The Organisation Intersex International, a body that fights for the rights of intersex people, has created an online petition demanding that the International Olympic Committee abandon its plans to force intersex women to undergo medical treatment before they allowed to compete in sports. Along the way it also demand that the IOC treat such people with respect rather than referring to them as suffering from a “disorder”. Should you wish to sign, the petition is here. The web site is a little flaky, but my signature registered OK.
If you have missed my coverage of the issue, try this BBC article.
The IOC thumbs their collective nose at the judiciary of host countries, so why on earth are they going to listen to mere citizenry?
(As a citizen of an IOC host country [yes, that does sound like we got infected, all right] I offer my condolences to the people of Britain and London especially.)
Because the citizenry are the people who buy tickets to their events.
There was a call to boycott the Vancouver Olympics over the IOC’s moronic sexism…..did you even hear about it?
The trouble is, even if a fantasticaly large percentage of the population actively participates in a boycott, the number of tickets available are so scant (relative to the overall population) they’ll sell out regardless.
Nope, didn’t hear anything about it. I suspect people like you didn’t other to tell me because you assumed that it would never work.
And even if the IOC don’t change their minds, simply having the campaign might change the minds of some people. If you give up before you have started you’ll never change anything.
Demand treatment before they can compete _as women_.
Some forms of intersex condition give a physical advantage, that isn’t disputed. So it’s a weird issue without a real satisfactory solution to everyone.
Name one. And provide medical evidence for the supposed advantage.
And before you start going on about excess tersterone, please note that the bodies of women who have AIS are unable to process the hormone, otherwise they’d develop beards. In practice they are very smooth-skinned and a number of them get work as models or actresses.
Besides, every top flight athlete was born with some sort of biological advantage that sets them apart from the average person. They simply wouldn’t be that good otherwise. Are the IOC going to require exceptionally tall women to have surgery to reduce the length of their legs before they can compete in the high jump?
The idea that someone who was identified as female at birth, was raised as a girl, is comfortable with her female identity, is legally female in her country of residence, and may be happily married in what she and her partner regard as a heterosexual relationship can suddenly be “really a man” just because someone in the IOC says so is just absurd.
What next? Will the IOC demand that lesbian athletes undergo electroshock treatment to “cure them of their manliness”? Will they only allow women who have given birth the compete because they suddenly decide that ability to reproduce is their preferred test of womanhood? Or will they require female athletes to undergo cosmetic surgery if they don’t fit some ideal standard of womanly appearance? Isn’t that what this is all about? A bunch of old, white men looking at poor Caster Semenya and muttering, “well I don’t fancy her, she’s not much of a woman is she?”