
There's No Rulebook for Sex Verification - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html
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anigbrowl
In the future, there will be illegal clone racing.

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danw
I believe that in addition to the Olympics and paralympics there should be an
'enhanced' Olympics. Any artificial limbs, performance enhancing drugs, etc
would be allowed. A celebration of human technological progress.

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joshu
I've always wanted an "all modifications allowed" olympics. Athletes on three
kinds of steroids, runners with /wheels/, whatever. I'd pay to see that.

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SapphireSun
Does anyone know _why_ she was called to have her sex verified?

I'm not a sports fan, so maybe I'm missing something, but it is not in any
article I've read in passing.

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jodrellblank
This is why: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRTdsxjYbJA> \- from 1:30s
halfway through the second lap, she pulls ahead as if she was ... well, a man
running in the womens race.

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boredguy8
So good. Binary conceptions of gender really need to go the way of the dodo.

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hughprime
Given that 99-point-something percent of people fall into one biological
category or the other, it's a pretty reasonable approximation.

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josefresco
There are more cross-gender people in America than there are Jews.

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hughprime
By "cross-gender" I assume you're including categories like "biological men
who identify as women", which is a very large group compared to the biological
categories mentioned in the article.

I mean, I have no problem with men who want to identify as women, or indeed
with men who want to identify as $6.99 Ikea table lamps, but the existence of
such men isn't a challenge to binary human/lamp classification schemes.

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whye
You have it backwards.

prevalence of Klinefelter's syndrome (XXY male, with symptoms): 1 in 1000 men

prevalence of Transsexual men ("biological" men who identify as women): 1 in
30,000 to 1 in 4,500

(source: Wikipedia, but the references for these statistics appear to be in
legitimate scientific publications)

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dgordon
Actually, prevalence of transsexual women (the accepted term for what you
meant, since "women" is what they identify as) is probably quite a bit higher
than that. <http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html> does
an analysis that concludes that said prevalence is on the order of 1 in 500.

But I don't think we were talking about transsexuality, which is something
different from the intersex conditions which might make this whole business of
sex testing more complicated than one might expect.

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SwellJoe
_Middlesex_ is one of the best novels of the decade, and covers the gender
question in vivid and scientifically sound detail.

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shrikant
So, uh, here's a weird suggestion - have THREE categories:

1\. Verifiably male 2\. Verifiably female 3\. None of the above

This would probably spur more transgenders into track and field, and sports in
general..

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jacquesm
I think you're going in the wrong direction with this, why not simply have
_one_ category and rank them all as 'people', the ultimate in emancipation.

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kirse
This sounds so intellectually deep and all, but did you even take roughly 30
seconds to think about what happens when you combine men and women in athletic
competition?

Hint: Men will dominate (just about) everything.

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jacquesm
Oh, I realize that. It will show how totally pointless measuring people by
some yardstick is.

So what if you can run 1 second faster than some other human on a predefined
course. You are _still_ better than 99.99% of the rest of the humans.

Humanity is multi-valued, what your abilities are in one narrow (and
ultimately useless) field should not in any way degrade the people lower in
the 'ladder' and it should not reward those higher up.

Competition sports are historically good for two things only (and 'good' is up
for debate), inspiring nationalism in people and paying exorbitant salaries to
the competitors because of the media spectacle.

edit: Our capability to measure time is what drives this crazy competition
forward, if we were limited to say 1 second intervals plenty of women and
plenty of men would be able to compete just fine (only not in the same race,
but for instance simply against the clock).

The differences between all humans competing in these races and the 'rest of
us' is essentially so small as to be meaningless.

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unalone
Don't know who was downvoting you. I agree. Don't know if I'd have agreed
three months ago, but I'm starting to grow increasingly weary of rankings and
competition.

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of human potential. When I see people
performing on levels I can't think of reaching, it gives me a fuzzy feeling.
But we've gone past that in society, to the point of fetishizing achievement.
I think it's awesome, for instance, that Michael Phelps broke the records he
did. It's what he loves doing, apparently, and the technology behind his suit
was pretty cool, and the spectacle was fun. But we aren't really given a
choice about what to find fun, are we, when every media station heralds it for
a week at a time. I'm sure other cool things were happening that didn't
involve milliseconds in an expensive pool. Then the fame gets so ridiculous
that his using marijuana became a scandal in and of itself, and he had to
apologize not primarily for using but for letting kids down.

I'd like to see society move past these anal little obsessions. It's awesome
that some people like some competitive sports, but I don't think it should be
the center of our society. (I really don't think society should have _any_
center whatsoever, but that's crazy talk.)

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seekely
The media ruins everything through overexposure and pathetic coverage, from
politics to celebrities to crime. I think it is a bit unfair to take it out on
sports and competition. What people like Michael Phelps do is nothing short of
amazing, and we shouldn't penalize his accomplishments, the entertainment he
provides, or competition in general because the media is sick.

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jacquesm
I'm not so sure it is 'amazing'. What I think is 'amazing' is to have a dream
of putting men on the moon and realizing it, to come up with a way of
connecting people all over the world and to allow people to travel around the
globe in extremely short spans of time.

Athletes are - I'm sorry - overrated. Yes, it is great that they can do what
they do, and I'm happy for them that they achieve their goals. But I'm just as
happy for some local kid competing at ping-pong and winning, there is not much
class difference there (in my opinion).

Sports are a means of finding your own limits, then exceeding those limits.

The media indeed messes it up, and for all those other categories you listed
as well.

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seekely
The amount of work, dedication, persistence, and pain Phelps has endured to
achieve the results he has is no less than the work, dedication, persistence
and pain an engineer on the first Apollo mission endured. Phelps and the
engineer just happen to be good in different domains. They are both amazing
people with amazing accomplishments. The world takes all kinds.

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unalone
Don't look at the effort. Look at the final result. Lolita took all of four
months to write, and it's terrific. That's less time than it took Ed Wood to
make any of his movies, all of which bombed.

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tokenadult
Are you sure Nabokov didn't think about the issues that led to writing Lolita
in the years before he started putting words on paper? Maybe he really did put
in more effort (e.g., in writing other novels) before Lolita was such a result
in such a seemingly short time. Nabokov's autobiography suggests he worked
hard for a long time developing his craft.

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jacquesm
I think whether he spent 10 years on it or 15 minutes doesn't really matter,
the work stands on its own, it is a _creation_. Sports as such - especially
top sports where the 1/100th of a second counter makes the difference - does
not create anything of inherent value.

The guinness book of records might make you believe otherwise, but it really
does not matter who ran a little faster than his fellow humans.

Without Nabokov, Bach or van Gogh though, we'd all be a little poorer.

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lacker
Dang, I was hoping this article would be about the difficulty of passing the
Turing test.

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clintboxe
Poor Matthew!

