Certainty is all, whatever it is

Today I wish to begin with a disclaimer and/or warning/explanation. As a contributor to this august organ, I do not regard myself as being under any obligation to be balanced, ‘modern’ in outlook, PC-correct or indeed pay lip service (or more) to any notion of fairness, equality or positive action in order to promote the rights of hitherto disadvantaged groups or individuals.

Instead I regard  myself as paid – or, more correctly, not paid – to give of my opinions without fear nor favour and in the full expectation that in some quarters they may not always find be agreed with by our readers or, possibly for some, may even cause passing offence.

And so today I come to the case of the hyperandrogenic Olympics women’s 800 metres track gold medal winner Caster Semenya.

At the moment, in the wake of the final thrashings of the Rio Games, there are a number of commentators and columnists jumping on a proverbial bandwagon in coming to Semanya’s defence and/or peddling a ‘Lay off her!’ line which seems to be based on the technical fact that – as a result of the successful appeal by an Indian athlete afflicted with the same medical condition against the ‘maximum acceptable testosterone level for a woman’ rule of the IAAF and/or IOC – allowed Semenya and other like her to stop taking testosterone-suppressant drugs … and thereby exploit the natural advantages over other females that their bodies give them.

As I understand it – and I accept I may be behind the eight ball here – Seb Coe and the IAAF have now lodged an appeal against the above appeal ruling that effectively allowed hyperandrogenic athletes to run against ‘normal’ females in the Olympics and elsewhere.

See here for representative examples of the ‘Semenya defence’ phenomenon – firstly, an article by Katrina Karkazis that currently appears on the website of – THE GUARDIAN

Secondly, an article by Christine Aschwanden that appears on a website called – FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

It seems to me, as an inexpert television spectator upon proceedings at the Olympics, that the modern obsession with being fair to everyone – and indeed the fashionable imperative to promote the rights of ‘people outside the norm’, presumably on the assumption that (being disadvantaged) they deserve to be over-compensated not least because the vast majority of mainstream ordinary people are already very comfortable thank you – sometimes goes that extra mile or two too far … and that this is one of them.

I may be writing rubbish here, but as a lay person, it seems to be absolutely the case that hyperandrogenic athletes like Semenya (and allegedly – and there’s nothing to say this is correct – two other athletes in the Olympics women’s 800 metre final) do possess an in-built advantage [i.e. (and I don’t know the scientific specifics but let’s just for these purposes refer to them as) ‘testosterone’] over ‘normal’ women.

The proof (in my view) of that proposition is that, when she was required to take testosterone-suppressants, Semenya’s athletic performances were no better than a large number of other female athletes. Then – after the appeal against the ‘maximum acceptable testosterone level for a woman’ succeeded – when she was able to stop taking those suppressants, her race times went spectacularly lower again and then directly resulted ten days ago in her winning her Rio gold medal.

It seems to me that sometimes the good of the ‘vast majority’ has to outweigh what might be good for some individual and/or small group that are, on the face of it, disadvantaged.

(I might go so far as to suggest that it is the conceit of many politicians and indeed wringing-their-hands-liberal-lefty-‘We know better than they do’ intellectuals in the media who together for decades have championed the rights of the few ahead of addressing the best interests of the many is all part of the problem that led so spectacularly to the ‘two fingers in the air’ comeuppance represented by the Brexit vote in the UK Referendum on the EU).

With the Caster Semenya issue, surely some blunt and hard decisions have to be taken on the sometimes blurred lines between what constitutes a woman and what does not. I’m talking here about those who are hyperandrogenic, transgender (whether going from woman to man or vice versa, and where alone the scale of the transformation from one to the other any individual has reached) or indeed anything else other than ‘normal’. These decisions may even ultimately have to be arbitrary for all I know. But once taken, they must be applied to all.

Because if someone doesn’t come along and make those tough decisions, we’re going to be bumbling along not knowing whether what we’re watching is for real or not. It’s very similar to the performance-enhancing drug-taking problem. And spectators want – indeed need – to know that they can believe the evidence of their own eyes, that what they are witnessing is ‘genuine’ competition – not affected by unfair advantages or ‘cheating’ (and not that all advantages are cheating, I’m certainly not suggesting that in hyperandrogenic cases).

The only alternatives – it seems to me – that might solve such problems would be either – firstly – for there to be separate complete sets of events for hyperandrogenic individuals, or even two new sets of events, i.e. one for hyperandrogenics and one for transgender people.

Or – secondly – for the sporting powers-that-be to say:

“Right, that’s it. We’ve had enough. In line with 21^st Century politically-correctness, from 2020 at Tokyo we’re moving directly to where we all hope things will eventually end up – i.e. total equality. From Tokyo 2020, therefore, there will be no distinction between the sexes at all. Men, women, transgenders and hyperandrogenics – if they wish to enter – will all compete in the same events, end of message.”

The irony is that I don’t think this is a particularly radical step to take.

After all, under the current circumstances (i.e. in which hyperandrogenic athletes can compete in women’s events) what I’m glibly calling here ‘real women’ have virtually bugger-all chance of winning Olympic gold medals if faced with hyperandrogenic opponents. We might as well go the whole hog and make it fair all round by lumping everybody, wherever on the spectrum between being pure men and pure women they are, into one contest.