Monthly Archive for June, 2012

The New York Times

Sex-Verification Policy Is Criticized as a Failure
By JULIET MACUR
Published: June 25, 2012

The International Olympic Committee’s new policy regarding who is eligible to compete as a female athlete is a veiled sex-verification test that fails in its objective to protect the integrity of women’s events at the Games, critics of the regulations said Monday.

Kevin B. Wamsley, a professor of sport history at the University of Western Ontario who has written about the issue of sex testing in sports, called the new policy a farce.

He said the policy was not an improvement on the invasive sex-verification testing to which Caster Semenya, the South African runner, was subjected in 2009 after winning the world championships in the 800 meters.

“No matter what they call it, it’s still a sex test that’s all about judgments and so much more about social values than science,” said Wamsley, the former director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies. “They don’t need this test, and I think they should get rid of it.”

Goto Full Article – “Click Here”

Published June 2012

NY Times Publisher – Promotes IOC oppression tools policies of women’s endocrine systems at the cost of commercialism – selling “femininity”.

New York Times Article:
I.O.C. Adopts Policy for Deciding Whether an Athlete Can Compete as a Woman
Published June 24th, 2012

Jason Stallman NY Times Publisher, in todays article written by Juliet Macur, has sold out to ALL Women in promoting the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) policy release on Hyperandrogenism on June 24th, 2012 prior to the London Olympics next month.  Stallman well aware of the science and expertise from Canada, United States and Europe, who with strong science – overwhelmingly, oppose and suggest “the science does not match the policies and is based on folklore”, and that, we are raping and violating women for no reason other then to the selling out to commercialism, and that the issues being perpetuated by the IOC’s well oiled propaganda machine,  primary focus is to protect “femininity”. Not to be confused with women’s sport.  As experts conclude, the IOC’s continued dark (50) year history trying to regulate “fairness” as a facade and purposely misguide the public, to focus on what their real aspirations are, is to what sells, NOT women’s sport, but “femininity”. The IOC a corporation and business that relies on brand to fund the games, under the illusion of sport, competitive excellence and inclusion.

This is done on purpose, as it relates to commercialism and what sells best, and will drive profits.  Truthfully the IOC doesn’t care about sport, it is a vehicle to a means end.  It is about “POWER AND MONEY”. So what drives those numbers up on the positive side of the balance sheet, are MENS SPORT AND FEMININITY.  Selling to their target consumer which is primarily men.  Women’s sport, women’s excellence and celebration thereof, is barely existent, and a consumer facade.  Thus all to well known, the degree of the global challenge for women and women’s sports organizations to grow and develop.  WE are continually oppressed.

Gender verification of women of the last (50) years, created by Prof. Arne Ljungqvist and Co-fathered by Dr. Myron Genel (Yale) have been behind the scenes challenged by top experts, and now clearly by the experts, as it pertains to gender verification, Stockholm Consensus and most recently the IOC Regualtions on female Hyperandrogenism, “the polices don’t match the science”.

In-fact and imporant to note, neither Ljungqvist, Genel, Villain (UCLA) and or Bermon (IAAF) have ever tested one athlete, let alone spoken with the athletes grossly impacted around by these human rights violation, causing physical/social rape, humiliation and even suicide.

Experts around the world are saying these men are a “FRAUD” and the science is there clearly to prove it without a doubt, and they know it. The IOC, has perpetuated this years knowingly the science has been clearly presented, and it is they trying to avoid “HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, HUMILIATION AND RAPE CHARGES” OF FEMALE ATHLETES.”

The policy presented by the IOC on June 24th, 2012 is a propaganda tool, using “testosterone” which is an everyone hormone, and ALL high performance athletes female and or male, have excessive natural serum testosterone levels.  There are multiple coming together regarding human physiology, that creates human excellence in a given sport. testosterone being one of over a dozen.  Moreover, which the purposely does not explain, every female and or male have androgen receptors, of which regulate and absorb at different rate testosterone in a person body.  Many women and men athletes, have an “insensitivity” no matter their level of testosterone production from their ovaries or testicles. The IOC and IAAF have purposely misguided sport and public, putting value number of testosterone level ml/ of 100 max for women. This cannot be done, as the athletes uptake through their receptors could be insensitive and or highly sensitive and it depends on the individual athlete.  The female athlete could have 250 ml/ but if she is insensitive or low receptors, it would not matter if she had 25ml/ and or 300ml.  it is how the body utilizes it and it cannot be controlled let alone evaluated.

The IOC has done this purposely, and know this to be true, they do “not want to see strong featured women” in sport as we are socially accepting of this of men, of which we do not oppress.

This entire issue is not about women excellence and or performance, even as far women sport. It is what sells as the box office, and will draw most money and financial income for the Olympic games, which is “FEMININITY”, NOT Women’s Sport.

This is a social science exercise and nothing to do with physiology, science and or gender.  The IOC has done this on purpose and as they have only learn time and time again, as Olympic history has shown, the falling of so many women who have been sort hurt and violated, and continue to be, at the cost of commercialism and sexism of women’s bodies, and femininity.

What Jason Stallman has done though this NY Times article, only to further confirm the IOC’s false ideology, stereotypes and threat to ALL women, but as well further as he used “Casters” image and name as the “poster child” of the issues. From a journalistic view is illegal, continuing to condemn, demean her for being a great woman. Showcasing his own ignorance  and the power of the “illusion and box” ALL women suffer from trying to fit into the “socially accepted man-made box”, only reinforced by the International Olympic Committee for the sole purpose of “commercialism” as the science and and expertise does not support the IOC’s recent and past policies as it pertains to women’s gender of which we do not regulate mens gender.

The IOC ‘s release on June 24th, 2012, is symbolic and tragedy of the man-made barriers created by men for women, in the vision of men, of women’s bodies, abilities and attaching as a priority sexuality and femininity over women’s ability to compete well and celebrate our excellence as we do men. The IOC is prepared at ALL cost to oppress that, and physically oppress women physically an their endocrine systems to ensure this does not happen, and women are unable to compete at the same level as men, requiring them to develop and become strong bodied, to be the every best they can be in their given sport.

This will continue at any cost, until the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is legally challenged, as they know is forth coming. It is unfortunate, as a  society and sports system, that these issues cannot be done in any other way, which speaks to the much bigger issues of the business of the IOC and and their role and influence and particpation in the future development of sport.

There should be a panel of Olympic women, elected by women only to evaluate male masculinity and competitive performance, to assure that male athletes conform to the rigid man-made stereotypes assuring they are not to feminine in the eyes of the IOC, and meet the model needed for accepted consumerism on the playing field.

THE IOC CREATING UNWARRANTED  OPPRESSION, GENDER “WITCH HUNTS” AND VIOLENCE TOWARDS WOMEN…

This insanity must stop!

Goto Full Article - “Click Here”

Published June 24th, 2012

CBC – Radio Q. IOC/IAAF Hyperandrogenism Rule – Based on “folklore”

June 19th, 2012

A discussion with Katrina Karkazis PhD, MPH (Center for Biomedical Ethics
Stanford University, Dr. Rebecca Jordan- Young (Bernard College, New York), speak about concerns of the recent saying the science around testosterone and women in elite and Olympic sport is not scientifically supported. Dr. Jordan-Young says; “It is based on folklore”.

To listen to full interview and Podcast - “Click Here”
(Scroll 1/3rd across to interview – 2nd interview of one hour series.)

GH 2000 Final Report
GH-2000 A Methodology for Detection of Doping with Growth Hormone and
Related Substances

The study variance and overlap of testosterone between women/male elite athlete bodies.

Funded by the European Union/International Olympic Committee

Published June 2012

Growth-Promoting Hormones Don’t Stimulate Strength: Research Debunks Bodybuilding Myth

June 18th, 2012

New research from scientists at McMaster University reveals exercise-related testosterone and growth hormone do not play an influential role in building muscle after weightlifting, despite conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise.

The findings indicate that bodybuilders who look to manipulate those hormones through exercise routines are wasting their time.

In two separate studies, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and the European Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers found anabolic hormones – long thought to be essential for building a muscular frame – do not influence muscle protein synthesis, the process that leads to bigger muscles.

“A popular mindset for weightlifters is that increased levels of hormones after exercise play a key role in building muscle,” explains Daniel West, lead author of both studies and a graduate student in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster. “That is simply not the case.”

In the first study, researchers examined the responses of both male and female participants to intense leg exercise. Despite a 45-fold difference in testosterone increase, men and women were able to make new muscle protein at exactly the same rate.

“Since new muscle proteins eventually add up to muscle growth, this is an important finding,” says West.

“While testosterone is definitely anabolic and promotes muscle growth in men and women at high doses, such as those used during steroid abuse, our findings show that naturally occurring levels of testosterone do not influence the rate of muscle protein synthesis.”

Goto Full Article - “Click Here”

Published June 2012

New York Times
Sex Verification: You Say You’re a Woman? That Should Be Enough

By Rebecca Jordan-Young & Katrina Karkazis
Published June 17th, 2012

The International Olympic Committee’s new policy governing sex verification is expected to ban women with naturally high testosterone levels, a condition known as hyperandrogenism, from women’s competitions, claiming they have an unfair advantage. I.O.C. officials portray this as a reasonable compromise in a difficult situation, arguing that the rules may be imperfect, but that sports are rule-based — and that the rules should be clear.

We agree that sports need clear rules, but we also believe that the rules should be fair and as rational as possible. The new policy, if it is based on testosterone levels, is neither.

So what is a better solution?

First, at the very least, female athletes should be allowed to compete throughout any investigation. Suspending them from competition once questions are raised violates their confidentiality and imposes sanctions before relevant information has been gathered.

Second, when it comes to sex, sports authorities should acknowledge that while science can offer evidence, it cannot dictate what evidence we should use. Scientifically, there is no clear or objective way to draw a bright line between male and female.

Goto Full Article – “Click Here”

Published June 2012

New York Times
Gender Testing for Athletes Remains a Tough Call

By Eric Vilain
June 18th, 2012

Is LeBron James too tall and too fast to play basketball?

In times of extreme political correctness infiltrating almost every societal topic, sport stands out as an oddity. It captures the passion of billions of people around the world, yet it is grotesquely unequal. There are no remedial programs for ungifted athletes.

Yet when it comes to women in sports, everyone frets about equality.

This was particularly true in the outrage over the case of Caster Semenya, the South African athlete who won the 800 meters at the world championships in Berlin in 2009 and was accused of holding an unfair advantage because she was thought to compete unjustly in a women’s event. When men are more talented than others, it is an expression of the beauty of sports. But when women outcompete others, suspicions about eligibility and arguments for a level playing field often arise.

Goto Full Article - “Click Here”

Published June  2012

London 2012 Olympics: is measuring athletes’ ‘femaleness’ ever acceptable?

By Sam Murphy
June 14th, 2012

Sport is not a level playing field. If some athletes have ‘better’ hormones, then surely that’s the same as having better genes

London 2012 Olympics: is measuring athletes’ ‘femaleness’ ever acceptable?

Sport is not a level playing field. If some athletes have ‘better’ hormones, then surely that’s the same as having better genes

It’s a stressful time for any Olympic contender right now, as they focus on peaking at the right time, steering clear of injuries and preparing mentally for the ultimate contest. But some female athletes have an extra thing to worry about: gender authentication.

You may remember the furore surrounding the South African 800m runner Caster Semenya when, in 2009, she who won the world championships in Berlin by a huge 2-second margin. Even before the medals had been handed out, Semenya’s authenticity as a woman was being questioned and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) confirmed that gender verification tests were being undertaken. While Semenya’s case was being reviewed by the IAAF she was banned from competition, but did not escape the glare of media speculation (one headline asked “Woman, man or a little bit of both?”). Although the IAAF never made its findings public, it was widely reported that Semenya had both male and female sex organs and testosterone levels three times higher than typically found in a woman. Semenya got to keep her medal and, after an 11-month hiatus, the right to continue competing against other women. Through her legal representatives, she stated at the time: “I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being.”

Go to Full Article - “Click Here”

Published June, 2012

The Times of India – AFI to wait for medical report on Pramanik case

June 14th, 2012

NEW DELHI: Athletics Federation of India on Thursday said that it won’t do anything now and wait for the medical report and police investigation on the allegation by a Kolkata woman that 2006 Asian Games gold medallist Pinki Pramanik was a “male” before taking any action.

AFI Secretary C K Valson said that the federation would wait for the result of medical report of Pramanik and would inform the IAAF if she turns out to be a male as alleged in a complaint lodged by a woman in Kolkata.

He, however, added that the IAAF rules were not clear on whether the medals Pramanik had won in national and international events would be stripped off or not.

Goto Full Article - “Click Here”

Published June 2012

Proposed testosterone testing of some female olympians challenged by Stanford scientists

By Tracie White
Standford Medical Center

STANFORD, Calif. — Proposed Olympic policies for testing the testosterone levels of select female athletes could discriminate against women who may not meet traditional notions of femininity and distort the scientific evidence on the relationship between testosterone, sex and athletic performance, says a Stanford University School of Medicine bioethicist and her colleagues.

They also warn that the proposed policies would not only be unfair, but also could lead to female athletes being coerced into unnecessary and potentially harmful medical treatment in order to continue competing. The critique was published online today in The American Journal of Bioethics.

The testing policies, adopted a year ago by the International Association of Athletics Federations and now under consideration by the International Olympic Committee, call for using testosterone levels to decide whether an athlete is “feminine” enough to compete as a woman. The problem, the authors explain, is that there is insufficient evidence to set a benchmark for a normal testosterone levels in elite female athletes, let alone persuasive research showing that testosterone levels are a good predictor of athletic performance.

“What makes sex testing so complicated is that there is no one marker in the body we can use to say, ‘This is a man,’ or, ‘This is a woman,’” said first author of the paper Katrina Karkazis, PhD, a medical anthropologist and senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics. “These new policies try to get around that complexity by singling out testosterone levels as the most important aspect of athletic advantage. But what causes athletic advantage is equally complex and cannot be reduced to testosterone levels.”

Goto Full Article - “Click Here”

Podcast - “Click Here”

Published June 14th, 2012

Out of Bounds? A Critique of the New Policies on Hyperandrogenism in Elite Female Athletes

Certain Athletes Need to Be Deemed ‘Feminine’ Enough for Competition

By Katie J.M. Baker

Do female athletes with “unusually” high levels of male hormones have an unfair advantage on the field? The International Association of Athletics Federations thinks so: the organization recently decided that a woman cannot compete in track and field sports if she has too much testosterone in her apparently confusing body.
The issue has been a hot topic in South Africa ever since 21-year-old Caster Semenya won an 800-meter world championship and her competitors called her out for her “muscular biceps” and “husky voice.” “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man,” said Elisa Cusma, who placed sixth in the race. Some might think Cusma sounds like a sore loser, but the IAAF has decreed that women like Semenya must have surgery or receive hormone therapy prescribed by an IAAF expert medical panel if they want to continue to compete, because they have an “unfair advantage,” said Dr. Stéphane Bermon, coordinator of the IAAF working group on Hyperandrogenism and Sex Reassignment in Female Athletics. “More muscle mass, easier recovery and a higher level of blood red cells.”

Semenya kept her medal and was eventually allowed to race, but she looks markedly more feminine now — according to the Toronto Star, she’s “almost unrecognizable from photographs taken during the height of the controversy.” Track and field managers at the university she trains at say they know she gets treatment, but that they can’t give any details. “We all accept . . . and she accepts . . . within sports you have to perform within certain guidelines, or else it will be chaos,” explained one manager. Semenya won’t talk about it either, but now that she has a “fit, feminine body” and wears tight clothes to show it off, people seem satisfied enough.

Goto Full Article - “CLICK HERE”

Published June 12th 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – PUBLIC NOTICE:

Correspondence sent to Arne Ljungqvist & International Olympic Committee (IOC), requesting compensation for victims of gender verification testing

June 11, 2012 a statement of request has been sent to IOC Medical Chair Arne Ljungqvist, IOC President Jacques Rogge that (2) funds be developed, to compensate female athletes who have been physically and publicly violated, the last (50) years, by unwarranted and false policy unsupported by science, falsely presented the media and general public, when in-fact now science and research had been done. The outcome and fallout on the individual  female athlete has been too costly. Top experts now concluding with scientific data presented, “the science does not match the policies”.

The IOC continues to evade recommendations and warnings from sport leaders and scholars behind the scenes, to avoid gross human rights and discrimination targeting women.

The letter to the IOC – (2) Funds Requested

The Limits of Acceptable Biological Variation in Elite Athletes: Should Sex Ambiguity Be Treated Differently From Other Advantageous Genetic Traits?

J. Michael Bostwick, MD, and Michael J. Joyner, MD
June 2012

Elite athletes are unlike other people. They are gifted with the ability to be able to work their bodies faster, harder, and more skillfully than “mere mortals.” While the exercise of prodigious discipline is undoubtedly key to their successes, genetic and other biological variants likely factor into world-class performances, although how they do so is both complicated and poorly understood. In this context, disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs) can sometimes give female competitors a masculine edge. As the 2012 Olympic Games approach, one such athlete, Caster Semenya, a middle-distance runner from South Africa, has been cleared to compete, although not without considerable controversy that triggered an extensive medical work-up ordered by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) that confirmed a DSD and judged her to be a woman for the purpose of competition.

Dreger goes so far as to call the new testing requirements a “biological reduction of women to a hormonally disadvantaged class of people,” with females who have bountiful testosterone levels “medically made disadvantaged” through suppressive treatment.

Read Full Academic Publication - “Click Here”

Published June 10, 2012

The Toronto Star – Olympics struggle with ‘policing femininity’

By Stephanie Findlay
June 8th, 2012

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA— There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.

Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes.

Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was so fast and muscular that many suspected she was a man, exploded onto the front pages three years ago. She was considered an outlier, a one-time anomaly.

But similar cases are emerging all over the world, and Semenya, who was banned from competition for 11 months while authorities investigated her sex, is back, vying for gold.

Semenya and other women like her face a complex question: Does a female athlete whose body naturally produces unusually high levels of male hormones, allowing them to put on more muscle mass and recover faster, have an “unfair” advantage?

In a move critics call “policing femininity,” recent rule changes by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body of track and field, state that for a woman to compete, her testosterone must not exceed the male threshold.

Goto Full Article  - “Click Here”

Published June 8th, 2012