How To Prove Someone Is Female?

krou writes "Caster Semenya won the 800m at the World Athletics Championship in blistering style, leaving her competitors in the dust, but she has been thrown into the midst of a scandal amidst claims that she's not really a woman. According to the many press reports, she's believed to shave, is flat chested, has a very masculine physique, previously preferred playing physical games with boys, and shunned traditional female activities and clothing. Questions about her gender have dogged her entire career. Previously, acceptance that she is a women relied on simple inspection of female genitals. But now the IAAF claim that they want to conduct further tests to see if 'she may have a rare medical condition that gives her an unfair advantage.' An IAAF spokesmen noted that 'The [testing] process was started after Semenya made her startling breakthroughs — a 25-second improvement at 1500m and eight seconds at 800m, just some weeks ago.' I'm curious what the Slashdot community thinks: what can be considered proof of someone being male or female? Is it simply a case of having the right genitals, or are there other criteria that should be used? Is the IAAF right in claiming that someone should be prevented from competing because they have a rare medical or genetic advantage?"

Comments

Re:Simple solution

[dougmc]

Sounds good, but then women would almost never win in most sports. They may be equal under the law, but they're certainly not physically equal.

Re:Easy

[gnupun]

So athletes have to hand over their DNA to participate in a race? No way. Enough big brother garbage; govt is not god and citizens must have rights to some privacy, including protecting their DNA. Only criminals should be subject to such intrusion.

Re:Probably not that difficult

[Narcocide]

No there is another question you can ask instead; How fair is it to disqualify/qualify *humans* based on gender as we evolve as a species towards more mixed-gender traits. It is reasonable to assume that since reproduction includes FUCKING EACH OTHER that the DNA of the resultant pairings would not eventually start to include more and more of the strongest traits of each half of such pairings, right???

Sure historically there are gender-based assumptions about what is "right"/"wrong" for each gender in society but isn't it equally likely that as society progresses these assumptions will also change?

Re:Genetic

[Kjella]

I guess I don't find that process that interesting. Is there really anything better or more fair about a guy who produces abnormally high levels of HGH, vs. someone else injecting HGH? Why is one more interesting to watch than the other? It seems the only possible answer is attaching some sort of mysticism to the fact that one was "natural".

If we wanted to set a new weight lifting record, we could just bring in a forklift. Sure, it's not entirely fair that you must play with the cards you've been dealt with but at least that puts reasonable bounds on things. Drugging people up with all sorts of shit that might make them win a medal today and screw tomorrow would certainly be no more fair and destroy any vision of the healthy athlete. You can tell with american athletes, the kind that never get drug tested that they're just shot up on everything and probably have sideeffects from here to Mars. But who cares when you a few years can be an NFL star...

Send them out to buy a jar of pickles

[Snaller]

If they get lost first and then can't open the jar - its a girl!