What No One Is Telling You About Caster Semenya: She Has XY Chromosomes
Plus The Usain Bolt/Michael Phelps Comparisons Don’t Work and More
By Robert Johnson
May 2, 2019
Let me start by saying, none of what I write below should be viewed as a personal attack on Caster Semenya. I have the utmost respect for her. Instead of writing up tons of praise for her, I’ll just share a tweet that one of my employees sent out yesterday as it’s better than anything I could have written myself.
That being said, I’m writing this column as I feel like the average person who hasn’t been following the Caster Semenya situation closely and woke up yesterday to see Semenya headlines in newspapers and on websites across the globe likely has no idea what is going on. The mainstream reporting on Semenya is very misleading, to say the least so let me share a few key facts that you likely haven’t read anywhere else.
Semenya flexing her muscles at the Pre Classic in 2018
1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. It was generally accepted by people following the case closely that Semenya was XY, but now it’s been confirmed as fact since the CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge them.
(In case you forgot what you learned in junior high biology, typically females have XX chromosomes while males are XY).
How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBCcould all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me. Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead paragraph of every story so people like my mother, who sent me a confused email after she saw an article on Semenya, can really understand what this is all about. Instead, the closest we get to the truth was that some of the articles talked about how Semenya has intersex “traits” or “characteristics.” Let’s be real, if you are an XY woman, you are the very definition of what virtually everyone would think of as intersex.
Because of the glaring XY omission, many across the globe ended up reading opening paragraphs like this from the front page of the New York Times:
Plus The Usain Bolt/Michael Phelps Comparisons Don’t Work and More
By Robert Johnson
May 2, 2019
Let me start by saying, none of what I write below should be viewed as a personal attack on Caster Semenya. I have the utmost respect for her. Instead of writing up tons of praise for her, I’ll just share a tweet that one of my employees sent out yesterday as it’s better than anything I could have written myself.
That being said, I’m writing this column as I feel like the average person who hasn’t been following the Caster Semenya situation closely and woke up yesterday to see Semenya headlines in newspapers and on websites across the globe likely has no idea what is going on. The mainstream reporting on Semenya is very misleading, to say the least so let me share a few key facts that you likely haven’t read anywhere else.
Semenya flexing her muscles at the Pre Classic in 2018
1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya has XY chromosomes. It was generally accepted by people following the case closely that Semenya was XY, but now it’s been confirmed as fact since the CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge them.
(In case you forgot what you learned in junior high biology, typically females have XX chromosomes while males are XY).
How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and BBCcould all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me. Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead paragraph of every story so people like my mother, who sent me a confused email after she saw an article on Semenya, can really understand what this is all about. Instead, the closest we get to the truth was that some of the articles talked about how Semenya has intersex “traits” or “characteristics.” Let’s be real, if you are an XY woman, you are the very definition of what virtually everyone would think of as intersex.
Because of the glaring XY omission, many across the globe ended up reading opening paragraphs like this from the front page of the New York Times:
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