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."
Former Member
Originally posted by SWinkleblech
It is a known fact that woman and men are built different. Have you ever done the chair test. If you lean against a wall with your head against it, lift the chair, and then try and stand up straight. Most men can not stand up. Why? Because mens equalibriam(or whatever the word is) is different from a womans. Men are more built to do heavy work while a woman is built to have babies. As a woman I hate admitting that a man is stronger but you just can't argue a fact. Yes some stronger woman can beat some men, but if you put the strongest woman against the strongest man the man would win. That being said I will say that a man may be stronger in body but a woman is stronger in mind.
Hi Shannan, I absolutely agree that the average man is stronger than the average woman and that the best male swimmers are faster than the best women swimmers. No argument at all. These are matters of fact. The issue I am trying to press is that if one believes that people need to be of equal size and strength for a competition to be fair then the entire world of swimming competition is unfair, and it is disengenuous (perhaps even unfair? :)) to only apply this standard of fairness to transexuals and not to everyone else.
Ok, I'll bite here....if competition is so unfair and disingenuous, what is your ideal vision of competition? Should men and woman compete in the same events? Should man (humans) race against animals and swim against fish? Gosh, PETA thinks lab rats have the same rights as humans, so, should we compete with lab rodents, fish, foul and anything else to make sure your idea of fair is practiced. Or, should we come to our senses and realize that the basic foundation of competition is found partly in luck (our body through genes), hard work, determination, skill and dedication?
Heck, if I am to embrace your thoughts on what is a fair competition, Mr. Moose and I are going to the Olympic Trials…..heck, sign us up!
LindsayNB writes “Out of curiosity, 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?”
Now which “You” are you, Linsday, referring to? Is it the hypothetical transsexual, Connie, the other readers of this post, or the world in general?
I’ll admit that when I read “the world doesn't think much of your nation now does it?” that I inferred the “your” was “USA”, but I now understand that was not your intent.
Originally posted by Conniekat8
Cause the audience being addressed is in US, large majority, so when one adresses an audience of, let's say, Latvians, and they refer to "Your Country" that carries an implied meaning of "the country that you people are from".
It was clear to me he wasn't using "your" to refer to the US. I can see how others might see it differently and can accept the different perspective. I thought your average person would see it the same as I.
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?
I seriously doubt anyone would undergo a "sex reassignment" operation (Dr. Renee Richards' terminology) for the sole purpose of achieving athletic success. The sheer magnitude of the whole ordeal dwarfs the relative simplicity of taking a performance enhancing drug. That having been said, this debate would have more validity if the operation did in fact result in a true change of sex.
Originally posted by LindsayNB
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.
The difference is that one can be defined easily while the other can't.
When you compare women to one another, the first question is what characteristics you should compare. Is height the important thing? Or weight? Or physical strength? And how many categories do you create? And where do you place the boundaries? You also have the problem that some of these things can be changed by training. So should somebody be placed in a different competition category just because they didn't train as hard as somebody else?
Comparing men to women, on the other hand, is black and white. You're either one or the other (so there are, by definition, only two categories and only one clearly defined boundary), and there is a whole set of physiological differences that go along with which one you are. We don't need to concern ourselves with what those differences are, or which ones matter, or whether they are an advantage or a disadvantage, because they are all inextricably connected.
Now, will a typical man-who-becomes-a-woman have an advantage over a woman who has an unusually high amount of strength and bulkiness for her sex? Perhaps not. But will a typical man-who-becomes-a-woman have an advantage over a typical woman? It sure looks that way! And will man who has an unusually high amount of strength and bulkiness for his sex, and who then becomes a woman, have an advantage over a woman who has an unusually high amount of strength and bulkiness for her sex? Once again, it sure looks that way!
I certainly don't think that someone should be barred from the Olympics just because they have had a sex change operation, but I agree with Renee Richards that the decision about which sex they should compete with ought to be made on a case-by-case basis.
Originally posted by LindsayNB
I think that the way masters meets divide results by age group is a good thing, even in spite of the fact that there is no clear differentiation of ability in the middle age groups in many events.
No disagreement here. But it should be noted that one of the main values of dividing masters competitions into age groups is that it enables us to draw conclusions like "there is no clear differentiation of ability in the middle age groups in many events."
LindsayNB
"oops, the world doesn't think much of your nation now does it?"
Gosh, that depends on who you ask! If you ask some tin horn gangster nation that supports the slaughter of millions of people by providing terrorism bases, money, infrastructure and a safe haven, then yes, I guess our nation might not be so popular. Conversely, if you ask nations that value freedom, decency and democracy, then you will find our nation to be very popular. Heck, even the nations around the globe that the United States of America saved from the ravages of nazi Germany in WW 11 find us to be pretty good guys.
Your smug innuendo that our great nation is unpopular around the globe is off base….but then again, arguing the fairness of competition for the sake of argument is a tad off base as well…..
