The inclusion delusion

Yes, I am going to talk about Caster Semenya again. I hate this subject but I hate even more the fact that people like Semenya are trying to kill women's sport, in the name of "inclusion".

As is often the case, I got the inspiration for this post while visiting the tweets of Ross Tucker. He pointed out a detail in the ruling of the CAS on the Semenya case. Tucker introduced this by saying "World Athletics had kind of tap danced and skirted around it in the Chand case, but when Semenya played this card at CAS, World Athletics responded". What this means is that Semenya argued that since men are 10 % faster than women how come she does not manage, if she is a man, to beat the other women by that margin? The answer is simple:  Semenya is not an elite male athlete; just a mediocre one. The ruling of CAS says so in a more polite way.

(Just in case you wonder what 5-AR deficiency is I suggest that you read this article. It explains why some persons who are male do not develop external male genitalia). 

In the words of Tucker: "This is all blindingly obvious, but there are still academics who portray sub-elite male performance as indicating that either a specific athlete (Semenya, in this case) or the general case (males) doesn’t get performance advantages from male T [testosterone]. Nobody is actually that stupid, so anyone who makes this argument reveals motives, not understanding. You need to have a real desire to deny basic performance physiology to propose this fiction. So it’s a canary, in a way, for conflict. Which is why Semenya has to say it. But so too, WA needed to refute it".

The post of Tucker led me to one of Mara Yamauchi and things became more interesting. (M. Yamauchi is an elite female marathoner and Commonwealth Games medalist. She holds the third-best british women's marathon performance). Having exhausted all legal means Semenya is now playing the media war. She is publishing her biography "A Race to be Myself" and was invited to the BBC Woman's Hour on November 7th.

The interview led by Emma Barnett was anything but fair, cherry-picking the arguments and trying to gaslight the ones of the opposition. It started by stating that Semenya is not allowed to compete. This is of course a lie. Semenya can freely compete in the male category. Semenya could not deny the fact that she has testes but she brushed that away by saying that they “do not play any role in sports”. Then how does one explain the 10 % difference in races (it goes up to 30 % when it comes to throws)? When Barnett asked “Do you have an unfair advantage?” Semenya's answer was “No”. And she segued with the pernicious question why aren’t the DSDs running the same times as elite men? Alas, the answer is simple: they are not very good. Semenya's times are at best mediocre for a man.

Yamauchi pursues her analysis of the interview dismantling one by one Semenya's arguments. 

Semenya: “Sport has never been fair” because of genetics. Yamauchi points out that this is the Phelps gambit (meaning that some people have natural predispositions) that has been comprehensively dismantled ad infinitum. 

Ross Tucker’s clear explanation of male advantage and the performance gap between males and females was dismissed by Semenya as “nonsense”.

Semenya did not hesitate to attack the female athletes who have spoken against the inclusion of DSD athletes in women's sports by saying “That’s their problem because they are fed with wrong info” and asking “Why aren’t they winning medals?”. Unfortunately, the answer is simple: "Because the medals are won by DSD males". 

Fortunately, this is no more the case since DSD athletes are banned from Athletics unless they reduce their testosterone levels to a low that will, hopefully, suffice for them not to be competitive. But, of course, this is not a 100 % foolproof measure. Lowering testosterone levels does not reverse all the advantages acquired during male pubertal development.

Semenya concluded her interview by stating that "she believes in fairness". Nothing is further from the truth. She's an average (at best) male athlete who has been exploited by her country and her coaches to be labelled a black South African 'female champion'. And she has been playing the game from the outset. And to add insult to injury she does hesitate to make fun of the women athletes. When, after the Rio Olympics final, L. Sharp burst into tears and spoke out, Semenya riposted, "Lynsey is a good runner. She would have been better if she had just bit her tongue and trained".  

However, the case of DSD athletes is not the only danger for female sports. There is a huge one lurking, that of transwomen, i.e. men who decided one day that they prefer to be women and they claim that this gives them the right to compete in the women's category. World Athletics has taken the brave decision to exclude them. World Aquatics also. Unfortunately, we live in an era of woke-ism, and there is a large part of "progressive" thinkers who are ready to sacrifice women's sports on the altar of "inclusion". There is a great video clip produced by the association "Fairplay for Women" where several british champions speak about the danger of the inclusion argument for women's sports. I suggest that you watch it (and I did not hesitate to steal its title and use it for this post). And, do not forget: the term transwoman is a fictional, gaslighting, male rebranding farce.