@annaleen , weird coincidence! I happened to have just written the author this e-mail:
[2024-08-03 update: Fixing a science error, showing again why I should not speak extemporaneously on a technical field in which I'm an interested amateur, without careful reading.]
Bravo for episode 1 of "Tested", and I'll be awaiting the additional episodes with great interest. I have a few thoughts that might or might not be useful, but first wanted to ask a question that might sound like
self-promotion: Did you happen across my essay "Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment" that I published in 2008 and have maintained as needed since then (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html)?
Back in 2008, as we Californians were facing Prop. 8, I had a sudden idea: I knew a little about DSDs and the dreadful history of sex-testing female athletes in the Olympics, plus I have a law background (albeit am a senior system administrator by trade). And I'm a huge fan of literary nature writer John McPhee.
Relevance: Celebrated writer McPhee has an uncanny knack for what I call "non-rhetoric rhetoric". In writings such as the New Yorker essays anthologized in The Control of Nature, he lays out evocative and telling detail about some subject, in a cumulative manner, that has the effect of making you consider a viewpoint he never actually voiced.
I thought: Hmm, what if proponents of the California Marriage Protection Act (Prop. 8) would hate its consequences that they don't anticipate? I can make a persuasive case for that without arguing -- as McPhee does.
My essay describes for general audiences 12 DSDs that result in humans being difficult to classify, and then details just how badly sex-testing has gone wrong in the Olympics, and then describes how US "marriage protection" laws had already gone off the rails and legalized some same-sex marriages that would otherwise have been illegal.
(This was pre-Obergefell. My footnotes track the post-2008 developments.)
Anyway, about Ms. Mboma: I'm just a very interested amateur with a research hobby and science interest, but it seems to me that both of World Athletics's DSD policies are not merely controversial but also
utterly lacking in logic as applied to both Ms. Mboma and all fellow XY,46 women with 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency, condition #1 on my essay's list of 12 DSDs.
Why? Two reasons:
Although androgens do have some ongoing lifelong effects for both sexes, they are primarily developmental hormones. The effects after adulthood are quite minor. (I'm aware that debate over how minor is minor is central to controversy over WA/IAAF's policies -- and of those attempted by numerous Olympic committees.)
The defining effect of 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency is that autosomal recessive mutations in the SRD5A2 gene cause a deficiency of enzymes named "steroid 5-alpha-reductase" types 1 and 2, with the
result that testosterone is converted only very inefficiently to dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in the developing reproductive tissues. DHT is extra-important at the embryonic stage.
I read that catalysis of DHT (from testosterone) occurs in the prostate gland, seminal vesicles, epididymides, skin, hair follicles, liver, and brain (oddly enough, not in the testes). There are also two other biochemical pathways where both men and woman can produce needed DHT, from progesterone and from 17α-hydroxyprogesterone (in either case, catalyzed by the same 5α-reductase enzymes).
So, WA is measuring one androgen only, and there are others, such as the one Mbona can hardly produce at all.
All humans naturally have DHT, both sexes, naturally -- but WA's rule doesn't even try to measure or judge that chemical, let alone its effects in adult XY DSD women. Nor, if "too much of this chemical in your blood supply is unfair" do they even-handedly test any other women. Why not? All it takes is a blood sample.
As I'm sure your podcast will cover, there is basically no competent and relevant scientific data suggesting that unusually high testosterone in an adult woman athlete correlates with athletic achievement in running or any other sport, leaving aside that WA isn't measuring the right hormone in the first place. And, if we're judging athletes' natural endowments unfair if they correlate with achievement, where is the logic in stopping there? How is it not equally sensible (or non-sensible) to ban tall people from the pole-vaulting event? Soon, we end up in the world of Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction short story "Harrison Bergeron", set in a future where no Americans are permitted by law to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than any other Americans.
Anyway, some earlier follies from WA (then called International Amateur Athletic Federation = IAAF) did get some coverage in my essay's post-2008 "updates", though my main focus had been on the IOC and the Olympic committees. I note that IOC and WA have had at least one rather deliberately private consultation on athlete sex-testing, prior to WA's policy updates. Perhaps IOC lets WA be the issuer of policy trial balloons?
(Greetings from across the Bay. I'm in West Menlo Park.)
Andrew Losowsky
Annalee Newitz 🍜
adamrice
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