# General Discussion > Opinions >  Should there be a testosterone limit for participation in female sports events

## Angela

I can believe this is even a thing, to be honest. The fact that people actually think there shouldn't be shows such cognitive dissonance in my opinion.

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## bicicleur

there is a female athlete who is forced to take medication to diminish her natural testosterone level, and it reduces her performances

either you must say this female is not a woman, or you don't impose this on her

what about all these transgenders?
oh, this will become a mess..

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## [email protected]

I suppose this raises the obvious question of why sports are segregated based on sex (or gender). I know that otherwise men would generally out perform women, but tall men generally out perform short men in foot races, yet we don't segregate them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to change anything, but if we're going to play gender games we have to live with the consequences.

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## bicicleur

> I suppose this raises the obvious question of why sports are segregated based on sex (or gender). I know that otherwise men would generally out perform women, but tall men generally out perform short men in foot races, yet we don't segregate them. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to change anything, but if we're going to play gender games we have to live with the consequences.


tennis players are becoming taller lately
I guess there would be no interest in watching tennis competitions for men exclusively with restricted heigth
it's simply not the same specatcle nor performance

in soccer you can have a mix of different types of players
when the ball is in the air, being tall is an abvious advantage,
but when the ball is on the ground, shorter men prove to be more agile

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## Angela

This all arose because of a recent race where it was disclosed that the first three runners have genetic abnormalities, i.e. male levels of testosterone.

The winner, Caster Semenya, is not XX. She is XY . She has no uterus or ovaries, and male levels of testosterone. Instead she has undescended testes.

What the hell is this person doing competing in a women's event?



The whole idea of Title IX was to create equal sports opportunities for women. Let's be serious: if all teams included both men and women, extraordinarily few women would get to compete. 

In the interests of full disclosure, I'm the mother of an extremely athletic daughter: golf, tennis, swimming, skiing teams, high school and college. She beats most men she meets handily at all of them, but at higher level regional competition it's extremely unlikely she'd be on some of the teams if this were permitted, and if she were, she would get very little play time. 

It's absolutely not fair to most women.

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## [email protected]

Angela, I don't disagree. I don't want to change anything. But . . . if we agree that you are what you say you are, male, female, trans-m/f, and so forth (as we seem to do, at least at the Twitter level), then sports would have to change. I think it's crazy, but again I'm an old man and I can be expected to find a whole lot of crazy in this brave new world.

My children are both sons. My youngest is in the Army and I'm unhappy that we've decided, as an equality issue, that women should be on the front line in combat, in the infantry, facing hand-to-hand combat.

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## bicicleur

the thing is, IAAF introduced new rules only last year and it only applies for 800 - 1500 m races, they are not universal

IAAF does 'sex verification tests', but it is not known what criteria are used

it is all very shady

and what will they do with transgenders in the future?
it would be much better to have clear criteria now instead of improvising once these problems will arise
they don't have the guts to make clear rules as they are afraid to upset the transgender community and they will be acused of being discriminatory

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## Angela

Well, I don't give a darn whom I upset, as usual. :) That goes double for the twitter mobs, who absolutely do not represent most people in this country.

I don't care what people think they are in terms of gender. Whether I think some of them are just people who are mentally disturbed is a whole other issue. If someone wants to undergo surgery and take hormones to become another sex, and can find a doctor to do it, go ahead. I certainly don't believe in taking away their rights, and they should be treated with respect. 

However, one of the operative words here is hormones. They take hormones to change their sex.

If you're in a physical competition like a sport, and want to participate in a woman's competition, and you have male levels of testosterone, you should be disqualified. 

I feel about the army the way that I feel about professions like the police forces and firefighters. I absolutely do not believe, and this is after working with female police officers, that the rules should be changed to get more "equality" of numbers. If you want to be a firefighter, you should be able to carry a 200 pound person down the stairs of a burning building. To be in the police, there were always height, weight, fitness requirements (tests) which you had to pass, you should be able to take down a 200 pound man who is resisting arrest, or trying to kill you, run down young, spry people, be a good marksman, and of course pass all the psychological tests. If you can't do it, man or woman, you shouldn't be on the police forces. Watering down the requirements leads to more danger for not only civilians but fellow officers. 

Feminist ideology has no business in this. These are areas where reason, logic, and the greater good must prevail. 

As for fighting on the front lines, my opinion is the same.

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## Salento

@Angela 
*Only 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 80% of all tweets, new report find
*

_... If you needed any more evidence that Twitter doesn’t quite represent reality, a new study can help ..._

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...qji-story.html

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## Regio X

> However, one of the operative words here is hormones. They take hormones to change their sex.


But the hormones don't do a perfect job, of course, neither undo certain traits already formed.
Also, some women (men), in sports, take hormonal inhibitors, but in fact it doesn't matter that much, 'cause they grew up, their bodies formed, under male hormones. For example, it's the case of Tifanny (Rodrigo de Abreu), a Brazilian volleyball player who apparently takes inhibitors, but she (he) did the surgery at 30 years old, so her (his) body is masculine.

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## Angela

Yes, well, that's hardly the case with someone who has been XY since conception, and producing testosterone over a life time, with the only difference that his testicles didn't descend. 

Nor does the fact that high levels of testosterone don't completely do the job mean that they don't have some effect. We're not talking about these "altered" men competing against unaltered "men". We're talking about them competing against unaltered women.

Given that these are all talented athletes who have been training for most of their lives. would anyone really like to wager that those Eastern Bloc "women" athletes of the 70s and 80s would have been as effective against women athletes with normal levels of hormones if the eastern block athletes didn't have all that testosterone and steroids? Believe me, doing the Breast stroke and the Butterfly for hundreds of laps almost daily does increase shoulder and chest size even in normal women. My daughter had a big decision to make as she got into regionals, but not like this. 






Let's also not forget that a lot of them were put on these additives as children or in early adolescence, and no concern for the possible health consequences.

East German team at one point. "Females", supposedly.

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## bigsnake49

I am all for open competition based on skill/performance level. Men and women and transgender can participate in the same race/competition. So you could have a 100m dash that has lower performance men and higher perfrormance women, Let's say people that have run from 10.9-11.2 secs in the past.

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## Angela

Great. So, no room for women athletes at the highest levels. I give up.

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## bigsnake49

> Great. So, no room for women athletes at the highest levels. I give up.


I don't see any woman running 9.58 sec/100m lately, have you? The world record for women is 10.49 so even the fastest women could not compete with the fastest HS athletes in Florida.

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## Angela

> I don't see any woman running 9.58 sec/100m lately, have you? The world record for women is 10.49 so even the fastest women could not compete with the fastest HS athletes in Florida.


That's exactly my point.

Title IX was passed in the U.S. to provide funds for all women's teams at high school and college levels so that girls and women would also be able to compete athletically. If they had had to qualify for men's teams the vast majority would be completely shut out.

Believe it or not there are girls and women who like to play sports, at a highly trained level, and not settle for being cheerleaders for men. United States legislators agreed. 

If you're not interested in watching women's soccer, for example, or volleyball, or basketball, or tennis, then don't. Let women who want to compete at that level and people who want to watch it do so.

Don't ruin it by letting actual men compete and ruining the whole process.

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## Regio X

@Angela
Since my English sucks, it's possible I didn't fully understand your answer. It's also possible I didn't express myself correctly.
I was in agreement. The "but" was directed to the idea that hormones may change/reverse the complexion to the point to equal the (ex-)man to a (XX) woman. Then I suggested that they have to take inhibitors to compete among women, yes, however, they generally grow up as men, which is enough to cause an "imbalance".

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## Ygorcs

I think this is an issue that must be really deeply investigated further and ultimately, I believe, fairness will dictate that generalized rules won't do and we'll probably need an individual analysis varying from one case to another, because it's really complex. The reaction of the body to the hormones varies, the age in which the person started taking hormones blockers has a real impact, and so on. Even for the very same person, such as the Brazilian player Tiffany which Regio X talks of, there are controversies and different opinions even among experts. Some scholars claim that the prolonged action of "feminine" hormones take away all the extra strength and resistance of the muscles, so the trans women eventually turn to be within the possible range of cisgender women, and we know that very often the skull structure of men and women does not in fact vary that much (our sexual dimorphism is mostly muscular, not in the skull, though men's tend to be taller and a bit broader), to the point that mislabeling of the sex of individuals in archaeological findings is not rare at all.<br><br>The case of Tiffany in Brazilian volleyball is telling. I mean, she was widely accused of having innate advantages because in her first year playing with the female teams she had a hugely successful performance... however in the next 2 years she was much less successful and was way behind some of her better cisgender colleagues in almost every aspect. So, it becomes hard for me (and other people) to evaluate what's really going on in her case.

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## Regio X

@Ygorcs
That's an interesring perapective. I get what you mean, and also that the lack of testosterone causes a percentage loss of muscle, to put it in simple terms. I'm sure the use of an inhibitor of testosterone (by a man) would mean, for example, the loss of competitiviness in relation to other men. I'm just not sure it would really mean become virtually like a woman in regard to physical performance. I mean, let's invert, also for the sake of simplification: taking testosterone could help a woman when competing against women, but I wonder if it would be generally enough to make them compete on an equal footing against men (especially top men)?

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## Angela

> @Ygorcs
> That's an interesring perapective. I get what you mean, and also that the lack of testosterone causes a percentage loss of muscle, to put it in simple terms. I'm sure the use of an inhibitor of testosterone (by a man) would mean, for example, the loss of competitiviness in relation to other men. I'm just not sure it would really mean become virtually like a woman in regard to physical performance. I mean, let's invert, also for the sake of simplification: taking testosterone could help a woman when competing against women, but I wonder if it would be generally enough to make them compete on an equal footing against men (especially top men)?


I'm not sure of the science of this particular situation, but I would think you're right: a man taking a testosterone inhibitor might lose a competitive edge against another man, but I doubt he would be equal to a woman necessarily, in terms of strength, etc., given his body was affected by testosterone his whole life by that point, and he is presumably still xy. 

From the perspective of women's sports, in most situations the question is, does taking testosterone, or steroids, for that matter, give an XX woman an unfair advantage against XX women who do not take those things. Then, you have the Semenya case, which is even more egregious, because he is XY, and that y and that testosterone has affected him all his life.

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## markod

> @Ygorcs
> That's an interesring perapective. I get what you mean, and also that the lack of testosterone causes a percentage loss of muscle, to put it in simple terms. I'm sure the use of an inhibitor of testosterone (by a man) would mean, for example, the loss of competitiviness in relation to other men. I'm just not sure it would really mean become virtually like a woman in regard to physical performance. I mean, let's invert, also for the sake of simplification: taking testosterone could help a woman when competing against women, but I wonder if it would be generally enough to make them compete on an equal footing against men (especially top men)?


There are other advantages like skeletal mass (which is an absolute limiting factor in overall muscle volume), limb proportions (short legs are bad for running/jumping, narrow shoulders are bad for mostly any type of sport) and muscle fiber composition (women built for endurance rather than strength) that men tend to have over women. Hormones aid recovery and allow you to get closer to the maximal amount of muscle mass your skeleton can carry.

Those non-hormonal factors are also responsible for some very obvious correlations between physical performance and ancestry.

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## davef

The answer to the thread's question is: yes. Its a safe bet that a female who produces male levels of testosterone is on steroids (which is illegal in sports, I would imagine). Anyone who naturally produces male levels of testosterone isn't a female.

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## bicicleur

> East German team at one point. "Females", supposedly.


I agree with what you're saying, and it is not restricted to the east bloc in the 70's and 80's.
But I don't think this last picture is from a sports manifestation.
It seems to me it is a screenshot in a movie doing it's best to confirm some stereotypes.

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## Angela

> I agree with what you're saying, and it is not restricted to the east bloc in the 70's and 80's.
> But I don't think this last picture is from a sports manifestation.
> It seems to me it is a screenshot in a movie doing it's best to confirm some stereotypes.


I don't know. I googled the topic and found it. I'll try to find the picture again and see if I can trace it.

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## bicicleur

> I don't know. I googled the topic and found it. I'll try to find the picture again and see if I can trace it.

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## bicicleur

she took forbidden susbstances, but I think she was more a victim of the system and I don't think she would have cheated knowingly and willingly
and she does not look masculine to me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Drechsler

I think you selected the pics to confirm a certain stereotype that the media have planted in your mind.
A well-chosen picture of Serena Williams would have had the same effect.

Attachment 11007



I'm not blaming you for that Angela, just to make you aware.
And it is certainly true that East-German athletes were cheating in a systematic way, as Russia was still trying to do in the olympic winter games.
But it didn't turn females into males.

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## Regio X

Guys, thanks for answering my... what?... "finesse"? :)

Summarizing all below in one question: what is the solution in your opinion?

@markod
Good analysis. Yep, that's the point, and connected to what I was saying. I guess the "inversion" I proposed could make it more "evident" and easier to understand. 
So, I wonder if there would be XXs highlighting among men in certain sports, like volleyball itself? :)
And one more approach: what was Tifanny before the change, as sportsman, and what did she/he become in comparison to her/his pairs, as sportswoman? If the original condition doesn't matter that much, a similar relative performance would be expected, no?

I recognize the complexity of the matter though. Ygorcs is right. I just think this complexity is not that much in the general imbalance provoked by "XY" and "XX", evident imo, but in the integration of these people, never mind mere motivations of political nature, and we know they exist. I certainly appreciate more technical approaches. :) 
That said, the "condition", or whatever we call it, could be discussed separately from a psychological (?) perspective, but anyway I assume many of them are probably better with their choice, and they are, yes, different in important aspects, which doesn't mean they're "sub-citizens"(!), right? So, objectivelly, the question, here, would be: how to fit them? It matters imo, and should matter at least for the free world, after all, freedom imposes certain costs, and that includes the right of minorities. Indeed, they are generally citizens of free societies, and, as such, formally as good as anybody else. More importantly, they are people. On the other hand, there could be a conflict of, let's call, rights (?), after all, we have XX women on the other side.
So, alternatively, would a "transgender league" be viable, for example, in the fashion of, say, Paralympic games? I wonder if the audience could justify it in the future, with the help of sponsorships or whomever want to support it.
The counter-argument to keep them where they are could be their currently very low number and the fact they're not necessarily the best where they act, since they are... relatively few. So, that would not be a high price to pay, supposedly. Well, at least not so far. Still, truth be said, many of them, perhaps the most, would be ordinary as "professional" sportsmen, and, as women, would own their "success", in large degree, to the condition in question, beyond the natural ones. Admittedly, certain substances, too, affect what we recognize as "natural", and at the end this is the criteria (being natural), aside relativisms of all sorts. Let's try to be realisthic and go straight to the point. They are not less people than we are, which doesn't mean the change, the condition, is "natural". It is not. Again: what was Tifanny before the change, as man, and what did she/he become in comparison to her/his pairs, as woman? Plus, those are precedents that may evolve to something else. At an unlikely extreme, a league could become, yes, transgender, but with a different label. That's potentially.

So, what's the solution, and how to conciliate it with their right of what we could call "personal plenitude"? Keeping them? Keeping them just in specific ones? Not keeping, under the risk of not being able to fit them somewhere else? I mean, some transgenders may be talentend, and may want to be professional sportspersons. What to do then? Putting them among males? At least few time ago they couldn't even join the army. Complicated. At the end, both have a social price imo. Which is higher? Perhaps the answer is in the acceptance of them by sportswomen and in public opinion in general, even if it's subject to a pure "marketing" (for or against), and even if the best answer is not always, necessarily, in... public opinion.

Now, this seems complex, yes, and I must agree with Ygorcs here.

That said, particularly, I guess the lowest price, and perhaps the most "fair", would be in "private" competitions, in the fashion of Paralympic games, but perhaps we could also wait a bit more to see how it unrolls? I mean, it's something still new. If not, the solution would be to put them among males, which would probably mean not putting them anywhere. Again, complicated.

Insights are welcome.

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## bicicleur

transgenders can do with their own body whatever they want, but no one and no society or organistation should have to bend their rules to accomodate them
there are competitions for males and for females and to protect the athletes, sportsmen and sportswomen, and to create a level playing field there are rules and limitations
an important limitation is the list with forbidden substances
and it is not because someone 'feels' he/she belongs to the other sexe that he/she should be allowed to enter the league of the opposite sexe

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## Angela

> transgenders can do with their own body whatever they want, but no one and no society or organistation should have to bend their rules to accomodate them
> there are competitions for males and for females and to protect the athletes, sportsmen and sportswomen, and to create a level playing field there are rules and limitations
> an important limitation is the list with forbidden substances
> and it is not because someone 'feels' he/she belongs to the other sexe that he/she should be allowed to enter the league of the opposite sexe


I agree completely, and I don't see anything that complicated about it. If there are enough of them to have their own league, and they wish to organize it, great, and more power to them. 

We don't allow athletes to use performance enhancing drugs for a reason, and if they're caught they pay the consequences. This isn't that different.

When my daughter was in elementary school she desperately wanted to play baseball on the boys' team, and not softball with the girls. That's what her father, a great baseball player in his day, had taught her, and that's what she thought was more fun. They didn't let her. At first I was angry and wanted to fight it, but upon reflection I didn't do it. She could compete and even best them at 10, 11, 12, but what about when she was 16 or in college, even older? What then? She would never make the boys' or mens' teams, and she wouldn't have practiced and mastered softball. You have to be fair as well as realistic about some things. There are differences between the sexes that not all the training in the world can equalize. It doesn't mean we're inferior. We're just different.

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## markod

> transgenders can do with their own body whatever they want, but no one and no society or organistation should have to bend their rules to accomodate them
> there are competitions for males and for females and to protect the athletes, sportsmen and sportswomen, and to create a level playing field there are rules and limitations
> an important limitation is the list with forbidden substances
> and it is not because someone 'feels' he/she belongs to the other sexe that he/she should be allowed to enter the league of the opposite sexe


To be fair, every pro-athlete takes PEDs anyway, including anabolic steroids most of the time. Even when I was into very amateur level boxing in my teens and early twenties trainers would more or less tell you to leave if you weren't willing to inject. At the professional level athletes are basically walking pharmacies. It makes no sense to talk about rules and fairness with these competitions.

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## bicicleur

> To be fair, every pro-athlete takes PEDs anyway, including anabolic steroids most of the time. Even when I was into very amateur level boxing in my teens and early twenties trainers would more or less tell you to leave if you weren't willing to inject. At the professional level athletes are basically walking pharmacies. It makes no sense to talk about rules and fairness with these competitions.


some sport federations have only rules on paper, in other sports controlls are more serious
that being said, even in sports where there are controlls, always new products and techinques are invented, either for things that are not forbidden yet, or for stuff that is not traceable yet

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## Angela

Razib Khan chimes in about the differences between men and women in terms of athletics. I think I summarized part of it in an anecdote. Until about the age of 14, my daughter could beat the pants off virtually any boy in swimming, tennis, golf, baseball. As soon as the boys started puberty things began to change. She could and still can beat a lot if not most men, but although she can best almost all women she knows, she can't beat the best men she knows. 

Nature is just against her. It hurts, but there it is. Doesn't stop her from preferring to play against men, though. She's highly competitive: her father's daughter in almost every way. 

One of my favorite pictures of her is one I took when she had no time to change after a softball game and had to go in uniform to get a mani/pedi. The only thing she took off were her helmet (she was a catcher) and cleats. :)


https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/...medium=twitteror

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## bigsnake49

> Razib Khan chimes in about the differences between men and women in terms of athletics. I think I summarized part of it in an anecdote. Until about the age of 14, my daughter could beat the pants off virtually any boy in swimming, tennis, golf, baseball. As soon as the boys started puberty things began to change. She could and still can beat a lot if not most men, but although she can best almost all women she knows, she can't beat the best men she knows. 
> 
> Nature is just against her. It hurts, but there it is. Doesn't stop her from preferring to play against men, though. She's highly competitive: her father's daughter in almost every way. 
> 
> One of my favorite pictures of her is one I took when she had no time to change after a softball game and had to go in uniform to get a mani/pedi. The only thing she took off were her helmet (she was a catcher) and cleats. :)
> 
> 
> https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2019/...medium=twitteror


My sister was very fast in the 50m dash. She won a lot of meets competing against other girls. But she stood no chance when competing against the top black girls or the top boys. It's OK to have these competitions among similarly skilled people. My sister did very well among her peers but not so well among the higher skilled/higher performing girls and boys. The Williams sisters at their peak could probably compete with some of the lower ranked men in tennis but how will they do against Djokovic and Federer?

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## Angela

Softball plays: not baseball, but still lots of fun to watch imo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmxYW1mN64c

The science behind the differences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmxYW1mN64c

"Is baseball a harder sport than softball? How different are they really? Very different, not only in softball is the field smaller, the ball larger and pitching harder, it is also a lot harder to hit. You can make the argument that in baseball the ball is smaller which makes it harder to see and hit. But the bats have bigger barrels and a pitching mound is about 20 feet farther away from home plate, than in softball. As well as being farther away, the baseball mound is raised. This makes the ball travel in a downward trajectory, meaning that baseball players can not throw rise balls. In softball, the mound is flat; therefore pitchers can throw rise balls. This means that a softball batter has to work against gravity to hit a ball. Still not convinced that softball is a harder sport? In baseball, a fastball pitched at 90 miles per hour from an average pitching mound 55 feet from home plate gives a batter about .44 seconds to see and react to the pitch. In softball, a fastball pitched at 70 miles per hour from an average pitching mound of 37 feet, gives the batter about .35 seconds to see and react to the pitch. This means that a softball batter receiving a pitch 20 miles per hour slower still has 20% less time to react than a baseball player. Can you imagine if softball pitchers could pitch 90 miles per hour? The batter would have about .2 seconds to react, which is about the speed of blinking twice. So not only does a softball player have less time to react to the ball, if it is a rise ball or even just a high fast ball, they have to work against gravity, making softball a harder hitting sport than baseball."

Pitchers and catchers working in unison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xSEYt9vlWU

Boys trying to hit against a twelve year old girl throwing a softball...just for fun guys...don't get triggered. The boys haven't hit their growth spurt a lot of them, and they haven't trained for hitting softballs. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJwGD2rlgOw

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## Ailchu

sure this "women" has a significant advantage. but certainly many women who compete there have a significant genetic advantage over other women and that's why they are there. isn't the point of sports to show others you are the strongest the fastest or whatever? now if someone is genetically better suited for a sport you just implement new limitations and categories? what's the point then? let's assume there was a genetic programm to produce a women that has a strong genetic advantage over others in a certain discipline would she be allowed to compete or not?

and then there is also the discussion about drugs that increase the performance.

imo this whole discussion shows how stupid these too serious competitive sports actually are.

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## Angela

If people don't get it after this, there's nothing more I can say.

See:


"I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really questioned the existence of separate sports leagues and competitions for men and women. It’s always seemed obvious that distinguishing between male and female athletes is a no-brainer if women are to have a real chance of winning medals and tournaments in most sports, and if they aren’t going to be gravely injured in some contact sports. That simple distinction doesn’t say anything normative about either sex (although resilient, if narrowing, pay differentials are evidence that sexism hasn’t disappeared). It doesn’t say that Billie Jean King couldn’t beat a man at tennis. She famously did, after all. The whole point of separate contests, to my mind, is to empower women. Title IX, for example, is designed specifically to ensure equal access to sports for women, who had previously been sidelined in college athletics. In this case, separate is the only way to be fully equal.Then along comes the fascinating case of Caster Semenya."

She's what used to be called a hermaphrodite.

"She isn’t doping; she has played and is playing by the rules; she has been the subject of some invasive and ugly attention which she doesn’t deserve; but the upshot is that her body produces more testosterone or responds in ways different than women with XX chromosomes."

"Does that give her an unfair advantage? This month, in a 2–1 ruling, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that it did, and she (and any other high-T female athletes) could no longer compete in 400-meter or 800-meter track events unless they reduce their testosterone levels. Most women have T levels between 0.3 and 2.4 nanomoles per liter (npl). The new rules require all competitors to lower their testosterone to a maximum of 5 npl. "

"I’m torn, to be perfectly honest. There is no satisfactory conclusion here: Semenya has done nothing wrong, and neither have her competitors. The CAS acknowledged that it was forced either to discriminate against Semenya or against all the other women in her sport. So they worked out a compromise that doesn’t really please anyone, but that’s designed to keep competition as fair as possible. It seems a reasonable balance to me, but it has been widely excoriated, especially in the mainstream media."

The "gender studies" professors who blind themselves to science for the sake of ideology have come out in full force.
"Then this: “In other words, for most sports, testosterone levels do not correlate with superior performance.”
To put it mildly, this is bonkers. Women have a range of 0.3–2.4 npl, and we know that Semenya must have more than 5 npl, or the regulations would not apply to her. Men, in contrast, have a range from 10–38 npl. There’s not even an overlap. The range among women is tiny compared with the difference between men and women. Of course testosterone correlates with superior performance! That’s the entire reason we have separate contests for the two sexes. And the entire reason we forbid doping. How the New York _Times_ could publish this deeply misleading sentence (to be polite) is beyond me.
Current testosterone levels per se also don’t account for the effect of the hormone throughout a man’s life. Doriane Lambert, Duke law professor and former 800-meter running champion, notes how profound the effects are:
Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity.A physician who ignored these differences would lose her license. Gender studies professors apparently make careers out of denying it. So take the top female runners in the world right now: Literally thousands of boys and men would beat them. Lambert elaborates: “In the single year 2017, Olympic and World Champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best in the 400 meters of 49.26 seconds was surpassed over 15,000 times by boys and by men.” Remove the distinction between male and female testosterone levels, and no women will be in any major athletic contest for the foreseeable future.
The other argument is that all humans have natural inequalities and we don’t penalize a swimmer, say, who has an unusually wide wingspan, or whose body produces much less lactic acid than most, or a basketball player because he’s more than seven feet tall. Why penalize one natural advantage over others? The answer to that is that the natural advantage of males’ levels of testosterone over females’ outweighs anything else that might be pertinent within each sex’s range. Among the members of each sex, you can have natural advantages that can confer an edge, but most are quite subtle (the case for much lower lactic acid helping Michael Phelps, for example, is highly debatable) and they are nowhere near as powerful a determinant as testosterone. Yes, of course, plenty of women can outrun plenty of men. But the average difference in performance in most sports between men and women after puberty is 10 to 12 percent. At an elite level, that all but wipes out female victories in coed sports. It would end women’s athletics."
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...ns-sports.html

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## Ailchu

> See:
> 
> 
> 
> To put it mildly, this is bonkers. Women have a range of 0.3–2.4 npl, and we know that Semenya must have more than 5 npl, or the regulations would not apply to her. Men, in contrast, have a range from 10–38 npl. There’s not even an overlap. The range among women is tiny compared with the difference between men and women. Of course testosterone correlates with superior performance! That’s the entire reason we have separate contests for the two sexes. And the entire reason we forbid doping. How the New York _Times_ could publish this deeply misleading sentence (to be polite) is beyond me.


testosterone levels of 10-38npl is a huge range compared to 0.3-2.4 npl in women. so if testosterone has a correlation with physical performance, it probably has, the question is why shouldn't there be testosterone levels in male sports too? the poor low testo men never even have a chance to compete in certain sports without doping. so make doping legal already.

this discussion isn't really about fairness isn't it. it's as the text says to empower women and to have female competitors at big sports events. and i understand that. but then why not just say caster is no women so she cant compete. that easy cause i'm pretty sure if all those "female" competitors end up beeing transgenders with lowered testosterone levels people wouldn't like that either because they want to see real WOMEN there.

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