very successful carreer.
I suspect that this race car driver changed sexes due to gender disphoria as I can see no advantage to changing sex in terms of driving races. I guess if it was a female to male change the hormones might result in greater strength. Or if women were excluded from competition this would allow them to compete at all. But neither consideration applies to the situation at hand as far as I can see. I am open to correction. I believe in the current context we are talking about changing sexes for the purpose of gaining competitive advantage, if that is the case in the instance you are citing I am genuinely curious to hear more.
As many as will not want to get entangled with ACLU and the legalities of discimination based on sex.
Unless a corporation was offering a blanket sponsorship to anyone who won a medal and made a specific exception there would be no basis for a lawsuit.
I t hink this is a huge leap of judgement here and a very loose assumption of what the world may or may not think. The assumption here is representative of your value system. I can't say that your personal value system is representative of the majority in the world.
If you can give an example of a nation that would assign prestige to another country that had athletes change sex for the purpose of winning a medal I might concede this point.
You asked how so....
Well, you picked a rather confrontational and sensitive subject to start with, and then you choose terms like sexism and discimination that coloquially tend to carry a lot of negative connotations, and you don't calrify that perhaps you're thinking on a philosophical level, most people tend to take the meanings of those words in their every day use.
And Ya gotta admit that you don't hear 'dicrimination' and 'sexism' in the positive context very often nowdays, so without a heavy disclaimer and explanation, most people will continue the patters they're used to, and see those words in their negative connotations.
Perhaps people are misunderstanding what you are trying to say?
I didn't start the discussion of transexuals in the Olympics.
The word sexism was introduced to the discussion by someone calling my statements sexist, I just pointed out that my statement wasn't sexist, just the opposite. I even pointed out that my use was "by definition" and went on to say that the discrimination was justified.
Some people are definitely misunderstanding what I am trying to say, and I take a certain amount of responsibility for sloppy wording. I put a lot of effort into trying to be clear and precise but it is extremely difficult to be completely unambiguous and in some cases people ridicule one for being too precise, e.g. naval gazing, violating common sense, wanting to go to ridiculous extents in the name of fairness, etc.
Out of curiousity, when you read my original post with the four points about how motivations were defeated, did you interpret the fourth point to be an attack on the USA? I still hold that in context, i.e. following the first three points, it is most naturally read that "your nation" refers to the nation of the person who has undergone the sex change not the nation of the reader, especially given the repetition of form in each point. If so, did you also interpret the you or your in the first three points to refer to the reader?
Originally posted by Conniekat8
I think you need to define fairness, as you see it, before you can logically continue the discussion that you're carrying on, and then discuss it within the defined parameters. If not, and you attempt to discuss fairness on a philosophical level, people are not necessarily respond on a philosophical level.
Hi Connie,
If you review my previous posts you will see that my position is that there is no reasonable definition of fairness that can simultaneously say that a man and a woman competing is unfair because of differences in size and strength while also saying that a bigger stronger woman competing with a smaller weaker woman is fair. I have asked repeatedly for someone to post such a definition and no one has obliged. My claim is therefore that people who claim that the one is unfair while claiming the other is fair are being logically inconsistant.
I can't recall their names off the top of my head, but I know there has been more than one top level athlete that has done this. I know one is a race car driver, who still has a ton of lucrative contracts and a very successful carreer.
I suspect that this race car driver changed sexes due to gender disphoria as I can see no advantage to changing sex in terms of driving races. I guess if it was a female to male change the hormones might result in greater strength. Or if women were excluded from competition this would allow them to compete at all. But neither consideration applies to the situation at hand as far as I can see. I am open to correction. I believe in the current context we are talking about changing sexes for the purpose of gaining competitive advantage, if that is the case in the instance you are citing I am genuinely curious to hear more.
As many as will not want to get entangled with ACLU and the legalities of discimination based on sex.
Unless a corporation was offering a blanket sponsorship to anyone who won a medal and made a specific exception there would be no basis for a lawsuit.
I t hink this is a huge leap of judgement here and a very loose assumption of what the world may or may not think. The assumption here is representative of your value system. I can't say that your personal value system is representative of the majority in the world.
If you can give an example of a nation that would assign prestige to another country that had athletes change sex for the purpose of winning a medal I might concede this point.
You asked how so....
Well, you picked a rather confrontational and sensitive subject to start with, and then you choose terms like sexism and discimination that coloquially tend to carry a lot of negative connotations, and you don't calrify that perhaps you're thinking on a philosophical level, most people tend to take the meanings of those words in their every day use.
And Ya gotta admit that you don't hear 'dicrimination' and 'sexism' in the positive context very often nowdays, so without a heavy disclaimer and explanation, most people will continue the patters they're used to, and see those words in their negative connotations.
Perhaps people are misunderstanding what you are trying to say?
I didn't start the discussion of transexuals in the Olympics.
The word sexism was introduced to the discussion by someone calling my statements sexist, I just pointed out that my statement wasn't sexist, just the opposite. I even pointed out that my use was "by definition" and went on to say that the discrimination was justified.
Some people are definitely misunderstanding what I am trying to say, and I take a certain amount of responsibility for sloppy wording. I put a lot of effort into trying to be clear and precise but it is extremely difficult to be completely unambiguous and in some cases people ridicule one for being too precise, e.g. naval gazing, violating common sense, wanting to go to ridiculous extents in the name of fairness, etc.
Out of curiousity, when you read my original post with the four points about how motivations were defeated, did you interpret the fourth point to be an attack on the USA? I still hold that in context, i.e. following the first three points, it is most naturally read that "your nation" refers to the nation of the person who has undergone the sex change not the nation of the reader, especially given the repetition of form in each point. If so, did you also interpret the you or your in the first three points to refer to the reader?
