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."
Originally posted by breastroker
4) What is to say a state sponsored program of genetically altered or surgically altered athletes start dominating sports events? First Germany, then China, it can happen again. How about webbed feet and fingers? Gills?
Yeah, a state sponsored transsexual program, that's a likely scenario.
It always amazes me that Christians who use the Bible as their basis for living and hold a view because of that are frequently called closed minded or bigots while those that don't have a well founded belief system are called progressive because "anything goes."
In the unlikely event a transsexual person ever makes the Olympics as a male/female or whatever they choose to call themselves, what are those of you without a Christian/religious faith planning on telling your children? Sure, you can explain we should love all but that ain't gonna cut it with a kid who wants to know why a man cut off his willie to swim with the girls.
"are you comfortable about a female to male transexual who has undergone months of (male) hormone therapy competing as a women?"
Lindsay, I am not comfortable with ANY of this.....I believe it blurs the natural order of things.
I wonder if all the trannsexual circumcision mutiliated Olympic calibre swimmers in the world are throwing a huge party now. There's got to be one somewhere, right?
Another question is how the public would react if a woman-who-used-to-be-a-man won a gold medal in a women's event, but clearly did not perform well enough to have won any kind of medal in the corresponding men's event.
Originally posted by Leonard Jansen
"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. " - Woody Allen
Every generation thinks that they live in bad times, just as every generation thinks that their children are hopelessly lost. Every generation is correct. But somehow, it all seems to continue and that is what is so fascinating.
-LBJ
At no other time on earth has a species had the capability of destroying the planet. We have weapons of mass destruction (if we can find where we hid them) and people who are willing to use them.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
MANY, MANY, MANY things will happen in this world my friend...but THAT is not one of them....
I moved up here so Mr. Moose and Ralph could enjoy the cold weather....
In our general area there is a swimmer who has undergone the change.
I've met her. She is very nice.
My observations on this are:
- A person who is likely to make this change is probably not going to be doing it while they are peaking as a potential olympic athlete. It's very unlikely that a psycologysts would agree that the maturity level at that age 18-25 is there to be making that kind of a life decision.
- Seeing just a glimpse of what this woman has gone throug, the toll on the body and the psyche is tremendous, and I seriously doubt that anyone can maintain the peak level of physical fitness and mental composure needed to be an world class athlete.
- and if in spite of it all, they do manage to maintain the world class athlete status, then they deserve it, no matter what gender category they compete in.
- I think our medicine is advanced enough to be able to objsetively determine whether someone's physical abilities are closer to that of a male or a female, and what category they'd belong to, to be in fair competition.
- Having met this woman... On the personal level, once we all ghet past the curiosity and the novelty, trust me, you get over the discomforts or the prejudioces that you may initially feel. We all need to back off the streotypes, and deal with the people on a more personal level, get to know them before you judge them.
- Yes, it is odd and unusual, and it takes adjustment on our part to learn how to deal with it. Trust me, they don't bite and they're not bad people. If anything, they have a lot more turmoil in their lives dealing with what they're dealing with on daily basis that nay of us will have by meeting them or spending a few hours in their presence.
Get over the taboo, and look at it little more clinically. Look at the medical information on gender, and see just how many people get born with genetical goofups and gender bending anomalies... Be it physical, be it hormonal. A lot more than publically dare to admit to.
Medically, gender is not always as clear cut as public at large would like to think.
And for those who say it's not natural, it isn't so. There are lot of imperfect things in nature, and nothing is clear cut black and white, as we would like to think it is... I suppose to help us deal with the uncertainties, we want to categorize and compartmentalize people and things... and those that don't fit, make us nervous. But that's not the fault of the 'unfitting' that we can't figure out how to classify them.
It's okay, our instincts have hard wired us to gravitate away from the anomalies, that's nature's way of ensuring the survival of the fittest, and the contunuation of the species with the best gene pool available. For most people it's extremely difficult to reconcile those realities with the existance of humanities, as they understand them. Boils dow to, even though we would like to think we're an evolved 'human' (whatever that means) society, we're still very much driven by a lot of natural instincts that evolved ffrom the begining of time.
this whole discussion made me think of couple of books:
"Male and Female Realities: Understanding the opposite sex" By Joe Tanenbaum
and
"Shadows of forgotten ancestors" By Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
There's another book sitting on my desk right now waiting it's turn to be read, by Richard Dawkins "The selfish gene"
There's no 'order' in nature, it's a self guided chaos, much like fractals are. As for the 'order of things in nature' it is by large a religious invention, much like society moralities and the commandments etc are... inventions to maximize societies chance of survival. But don't mix up the religious (mostly christian) meaning of 'natural' with what nature really - scientifically is. It's not the same thing.
And before get up in arms because things I said may conflict with your beliefs and get you all irritated and up in arms, I'm not pro or against any of this. Those things exist, regardless of how You or I feel about them, and there is a place for it all, the religion, the society and how it functions, the prejudices, the humanities, the anomalies etc.
Well, that's just my opinion.
I forgot who said this, but I really see it as a very appropriate quote for the moment: "Seek to understand before you judge"
well, this is the place I was able to fond it first:
www.one-world.org/.../logic.html
