CAIS persons have a Y chromosome. However, it doesn't do them any good (for sports) because they can't use the androgens that their bodies produce. Earlier I stated the CAIS persons 'are women'. This is incorrect. They are not. However, the statement that they 'should be treated as women' stands. Treating them as men would be grossly unfair (to them). In a bygone era, this problem did not arise. CAIS persons were thought to be natal girls and treated as such. Some reports suggest that CAIS persons might gain a sporting advantage from height.
They are men with a disorder/disability, not women. Treat them as men with a disorder/disability that may need special accommodations as a man. That does not mean you just throw them in with the women. They have internal testes, testes = male. Probably shouldn't throw them into gen pop in a men's prison but if you let ANY MAN into a women's space based on whether or not HE LOOKS FEMALE ENOUGH then you open the door for ANY MAN who can pay for surgery. That's the problem.
K, Take a look at some photos of CAIS persons. Check out the YouTube videos by Benjamin Boyce (type Boyce CAIS into the YouTube search bar, watch the Claire Graham video). Genetically, CAIS persons are male. However, they are in almost all other respects female. Letting post-op men into women's prisons isn't really a problem. The problem is with intact men who just claim to be female so that they can abuse actual female prisoners (which has already happened).
They're still men with a disability not women. I'm pretty sure the person you're talking about on BB's channel actually lied about having CAIS, has PAIS and a lot of surgery, and if you see more pictures you see a major difference.
Your logic is really faulty. You cannot be "in almost all other respects" female because female is reproductive sex. If you have testes your reproductive sex is male as determined by your gamete potential. If you remove those testes you don't become female, you become a castrated male. There is no other aspect that makes someone male or female. External female genitalia does not make a person male or female it's just the most correlated indication that someone is male or female. So yes, letting post op men into women's prions is actually still a problem, because what you're setting as a standard is if you APPEAR female enough you get in. That's not the same as being actually female and is incredibly subjective. And also having your genitals cut off doesn't actually change the strength and safety imbalance and it is impossible to build genitals or change gamete production. An inverted penis is not a vagina, castrated men are men. By your logic cancer patients change sex if it affects their reproductive organs, that's not how biology works.
Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXL-3eoB-o. In my opinion, it would be absurd to send such a person to a male prison. As for the sex of the person, that is not so clear. The person has XY chromosomes. However, the person produces no sperm or eggs (I think) and has no male or female reproductive organs. Fortunately, CAIS is quite rare.
They are male. CAIS is a male DSD, only men can have CAIS or PAIS. It's part of the definition of the disorder. Women cannot have CAIS or PAIS because it doesn't affect women. It's like saying a fish might have HIV. Fish can't have HIV because it's HUMAN immunodeficiency virus. You have to be human to get HIV. You're making a category error. Furthermore, if all had gone right in development there would have been testes and we can know that. Genetics is not nearly as hard as people are trying to make it around this discussion. Streak gonads can still have different cells. Ovaries and testes cells are different under microscopes, often even when they fail to develop fully. If a CAIS male is born with a blind pouch, XY chromosomes, streak gonads, and develops breasts (but never the capacity to ovulate) then this is still a male with a DSD. All of those things combined will be used to diagnose this disorder including the necessary qualifier that the patient is male.
If you care about prison safety then fight for reform wherein male prisons are not cesspools of violence and human deprivation and rather actual facilities of rehabilitation. What you're arguing for is not safe prison reform and care for prisoners, but an alternative where women bear the brunt of bad law rather than an improvement for everyone based on fixing the prison system. That's how male predators ended up in women's prisons, because the standard is not set to sex for sex segregated spaces but instead the superficiality of human appearance which can be modified with surgery (BB's guest) or might appear different from the norm. You're right, fortunately CAIS is rare, but also it's still only men who can have CAIS. Figure out a third space if you don't want them in regular men's prison and work to fix how bad men's prisons are. Letting one man in sets enough precedent for others and then you end up with pregnant inmates like California.
In my opinion, CAIS persons and post-op transsexuals should be allowed in womenтАЩs prisons. Why? Because they donтАЩt appear to be a threat to other female prisoners and they would be at considerable risk in male prisons. Before the modern era, CAIS persons lived their entire lives thinking they were female (as did their parents and everyone else). Of course, they never got their period and never had children. My guess is that they just felt unlucky. With current technology we can detect this condition and act on it. However, that does mean we should kick them out of womenтАЩs prisons (in my opinion).
By contrast, self-id is an abomination (in my opinion). The idea that a person only needs to say they are female to gain access to womenтАЩs prisons is nuts. CAIS persons are typically intermediate in size and never go through male puberty. Which means that they have female strength levels. They tend to be super-feminine in appearance (body and face shape, but not internal anatomy). They are very, very unlikely to be dangerous to anyone.
CAIS men have testes and NORMAL testosterone levels. A lab test would return normal male testosterone, testes, XY chromosomes. All minimum indicators of sex, because sex is reproductive potential not appearance, are male. Sorting on appearance means the spectrum of opinion on what's close enough would have to be used even though we have fairly objective measures for what sex is. At what point is a scrawny small breasted man with PAIS/MAIS close enough to CAIS? We can't compare testosterone levels, some women will be hairier, taller, more broad shouldered, more flat chested than them. At what point is a stocky flat chested woman with CAH close enough to being a man? Caster Semenya is clearly male except genital development. Has all the strength and build advantage, where do those patients go?
Again, a minimum condition for CAIS is being male, regardless of external build. This is a slippery slope argument in a case where it's not a fallacy because "woman enough" is what's putting men in women's prisons right now. A penis is not the only thing you can violate another person with and this contingent of prisoners is particularly dangerous to women. Castration and hormones DO NOT reverse puberty. Some studies say there's a loss of as little as 10% of strength but men's upper body strength is about double that of women. A 10% loss in that context isn't even a standard deviation in the male bell curve of strength and strength correlates strongly with stature and build which is why we even have weight classes in sports. Between 140lb man and a 140lb with healthy body fat percentages he will have 10% more muscle. That scales. On average 50% of men are taller than ~95% of women. A 5'10" woman is the lowest in the 99th percentile, the equivalent man is 6'4". A 5'10" man and a 5'4" woman is not an even match even if he's on estrogen. A 5'4" man and a 5'4" woman isn't an even match because he is still probably going to outweigh her by 30lbs, with 25 of that being muscle. Having a penis then just becomes one of many problems in that scenario.
It is not women's obligation or burden to protect weak men from other men. Amputees, paraplegics, small men, short men, stupid men, men with a slight build, men with Marfan's, men with Ehlers Danlos, men with hypotonia, men with dwarfism. Any disability is a target. We are not a body shield for weak men against other men. Why doesn't your policy apply to other birth defects that make someone a good target for violence? What about this single medical problem is worse than a criminal with no legs being in gen pop? Really, if you care about prisoner welfare fight for a) a third space for disabled prisoners, b) actual prisoner welfare. If you separate by anything other than sex it is not a sex segregated space, by definition.
Yeah, that's true! But just thinking out loud now, variations in body shape and size are an occupartional hazard of competitive athletics, and swimming is one of those categories. What do we do with a person like Michael Phelps, with his famous wing span? Elite male swimmers half his size had to compete against him, knowing they didn't stand a chance. He was an outlier in terms of size, but also in terms of talent. Generally speaking, competitive athletes will gravitate towards a sport that their body type is best suited for but sometimes the superior biology of an opponent will just win out. But height isn't everything. Look at how tall and muscular Lia Thomas is. He still couldn't swim his way out of a paper bag when competing against other men.
As a rule, I'm completely opposed to allowing males to compete against females in any context. I'm even opposed to Caster Semenya competing in women's sports, because Semenya has XY chromosomes, and the Y is obviously expressed. Semenya is not CAIS. But CAIS strikes me as a very ambiguous intersex category in which an occasional superiority in height or strength might not make the individual a true outlier. Probably, for the sake of consistency, they should be banned from women's athletics, but I have experience some ambivalence saying that.
Caster Semenya was a 5-alpha-reductase male who should never have been allowed to compete with actual women. However, that's not a very PC view. In real life, somehow the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBC failed to mention that Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. I am sure that the failings of the Soviet state were not mentioned under Stalin either.
Yeah, not PC. But that has never been me. I discovered Semenya's status by doing a lot of digging. The information is out there, but it's hard to locate. To this day most people think Semenya is a woman with naturally higher testosterone.
Sex categories, age categories, and weight categories are all asymmetrically exclusionary in sports. An Under -15 league can have a 12 year old player, but not a 16 year old player.
A 185lb fight match can have a fighter show up weighing 180lbs, but not 190 lbs. For sex categories, the men's division can have people with extra X chromosomes, but the women's division can't sustain competitors with extra Y chromosomes. I think that's the only way to make it work.
Yes, you are right. Consistency matters, and we have to draw the line somewhere. The formulas for professional athletics are tried and true, and we should simply abide by them.
CAIS is an intersex condition in which the Y chromosome is present but is not expressed. тАЬCAISтАЭ stands for Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In other words, these individuals are genetic males who lack male genitalia and appear as feminine as any XX woman you will ever see. They live as and identify as women, and their Y chromosome would not give them an unfair advantage in sports because they likely have never gone through male puberty and have no circulating testosterone (if the person was born with internal testes that are surgically removed).
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
Men with PAIS have partial sensitivity, like Caster Semenya. That's where a benefit comes in. Although even in CAIS there is still SOME sensitivity to testosterone because it has effects other than virilization and a human without any level of sensitivity to any hormone would just be dead.
K, to the best of my knowledge Caster Semenya is not a PAIS male. Caster S. is a rather typical 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency) male. He was misidentified as female at birth. That is rather common in 46 XY DSD cases.
Caster Semenya is a standard male in most (but not all) respects. Testes? Of course. Male Testosterone levels? Of course (at least before medical suppression). XY chromosomes? Of course. Male internal (but not external) anatomy? Of course.
They tend to be taller, and hyper-female, since they lack receptors for testosterone. Apparently pretty common among models. Don't know about sports; apparently they get male size but not male muscles.
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
Except maybe not in sports - a Y chromosome might be a dealbreaker for competing in the female division.
CAIS persons have a Y chromosome. However, it doesn't do them any good (for sports) because they can't use the androgens that their bodies produce. Earlier I stated the CAIS persons 'are women'. This is incorrect. They are not. However, the statement that they 'should be treated as women' stands. Treating them as men would be grossly unfair (to them). In a bygone era, this problem did not arise. CAIS persons were thought to be natal girls and treated as such. Some reports suggest that CAIS persons might gain a sporting advantage from height.
They are men with a disorder/disability, not women. Treat them as men with a disorder/disability that may need special accommodations as a man. That does not mean you just throw them in with the women. They have internal testes, testes = male. Probably shouldn't throw them into gen pop in a men's prison but if you let ANY MAN into a women's space based on whether or not HE LOOKS FEMALE ENOUGH then you open the door for ANY MAN who can pay for surgery. That's the problem.
K, Take a look at some photos of CAIS persons. Check out the YouTube videos by Benjamin Boyce (type Boyce CAIS into the YouTube search bar, watch the Claire Graham video). Genetically, CAIS persons are male. However, they are in almost all other respects female. Letting post-op men into women's prisons isn't really a problem. The problem is with intact men who just claim to be female so that they can abuse actual female prisoners (which has already happened).
They're still men with a disability not women. I'm pretty sure the person you're talking about on BB's channel actually lied about having CAIS, has PAIS and a lot of surgery, and if you see more pictures you see a major difference.
Your logic is really faulty. You cannot be "in almost all other respects" female because female is reproductive sex. If you have testes your reproductive sex is male as determined by your gamete potential. If you remove those testes you don't become female, you become a castrated male. There is no other aspect that makes someone male or female. External female genitalia does not make a person male or female it's just the most correlated indication that someone is male or female. So yes, letting post op men into women's prions is actually still a problem, because what you're setting as a standard is if you APPEAR female enough you get in. That's not the same as being actually female and is incredibly subjective. And also having your genitals cut off doesn't actually change the strength and safety imbalance and it is impossible to build genitals or change gamete production. An inverted penis is not a vagina, castrated men are men. By your logic cancer patients change sex if it affects their reproductive organs, that's not how biology works.
Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuXL-3eoB-o. In my opinion, it would be absurd to send such a person to a male prison. As for the sex of the person, that is not so clear. The person has XY chromosomes. However, the person produces no sperm or eggs (I think) and has no male or female reproductive organs. Fortunately, CAIS is quite rare.
They are male. CAIS is a male DSD, only men can have CAIS or PAIS. It's part of the definition of the disorder. Women cannot have CAIS or PAIS because it doesn't affect women. It's like saying a fish might have HIV. Fish can't have HIV because it's HUMAN immunodeficiency virus. You have to be human to get HIV. You're making a category error. Furthermore, if all had gone right in development there would have been testes and we can know that. Genetics is not nearly as hard as people are trying to make it around this discussion. Streak gonads can still have different cells. Ovaries and testes cells are different under microscopes, often even when they fail to develop fully. If a CAIS male is born with a blind pouch, XY chromosomes, streak gonads, and develops breasts (but never the capacity to ovulate) then this is still a male with a DSD. All of those things combined will be used to diagnose this disorder including the necessary qualifier that the patient is male.
If you care about prison safety then fight for reform wherein male prisons are not cesspools of violence and human deprivation and rather actual facilities of rehabilitation. What you're arguing for is not safe prison reform and care for prisoners, but an alternative where women bear the brunt of bad law rather than an improvement for everyone based on fixing the prison system. That's how male predators ended up in women's prisons, because the standard is not set to sex for sex segregated spaces but instead the superficiality of human appearance which can be modified with surgery (BB's guest) or might appear different from the norm. You're right, fortunately CAIS is rare, but also it's still only men who can have CAIS. Figure out a third space if you don't want them in regular men's prison and work to fix how bad men's prisons are. Letting one man in sets enough precedent for others and then you end up with pregnant inmates like California.
In my opinion, CAIS persons and post-op transsexuals should be allowed in womenтАЩs prisons. Why? Because they donтАЩt appear to be a threat to other female prisoners and they would be at considerable risk in male prisons. Before the modern era, CAIS persons lived their entire lives thinking they were female (as did their parents and everyone else). Of course, they never got their period and never had children. My guess is that they just felt unlucky. With current technology we can detect this condition and act on it. However, that does mean we should kick them out of womenтАЩs prisons (in my opinion).
By contrast, self-id is an abomination (in my opinion). The idea that a person only needs to say they are female to gain access to womenтАЩs prisons is nuts. CAIS persons are typically intermediate in size and never go through male puberty. Which means that they have female strength levels. They tend to be super-feminine in appearance (body and face shape, but not internal anatomy). They are very, very unlikely to be dangerous to anyone.
CAIS men have testes and NORMAL testosterone levels. A lab test would return normal male testosterone, testes, XY chromosomes. All minimum indicators of sex, because sex is reproductive potential not appearance, are male. Sorting on appearance means the spectrum of opinion on what's close enough would have to be used even though we have fairly objective measures for what sex is. At what point is a scrawny small breasted man with PAIS/MAIS close enough to CAIS? We can't compare testosterone levels, some women will be hairier, taller, more broad shouldered, more flat chested than them. At what point is a stocky flat chested woman with CAH close enough to being a man? Caster Semenya is clearly male except genital development. Has all the strength and build advantage, where do those patients go?
Again, a minimum condition for CAIS is being male, regardless of external build. This is a slippery slope argument in a case where it's not a fallacy because "woman enough" is what's putting men in women's prisons right now. A penis is not the only thing you can violate another person with and this contingent of prisoners is particularly dangerous to women. Castration and hormones DO NOT reverse puberty. Some studies say there's a loss of as little as 10% of strength but men's upper body strength is about double that of women. A 10% loss in that context isn't even a standard deviation in the male bell curve of strength and strength correlates strongly with stature and build which is why we even have weight classes in sports. Between 140lb man and a 140lb with healthy body fat percentages he will have 10% more muscle. That scales. On average 50% of men are taller than ~95% of women. A 5'10" woman is the lowest in the 99th percentile, the equivalent man is 6'4". A 5'10" man and a 5'4" woman is not an even match even if he's on estrogen. A 5'4" man and a 5'4" woman isn't an even match because he is still probably going to outweigh her by 30lbs, with 25 of that being muscle. Having a penis then just becomes one of many problems in that scenario.
It is not women's obligation or burden to protect weak men from other men. Amputees, paraplegics, small men, short men, stupid men, men with a slight build, men with Marfan's, men with Ehlers Danlos, men with hypotonia, men with dwarfism. Any disability is a target. We are not a body shield for weak men against other men. Why doesn't your policy apply to other birth defects that make someone a good target for violence? What about this single medical problem is worse than a criminal with no legs being in gen pop? Really, if you care about prisoner welfare fight for a) a third space for disabled prisoners, b) actual prisoner welfare. If you separate by anything other than sex it is not a sex segregated space, by definition.
Sign them up for the WNBA!
Height is also an advantage in swimming
Yeah, that's true! But just thinking out loud now, variations in body shape and size are an occupartional hazard of competitive athletics, and swimming is one of those categories. What do we do with a person like Michael Phelps, with his famous wing span? Elite male swimmers half his size had to compete against him, knowing they didn't stand a chance. He was an outlier in terms of size, but also in terms of talent. Generally speaking, competitive athletes will gravitate towards a sport that their body type is best suited for but sometimes the superior biology of an opponent will just win out. But height isn't everything. Look at how tall and muscular Lia Thomas is. He still couldn't swim his way out of a paper bag when competing against other men.
As a rule, I'm completely opposed to allowing males to compete against females in any context. I'm even opposed to Caster Semenya competing in women's sports, because Semenya has XY chromosomes, and the Y is obviously expressed. Semenya is not CAIS. But CAIS strikes me as a very ambiguous intersex category in which an occasional superiority in height or strength might not make the individual a true outlier. Probably, for the sake of consistency, they should be banned from women's athletics, but I have experience some ambivalence saying that.
Caster Semenya was a 5-alpha-reductase male who should never have been allowed to compete with actual women. However, that's not a very PC view. In real life, somehow the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBC failed to mention that Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. I am sure that the failings of the Soviet state were not mentioned under Stalin either.
Yeah, not PC. But that has never been me. I discovered Semenya's status by doing a lot of digging. The information is out there, but it's hard to locate. To this day most people think Semenya is a woman with naturally higher testosterone.
Sex categories, age categories, and weight categories are all asymmetrically exclusionary in sports. An Under -15 league can have a 12 year old player, but not a 16 year old player.
A 185lb fight match can have a fighter show up weighing 180lbs, but not 190 lbs. For sex categories, the men's division can have people with extra X chromosomes, but the women's division can't sustain competitors with extra Y chromosomes. I think that's the only way to make it work.
Yes, you are right. Consistency matters, and we have to draw the line somewhere. The formulas for professional athletics are tried and true, and we should simply abide by them.
CAIS is an intersex condition in which the Y chromosome is present but is not expressed. тАЬCAISтАЭ stands for Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In other words, these individuals are genetic males who lack male genitalia and appear as feminine as any XX woman you will ever see. They live as and identify as women, and their Y chromosome would not give them an unfair advantage in sports because they likely have never gone through male puberty and have no circulating testosterone (if the person was born with internal testes that are surgically removed).
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
ThatтАЩs interesting. Thank you for the information.
Men with PAIS have partial sensitivity, like Caster Semenya. That's where a benefit comes in. Although even in CAIS there is still SOME sensitivity to testosterone because it has effects other than virilization and a human without any level of sensitivity to any hormone would just be dead.
K, to the best of my knowledge Caster Semenya is not a PAIS male. Caster S. is a rather typical 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency) male. He was misidentified as female at birth. That is rather common in 46 XY DSD cases.
Fair, but either way, still pretty obviously should have been checked for testes around puberty.
Caster Semenya is a standard male in most (but not all) respects. Testes? Of course. Male Testosterone levels? Of course (at least before medical suppression). XY chromosomes? Of course. Male internal (but not external) anatomy? Of course.
They tend to be taller, and hyper-female, since they lack receptors for testosterone. Apparently pretty common among models. Don't know about sports; apparently they get male size but not male muscles.
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.