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 gull80
In the first place, there are not a lot of these (where do you get your information?),
Mea culpa for using a subjective term like "a lot", in any case the number is irrelevant to the logic of the argument.
and second what we're really debating are the "gender dysphoric" individuals who decide as adults to undergo the procedure (rather than pseudohermaphrodites).
As I've said before, the argument that whether a person has XX or XY chromosomes is the one and only factor that ought to be considered is saying that a person whose sex is reassigned at birth, and has not undergone any of the typical male developmental changes that lead to male advantages in post-adolescent swimmers but still has XY chomosomes, should none the less swim according to their chromosomes. This is logically inconsistant with the claim that females should not have to compete with males due to their disadvantage as the person whose sex was reassigned at birth has the same disadvantages. I therefore assert that chomosomes are not of themselves a sufficient basis for the decision.
The IOC policy uses case-by-case evaluation to determine which sex a post-pubescent transexual competitor should compete in. Either one objects to the post-pubescent qualification or one believes that there should be an absolute rule rather than a case-by-case evaluation to determine whether an advantage actually exists. This argument says that actual advantage is irrelevant, undermining the rational for the original male/female distinction.
As for minimzing the role of chromosomes ("Chromosomes play no role in the act of moving through water"), read On Human Nature by Edward O. Wlison, a professor at Harvard.
Wilson deals with the effect of genes on human nature, what I asserted was that the genes themselves do not directly (i.e. physically) help you swim (microscopic strands of DNA internal to cells that they are) but indirectly through the changes they cause in the body. The outcrop of this logic is that it is better to base decisions directly on whether the advantage actually developed. One could argue that the advantages endowed by XY chromosomes extend into the mental realm, but I'm certainly not going to!
Originally posted by gull80
In the first place, there are not a lot of these (where do you get your information?),
Mea culpa for using a subjective term like "a lot", in any case the number is irrelevant to the logic of the argument.
and second what we're really debating are the "gender dysphoric" individuals who decide as adults to undergo the procedure (rather than pseudohermaphrodites).
As I've said before, the argument that whether a person has XX or XY chromosomes is the one and only factor that ought to be considered is saying that a person whose sex is reassigned at birth, and has not undergone any of the typical male developmental changes that lead to male advantages in post-adolescent swimmers but still has XY chomosomes, should none the less swim according to their chromosomes. This is logically inconsistant with the claim that females should not have to compete with males due to their disadvantage as the person whose sex was reassigned at birth has the same disadvantages. I therefore assert that chomosomes are not of themselves a sufficient basis for the decision.
The IOC policy uses case-by-case evaluation to determine which sex a post-pubescent transexual competitor should compete in. Either one objects to the post-pubescent qualification or one believes that there should be an absolute rule rather than a case-by-case evaluation to determine whether an advantage actually exists. This argument says that actual advantage is irrelevant, undermining the rational for the original male/female distinction.
As for minimzing the role of chromosomes ("Chromosomes play no role in the act of moving through water"), read On Human Nature by Edward O. Wlison, a professor at Harvard.
Wilson deals with the effect of genes on human nature, what I asserted was that the genes themselves do not directly (i.e. physically) help you swim (microscopic strands of DNA internal to cells that they are) but indirectly through the changes they cause in the body. The outcrop of this logic is that it is better to base decisions directly on whether the advantage actually developed. One could argue that the advantages endowed by XY chromosomes extend into the mental realm, but I'm certainly not going to!
