aceandart:

yolowoho:

yolowoho:

Rules will force some women to undergo hormone therapy that could adversely affect their health; will disproportionately affect women from developing nations who do not conform to Western standards of femininity; and will ultimately lead to some elite women quitting the sport.

So here’s newest in transphobia, misogynoir, & just overall awfulness in sports.

This is directed at Caster Semenya. She is a cis black woman, (who has naturally highish levels of testosterone) and she is an incredible athlete. This is misogynoir and transphobia all wrapped up in one shitty package backed up by shitty science and nowhere near enough data. It is a moral and ethical failure by the IOC, and it cannot go uncontested.

Further reading: 

• How Cultural Perceptions About Testosterone Rig Sports Against Trans Athletes 
• The Opposite of Fair Play: A three-part series that explores the history of gender testing in sports and how it affects the modern sporting climate
• Waiting Doesn’t Work: Transphobia in Sports 

From the first linked article (which, go read the whole thing):

Since the impact of testosterone is understood by most sports fans in
the context of PED controversies, is it any wonder that trans athletes,
especially trans women athletes, are unfairly targeted and discriminated
against? Using performance-enhancing drugs in sports is about
deception, and the cis world still views gender-diverse folks through
that same lens.

[…] Trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports because they are
women. Trans women should be able to make transition-related decisions
about their physical appearance, health, and well-being on the basis of
their desires and needs, not to achieve compliance with arbitrary cis
regulations. Much of the opposition to amab folks participating in
women’s sports is driven by the erroneous and bigoted view that amab
gender-diverse folks, especially trans women, are men wishing to
participate in women’s sports as a method of cheating. However,
regulations about hormone levels stem from the same faulty premise as
those views: that through hormone testing, an essential womanhood can be
defined, and acceptable (lesser) women’s bodies can be achieved that
are distinct from those of cis men.

[…] The biological supremacy argument, which places such value on the
importance of testosterone in athletic performance, actively harms afab
gender diverse athletes as well. Those who argue for the inclusion of
amab gender diverse people in women’s sports if they undergo hormone
therapy use the limiting and binary understanding of the differences
between men’s and women’s bodies that serve to cement cis men’s
undeserved sporting primacy. What follows from this argument is a
paradoxical understanding of afab gender diverse athletes.Consequently, sporting bodies do not develop specific policies
regulating the hormone levels of afab athletes participating in men’s
sports, because of two key assumptions. First, they assume that afab
bodies are inherently lesser than those of cis men, and are therefore
irrelevant in terms of issues of fairness or performance at the highest
levels. This argument relies on the sexism inherent in the binary
division of sport, the purpose of which is to privilege cis men. Second,
“inclusive” sporting bodies don’t regulate the hormone levels of afab
athletes participating in men’s sports because testosterone levels are
only considered to be an advantage when competing against women; the
wide variation in testosterone levels among cis men is irrelevant
because it is deemed to be “natural.”

[…] Those who mistakenly believe in the supremacy of men’s sports usually
rely on the subjective argument that men athletes are simply “better”.
However, to make such an argument, supporters have to deliberately
ignore a lengthy
history of discrimination on the part of cis men to limit and curtail
the access to sport that people of other genders have had. There are
numerous examples of women being barred from participating in sport, or
even simply banned from attending sporting events. Decades after
programs designed to foster equality in sport, there can still be considerable
discrepancies in terms of resources between boys and girls sports
development in many sports like soccer, baseball, and hockey.

Some women athletes must now medically lower their testosterone levels to compete