It's not about fairness

I was reading the column by someone with the Organisation Internationale des Intersexués (OII, an Intersex organization) about the International Olympic Committe (IOC) and how the IOC has never treated intersexed athletes with respect and fairness, including the recent events with Caster Semenaya of South Africa. I've expressed my view of her and noted she's not by definition intersexed, just an under developed male, and has no right to compete as female.

But the OII seems that all intersexed people should be able to compete in the sex and gender of their choice, despite any obvious or less than obvious advantages they have over non-intersexed atheletes, as the Caster case also showed (3 times the level of testosterone as female athletes). They think somehow people can just show up, announce their sex and gender, and compete accordingly.

And they expect the IOC to agree to allow it. It's about fairness in their mind. Except the OII fails to understand it's not about fairness for a small group of people and less so athletes, but the whole of the athletic community. It's a relative fairness, and as much as you want to complain about the binary sex and gender system, and intersex and transgender atheletes are discriminated against, it's what is.

And the OII fails to understand many professional organizations have rules and proceedures for transgender athletes to compete in the new sex and gender, Marianne Bagger and others have demonstrated this quite professionally by following them to compete openly and fairly. That's what the Athletic Association of South Africa should have done with Caster, make her transistion first, then compete.

That would be fair. But I suspect, when she does transistion, she won't be as dominate as she was in the Berlin competition in 2009 when the complaints were lodged against her. I won't argue the IOC mishandled her case, badly in fact. That's obvious, and they're simply trying to fixing their own problems. And they even botched that. But at least they issued rules for her for future competitions.

In the end the OII needs to take a step back, take deep breath, and see the larger picture, and then put themselves in that instead of trying to make their own picture of the world, and their view of fairness no one else agrees with. They need to get real about themselves and more understanding of others. Now that's fairness for all of us.