@hyblaean:

I do agree with you wrt Santhi's case: it's really a shame to cause so much unnecessary suffering. Does anyone happen to know what the final consequences were -- any discussion of transgendered people and sports, any attempts to change the rules so as to avoid such cases in the future?

I understand Allie's point that the rules were not made with AIS people or transsexuals in mind. And I understand Rosenkavalier's point that, if genetic differences play such a role, then people who were born with better bodies also have what could be construed as 'unfair advantage'.

I suppose we can't avoid segretating people for sports events. We segregate children from adults, because it would be unfair by any definition to have children competing against adult athletes. And considering that men and women also have differences in athletic performance: once more we see two bell-shaped curves (aka Gaussians) with non-coinciding mean values. Since these two curves are significantly different, and since men and women are two biologically significant groups, it also makes sense to segregate them in sports events. As Rosenkavalier would have it, we even do sometimes differentiate by 'genetic endowment' in a sense: the weight categories of boxing would be an example. Yet it would be probably so difficult to agree on good, reliable criteria for the categories -- which would depend on each sport, I presume -- and within each category there would still be those who are genetically slightly better and those who are genetically slightly worse, i.e. those with advantages and those without -- that it would soon get messy and is probably better avoided. Well, just have a look at how messy even the male-female distinction can get because of hermaphrodites, XY women, transgendered people etc.

Indeed, we men and women, despite all the differences we love to talk about, we're still so damn close that one can honestly wonder whether a certain athlete is really female or not. The problematic cases are few in number, but they do exist. I hope the rules will take that into account, so as to avoid sad cases like Santhi's in the future.

I would agree with you if the number of sports dominated by men and the number of sports dominated by women were more or less the same. Perhaps even if it was skewed 2:1 for men. But my impression is that the number of sports in which women would get medals would be very small, and that the net effect would be to discourage women from participating in most sports at a higher, Olympic level. We'd simply see the number of Olympic women decrease to, say, 15% of what it now is.

You might say, so be it. It's more equal when women and men compete as equals. There's a point to be made here, I see. Personally, however, I'd feel sad if no women were throwing the javelin, running the 400m or playing soccer in the Olympics. If it could be done without segregating athletes, I'd be all for it. (The SF writer Samuel Delany once described a more equalitarian society in which, among other things, women and men played on equal footing at the Interplanetary Games. Of course, women were in average of much stronger build in Delany's future -- the main (male) character expressed at one point surprise when looking through old 20th-century photographs and seeing that men used to be taller than women. But I digress.)

As for AIS people having an advantage because of bone structure or some extra gray matter -- I'm not sure these differences wouldn't still fall within acceptable limits of female bodily variation. Aren't there XX women who are also quite tall (for a 5'10'' Brazilian like me, they seem to be everywhere in Europe and the US)? Or have higher-than-average brain sizes? That's what I would expect from a bell-shaped curve distribution, at least. If AIS people (especially the complete AIS, or CAIS, not the partial AIS, aka PAIS) are considered to have an 'unfair advantage' because of that, then we'd be falling into Rosenkavalier's claim that the genetically better endowed of every sex also have 'unfair advantages', since their bodies would get better results than normal people if all were submitted to the same training program. So it's not clear to me that CAIS people shouldn't simply be seen as athletically female.

The PAIS people, as well as hermaphrodites, do pose a more complicated problem though. Perhaps they should be separated as a different category. Or perhaps they could still be subclassified, according to testosterone level and degree of sensitivity to androgenas, as either athletically male or athletically female.

Let me agree with webcat and Flora Poste on that -- I don't really see any reason for thinking that pole dancing is inherently demeaning to women or men, nor do I think that female strippers are necessarily oppressed women -- not any more than male strippers, or than female waitresses, for that matter. Here, as far as oppression is concerned, I'd much more see a problem of economical classes (for the strippers who are poor and had no other choice than stripping to earn a living) than of gender inequality.