Saturday, September 12, 2009

Semenya Situation is a Gross Violation of the Civil Rights of Women

With the looming reality that chromosomes are going to reveal he's a man, Semenya dropped out of today's race saying "she doesn't feel well".

What a sad and sorry situation it is when people exploit another human being for their shot at being glorified in a spotlight.


The newspaper report sparked outrage from the South African's family and her supporters, who said they won't allow Semenya to be banned from international competition.

"We will go to the highest levels of contesting such a decision," said South Africa's sports minister, Makhenkesi Stofile. "I think it would be the Third World War.

"We think her human rights have been violated and her privacy invaded," Stofile said. "I don't know why she is being subjected to this."


They don't know why "she" is being subjected to this?

The answer to that is simple.

When young girls and women spend countless hours in grueling workouts and practices to compete in the Olympics, and somebody comes along whose muscles are being fed testosterone though from their testicles but enters the competition a "female" - it's called "cheating".

If you have no uterus, no ovaries, XY chromosomes and a pair of testicles that continuously feed your muscles testosterone and other male hormones and you want to compete in the Olympics, you've got to enter the race as a male.

Other young women have a right to fair competition.

Semenya and the team of people exploiting him are violating the rights of others. They're stealing. Semenya has robbed the young woman who came in second place of the victory she spent years pursuing.

If they expect us to believe that Semenya's parents were negligent in never following up on where her breasts and menses were, they never noticed her male features and in all the physical required for school and competitions, all the physicians never noted her absent uterus and ovaries and in their place testicles fueling her growth and musculature, all I can say is some of us are not as stupid as we look.

The testosterone gives men advantages in playing sports. That's why competitions are segregated. Men would always win if they weren't.

If he competed fairly, Semenya's running times weren't going to bring home a medal.
They made a conscience decision to exploit the young man and use his birth defects and cheat other women out of their victories and they got caught.

Man up to it.

This is a women's rights issue. For the hundreds of thousands of female athletes who exhaust themselves doing the work it takes to become an athletic champion, women all over the world should be vehemently objecting to having a country hijack their victories by entering males as females.

Entertaining the idea that this was anything but cheating is a gross violation of the civil rights of women.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is more to this story than meets the eye. She is a sexual oddity; a hermaphrodite. In the West physicians would have surgically corrected her organs. In these cases the sexual identity of these poor people is 'elected', with hormone support. In the West her 'boy's' would have been removed and she would have been raised as a girl.

TTC said...

Yes, I understand. His condition is a terrible one to bear. He didn't have his boys removed, they're feeding his musculature and this is about a sports competition where women have the right to competed against fairly.

If he had a medical condition that gave him 10 inch springs on his heels, entering him into the Olympics vaulting contest would be cheating people who qualified legitimately.

He is not a woman. He has xy chromosomes and testicles. He had no more right to enter the women's competition than signing up for special olympics events to blow everyone out of the water.

They did a terrible thing to this individual. The people who exploited him will get to walk away. This child will live with the terrible repercussions of cheating for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless, as a woman, I'm outraged they are portraying HIM as the victim instead of the people he and his crew cheated.

Anonymous said...

Hmm.. God made this person this way.
I'm not sure where women's right to fairly compete in sports falls in natural law. God grants physical attributes to his children in marvelous sometimes unfair ways.
This certainly is a weird issue - the kind an ethicist would enjoy.
Outrage? I think somebody born with both sets of hardware deserves some compassion - to be exploited as a novelty act is another matter.

TTC said...

I think you'd feel quite differently if you had a daughter who got up at 3 every morning before school for years to use legitimate tools to become a champion.

I'm very empathetic to his situation. He was born with a birth defect. That is a sidebar from the reality that he then used his testosterone to fuel his muscles and cheat by entering the race as a woman when his chromosomes are xy and he has testicles.

By the way, there's no evidence he has any female equipment that I know of. No ovaries. No uterus. No breasts.

It's about robbing women of their right to define sports competitions has having the right chromosomes and without an unfair advantage that would wipe out our ability to be victorious in sports competitions. As far as I'm concerned, this is huge.

TTC said...

:O)

Alessandra said...

If what is being reported in various papers is true, SA officials and Semenya all knew about her intersex condition before Berlin (whatever it is), and they cheated by enrolling her/him in a category Semenya doesn't belong to. Whether they agree or not with the reasoning behind the two-sex sport division is irrelevant to their dishonest behavior.

Furthermore, they lied when they said they had no information about Ms/Mr Semenya's biological make-up before Berlin.

We may never find out if Semenya also cheated by taking "medications" which alter his/her hormone levels, as previously alleged in the Swiss paper, but that is also a possibility.

In the media this week:

Name of the LAB DOCTOR, name of the LAB, and NAME OF PSYCHOLOGIST WHO COUNSELED SEMENYA that s/he is intersex, ALL BEFORE BERLIN.

If the info below is correct, one more layer of SA's fraudulent endeavor exposed.

(http://www.dispatch.co.za/article.aspx?id=346287 for full article)

The M&G reported that Semenya had been tested at the Medforum Medi-Clinic in Pretoria early last month and that she had received counselling from ASA board member and psychologist Laraine Lane before hand.

The tests were conducted by Oscar Shimange, a medical doctor specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology.

The M&G said Chuene had also denied Adams was the official doctor of team SA. Adams was, in fact, commissioned by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to oversee Semenya’s gender tests in SA, and was listed in an ASA press release for the championships as a “team doctor”.
The M&G quoted a senior official close to ASA saying that when Team SA was in Neubrandenburg, Adams received a call from Medforum Medi-Clinic informing him of Semenya’s gender test results, which were “not good”.

The official said Adams then convened a meeting with Chuene and ASA vice-president Kakata Maponyane, among other ASA officials.

Adams advised them to withdraw Semenya from the competition, but they refused, said the M&G.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly’s sport committee yesterday postponed its meeting with ASA, which was scheduled for Tuesday.

This was because of the change in the parliamentary programme next week.
The meeting will be rescheduled in the next parliamentary term, starting on October 6 . — SDR, additional reporting by Sapa

Alessandra said...

And now the lawyers, hungry for the media spotlight, are getting involved. It was only a matter of time, of course:

http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2009/09/the-gender-confusion-chronicles-a-fastpaced-look-at-sports-and-the-law.html

As for the nuts and bolts of the case, Kessler--working with Dewey's office in Johannesburg--wants to know whether the IAAF has tested Semenya, how those tests are being administered, and who is administering them and tracking the results. He also wants to know whether Athletics South Africa, the nation's governing body for sports, tested Semenya before the world championships in Berlin last month. The ASA has repeatedly denied that such testing took place, but a weekly South African newspaper reported Friday that ASA indeed tested Semenya before the event. (The ASA had already announced it would conduct an internal investigation on its handling of Semenya's career.)

Kessler says it's possible the IAAF or ASA--or both--violated Semenya's rights to medical privacy, something that could discredit any test results either body might obtain. Either way, though, Kessler says Semenya's timing in hiring Dewey is better than Pistorious's; the IAAF had already suspended Pistorius by the time Kessler got involved. Now he's in a position to protect Semenya before any adverse ruling, he says.

"There is no allegation here that anyone did anything artificial," Kessler says again. "This whole thing is offensive.