That they might test it!  Look at it.  Is that bulldog a man or a woman?  Sheesh, this is so stupid.

FLY ARMY!

Well, the answer to the age-old question,'how high can you stack it?' has now be answered.  We can all move on now.

"...a life lived as a woman made Walsh female, and the inexact measurements performed by strangers cannot render her life untrue."

A fast look at the ol' chromosomes and a quick nubbin-check is pretty freakin' exact, there Finney.  I mean, the only answers available are "yes" and "no".  

Kinda makes exactness "doable", ya know what I mean?

It's time for androgeny.....

It's Pat!

Is a home run regardless of how you feel about the underlying issue, IMO, because in this case the author's identity does matter. The Times needs to ask itself a simple question: "Why did we have to learn about it from Mark?"
JMR

The tax & spend drug war looks racist in the real world.

What I object to here is that, once again, a member of the GLT community is demanding special treatment.   That is, after having had a sex change, demanding to be allowed to particicpate in sex defined sporting events in the new gender. Renee Richards, anyone?

There are plenty of sports that are gender neutral (mostly hand to eye coordination) where such individuals could participate competitively without upsetting society's apple cart...equestrian, shooting, sailing, angling.

This is akin to the gay marriage argument.   Special but equal.  No.

Good luck with your golf tournament, Mark.  I really laughed at your "brag alert".

David Gregory, do you know which damn network you lie for? ~ Uncle Jimbo, @Blackfive

So a guy who wins the Bronze medal in track-and-field every time he races finally gets tired of being the runner-up, switches to the female side, and wins every event from the 100 meters to the hurdles to the long jump to the high jump and everything in between, and thereby sets a new Olympic record with 17 Gold medals.

 I find it difficult to believe that, as long a the guy wears a dress when he's mowing the yard, Boylan would be just fine with that.

The conclusions and hypotheticals drawn by the writer are poor, oversimplified, and it's ridiculous that she didn't mention her own orientation. BUT, there are some genuine good points brought up by the writer that you've chosen to ignore.

Let's try it Boylans' way and let a man enter as a woman. That "woman" would be tested for doping and, since that "woman" has rather high testosterone levels, far more than any natural-born woman would have, "she" would be banned from competition. Ether way, "she's" out.

A long time ago, I remember a question that went something like this:

In the Olympics, they often have two categories for events, one being the women's, such as 100 meter freestyle swimming. OFFICIALLY, what is the other category called?

The obvious answer, "men's", was said to be incorrect. The actual OFFICIAL other category as compement to "women's" is "open".

Thus, the "women's" category is restricted to those athletes with XX chromosomes. The "men's" category contains those with XY chromosomes plus any other human variation out there.

There's something most of you are missing here. Some of you are very close, but you don't seem to have the whole picture.

It's basic anthropology: sex is definite, as long as chromosomes and sex organs are normal. Gender, however, refers to socially defined roles and behaviors. In American culture, we've tried to get to a point where gender roles don't exist - men raise children, and women work in offices.

But in a culture where gender roles are strictly defined, it's very possible for a person to switch, just by changing the way he dresses, speaks or acts. The classical example is the native American bardiche, which gets way overplayed, I think. Still, it stands out as a fine example of a social role where a man chooses to live as a woman, marrying a man and doing woman's work. The bardiche probably doesn't exist anymore, however, because white people politely civilized native Americans. By killing them.

Another classical example we learn in introduction to anthropology is a tradition in an African society (sorry, I've forgotten the region) wherein a woman may marry another woman and take on a man's gender role. Her gender becomes "male" even though her sex is still "female."

Now, you might be laughing - look, this guy's spouting tired, cliched examples from introduction to anthropology class. But that's my point. You guys are at the 101 level, and you're still getting it wrong. There are 18-year-olds out there who have a far better understanding of this issue than you ever will. And it's not a wimpy, touchy-feely social science thing - it's years of research, hundreds of published papers and an entire branch of studies, Women and Gender.

And these old examples have cognates in contemporary American society. They aren't old, unreal, ancient traditions in another world, far, far away from us. They are very real issues, here and now. The problem is that people like you are just kind of clueless about them, and in your clulessness, you just assume that anyone that is different from you is an aberration, an abomination or just plain "it." 

You are missing the point of this thread.  The argument is that physiologically men are different than women. It doesn’t matter what you cut off or sew on or inject into them they are still fundamentally built like the gender they were born with.  In athletic competition this is a major difference, hence the reasons there are different categories of men’s and women’s competitions for the same sport!  The article states that an autopsy revealed that “she” was a man.  This illustrates the point being made – it is unethical to participate in a women’s sporting event if you were ever a man! It doesn’t matter whether “she” felt like a woman or not. Her body was still put together as a man’s. Her musculature and bone structure was stronger than a woman’s and therefore gave her an advantage above the true biological women in those competitions. This makes it unethical and therefore fraudulent for her to be awarded those medals since she had an unfair advantage just as if someone were doping to enhance their performance abilities.  As has been stated (and apparently ignored by the liberals bent on painting the conservatives here as bigots) if there were no physical difference then there would be no special designation between men’s and women’s sporting events and they would all compete on the same level. Women wouldn’t tee off at different locations than men, scoring would be relatively the same in all competitions across the board if there were no differences. I lived with this asinine, unrealistic farce while I was in the military. Women were given lesser physical training requirements yet were given the same pay and the same rank and respect even when they through example couldn’t perform at the same level as the men. This is seen in various other professions where physical prowess is necessary to perform the duties at hand. Cops, Firemen and military will all tell you that women cannot perform at the same level (and therefore in a more dangerous capacity in dangerous situations) as men.  To ignore that puts everyone in those physical situations in danger. In sports it demeans the men who earn medals and trophies for being the best at something, then have to share those equal awards with women who are ranked the best as well with the caveat of being “the best woman”. This demeans the women as well because they always have that caveat attached to the awards.  Then to have someone who is a man biologically come along and then be awarded the awards that are specifically designated for women BECAUSE of their physical inequality to men, is just an even bigger insult.  This seems like more liberal claptrap to bring everyone to complete and totally utopian parity unnaturally by totally ignoring the physical, biological and human nature related differences in us all. It’s an irony that the liberal mantra of respecting diversity also espouses trying to make us all identical regardless of the repeated outcomes.  Get off this gender bender conversation of being transsexual as being ok. This thread is about dishonesty in sporting competitions not about who’s right about sexual gender confusion!

"The moment you give up your principles and your values, the moment you laugh at those principles and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period." - Oriana Fallaci