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The severe storm is set to barrel into the Bay of Bengal this weekend. PHOTO: AFP
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- 1m Indians, Bangladeshi evacuated ahead of 'monster' Cyclone Fani
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British MPs lead world in declaring climate change 'emergency'
- May Day saw massive labour protests from Paris to Moscow
- Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi revealed he is alive and well
- U.S. synagogue attacked by radical right-wing christian
- Messi scored an emphatic 600th goal for Barcelona
- Billionaire found guilty of bribing doctors to hawk his company's opioids
- Democrats ramped up pressure on A.G. Barr over missed hearing
- Mercedes made history with a fourth consecutive 1-2 podium finish
- U.K. defence secretary sacked over Huawei report leak
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Semenya at the 2012 London Olympics. PHOTO: Phil Noble / Reuters
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Controversy has followed Caster Semenya down every track she's run. The South African athlete has twice claimed gold in the 800m at the Olympics and thrice at the World Championships. She is amongst the fastest women in the world – though some of her competitors believe she is racing under the wrong sex designation. The truth is that Semenya challenges the tightly-held division between men's and women's sport.
The sports trial of the century
Semenya was born with a woman's reproductive organs. She was raised a woman. She identifies as one and has competed as one her entire professional life. And despite this, she is perceived to be different. A perception that has now solidified into a contentious legal judgement that threatens her career and calls into question the most basic precept of what it is to be a woman. The 28-year-old has hyperandrogenism, a condition that confers heightened testosterone levels. In the parlance of the sport world she is an athlete with "differences of sexual development" (DSD). And under international guidelines female DSD athletes must keep their testosterone levels below a certain level in order to compete.
Semenya's rivals have been looking at her studs for over a decade. Despite (or perhaps because of) her success, she has suffered a decade of criticism, gender-verification tests, bans and outright discrimination. While some competitors have accepted her uniqueness as a quality to cherish, others have sneered (one described her as a man after the 2009 World Championships). And then there are all those who regard her as having an unfair advantage – in this group we can now count the highest sporting court in the land and the global athletics body. This week the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled 2-1 against her, ending her attempt to overturn a ruling from the International Association of Athletics Foundations (IAAF) that discriminates against her.
But first, a step back. In 2015 another hyperandrogenic athlete with heightened testosterone levels – India's Dutee Chand – successfully challenged an IAAF ban. The judges instructed the athletics body to suspend the testosterone-limit regulation for two years and find a long-term solution that would include DSD athletes. They did not, and in the intervening two years (while Semenya was collecting her second Olympic gold medal in Rio de Janeiro) the IAAF was marshalling evidence. Last April the regulation suspension lapsed and the IAAF rushed in new guidelines: any female DSD athlete registering more than 5 nanomole per litre of blood would be required to take hormone suppressants in order to race. Semenya sued, arguing that such measures discriminated against her.
The court agreed that it was discriminatory, but in a 2-1 decision ruled against her anyway.
What maketh the woman
This entire controversy hinges on a single chemical: testosterone. The CAS decision relied on a scientific paper which suggested that testosterone is the salient marker for determining advantage amongst DSD athletes. That's because testosterone is not only the primary male sex hormone, it's also an anabolic steroid. It is believed that the chemical confers sporting advantage through increased muscle strength and oxygenation. That's a view also held by the IAAF, which considers the 'normal' female testosterone range to be below 2 nanomole per litre, and the 'normal' male range to be 7.7-29.4 nanomole.
The problem is that this binary classification of testosterone has been slammed for being both reductive and unscientific for a number of reasons. First, women have fewer testosterone receptors than men do. In addition to this there are several enzymes that regulate testosterone production that are often missing in DSD athletes, meaning they derive less value from the hormone than men do. Lastly, the 5 nanomole limit will actually cut off women who are naturally high in testosterone - such as those with polycystic ovarian syndrome. There is simply no valid laboratory test that can measure a woman's sensitivity to testosterone.
Not only is the testosterone argument a subjective one, it also elides the full scope of scientific orthodoxy surrounding the definition of gender. As many scientists have argued, the notion of simplistically grouping humans into male and female is not backed up by evolutionary biology. The human body is simply too complex and too varied to fit the binary construct, a fact that is only slowly now filtering into the zeitgeist. Intersex conditions vary greatly; some people have male reproductive organs and internal ovaries, or female reproductive organs and internal testes. Some present as men but have XX chromosomes, or present as women but have heightened levels of testosterone. Simply put there is a panoply of intersex variants that included different configurations of what have traditionally been deemed male or female characteristics.
As Dutee Chand argued successfully in 2015, it was unfair to penalise her particular genetic variation - while at the same time she was racing against taller women and those from wealthier backgrounds (who possess numerous advantages in terms of training, diet, and sport technology). Unfortunately for Semenya, the argument that her natural body offers no more advantage than Usain Bolt's fast-twitch muscles, fell on deaf ears. She has been told she needs to become more of a woman through hormone suppressants in order to race.
Celebrating difference
The simple fact is that all elite athletes are all different from the rest of us. Which brings us to the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps. The American swimmer retired with 28 medals (23 of which were gold) – an achievement that defies the imagination. His dedication and fastidious training are legendary, but they are not the reason why he ranks amongst the greatest individual athletes of all time. A complex and extremely flukey combination of genetic factors made Phelps a perfect candidate to be a champion.
He lives with Marfan syndrome, a defect that affects the heart valve and aorta, often leading to early death. An archetypal symptom is having a longer arm-span than height. Phelps's huge arms are tipped with extremely large hands and he walks around on size-14 feet. This water displacement this affords him an undeniable advantage over those who jump in the pool with him. But perhaps most surprising is the fact that Phelps produces half the lactic acid of a typical athlete; meaning he is half as fatigued at the end of the race. And yet, despite the biological advantages, Phelps is hailed as the consummate athlete, an outlier of just what is possible with the human body. No-one suggested pumping lactic acid into him before the race to even the playing field.
Sports officials and fellow athletes (not to mention the general public) have spent over a decade querying who Caster Semenya is. There is great comfort and security in labels, especially ones that have been passed down to us for time immemorial. It takes agile minds – athletic ones, if you will – to overcome built-in preconceptions (and the category mistakes that occur when they crash into the real world).
Sometimes the only thing that bears out is listening to, and believing, the person in question: "I just want to run naturally the way I was born. It is not fair that I am told I must change. I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman, and I am fast."
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Guaidó loyalists fire towards La Carlota. PHOTO: Boris Vergara / AP
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A coup attempt by any other name
It's difficult to get a handle on what is happening in Caracas given the sheer amount of propaganda being peddled. So we'll start with the basics: this week Venezuela's would-be leader Juan Guaidó tried and failed to foment a coup d'état against the autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. Early on Tuesday morning soldiers loyal to Guaidó sprang the anti-government activist Leopoldo López from home-detention.
As the sun rose over Caracas, several thousand demonstrators joined the two opposition figures on a freeway adjacent to the downtown La Carlota military base. This was 'Operacion Libertad', and amongst the civilians were dozens of members of Venezuela's armed forces. They hoped to exhort their colleagues inside the garrison to join them – to take up arms against Maduro. Then gunfire broke out. By lunchtime it was all over: the march on the presidential palace halted at its first step. Protesters were dispersed by gunfire, plumes of tear gas and marauding gangs of motorbike colectivos. Somewhere crushed under the wheels of armed vehicles out of La Carlota. Maduro blamed Donald Trump for the plot against him. Donald Trump blamed the 20,000 imaginary Cuban soldiers for thwarting the coup.
For his part, Guaidó seems to have overlooked the fact that autocrats do not disappear easily, especially those who enjoy the support of a sizeable minority of the population, as Maduro does. The first hurdle for armed insurrection is a steep one: acknowledging your friends, colleagues and family will die – painfully and in great numbers – in direct attacks, counter-massacres and enforced disappearances. Guaidó is yet to convince his countryfolk to lay down their lives for him. If one thing is assured, its the fact that foreign involvement in Venezuela is slowly destroying the country. Russian patronage is artificially prolonging the reign of an autocrat, and brutal American sanctions are killing everyday Venezuelans - as many as 40,000 by some counts.
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Jakarta is getting wetter and busier. PHOTO: AP
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Last one out, grab the mop
As far as trial balloons go, this one is up there with the best of them. This week newly-reinstated Indonesian president Joko Widodo asked his followers (and presumably the country at large) on Instagram whether he should move the administrative capital of Jakarta elsewhere. It would be a historic feat, but not one without precedents. Kazakhstan, Brazil, Myanmar and Australia have – with varying rates of success – all moved their capitals in one direction or another. And it's not like it hasn't been floated in Indonesia before, nearly every president since Sukarno (the first one) has advocated for getting out of Jakarta.
It's not difficult to understand why – the congestion in Jakarta is infamous. There are 10m people living flush in the city and another 20m living in the surrounding suburbs and villages. Transport infrastructure hasn't exactly kept up with growth in Indonesia's business and political hub. Jokowi also noted the benefits that would come with moving the capital from the island of Java (where 60% of the country lives) to a smaller island, like Borneo. Such a decision would help share the country's wealth and power around.
There is one final point that must be noted: Jakarta is sinking. While sea-level rise is doing some minor work around the edges, the entire capital is dropping between 1-15cm per year because the water-table has been over-extracted. Ground-water bores have worked feverishly for decades to provide potable water to a ballooning population; now the whole city is following them down. This means that the wet season is getting wetter and huge portions of Jakarta flood. If North Jakarta (the ocean-facing part) is to be abandoned – which many have argued will be a necessity between now and 2050 – then a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of assets will be sacrificed to the sea.
All good arguments for pulling up stumps now.
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Would you look at that? PHOTO: Jianhui Liao
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Food Photographer of the Year 2019
Villagers celebrate the goddess Nuwa's birthday with a noodle feast in Shexian County, Hebei Province. We're sure you can appreciate why Jianhui Liao won the award this year. Click here for a larger version of this extraordinary piece of art.
The end of Aids
A study published in the Lancet this week has highlighted a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in the fight to eliminate Aids. It concerns same-sex male couples where one partner is HIV-positive but uses antiretroviral drugs to suppress the virus. Conducted with 1,000 couples across Europe, the study found that the number of times the virus was transmitted was 0. There was not a single instance of transmission between the two partners. This does not just go a long way to killing off the stigma around HIV – it might just spell an end to Aids within our lifetime.
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. PHOTO: Jorgen Ree Wiig / Handout / EPA-EFE
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Russia may be putting whales in harnesses
This week Norwegian fishers spotted a beluga whale sporting an unexpected accessory: a harness. Given that beluga whales are not known for dressing themselves, the finding caused something of a scene. On closer inspection it turned out that said harness was inscribed with the words "Equipment St Petersburg", which of course led everyone to assume it was a Russian spy-whale that had escaped captivity. Before you laugh, this is not a far-fetched assumption: both the Russian and American navies use specialist marine-wranglers to train aquatic creatures, be they seal, dolphin or whale. They are most commonly used for mine-sweeping duties. But just look at the whale, such a creature is simply too beautiful to be caught up in the machinations of international naval conflict.
Sour pork
On a significantly darker note (though staying with the theme of animals that humans have bent to our will), the crisis in China's pig farms is spiralling out of control. An outbreak of African swine fever has broken out in the world's most voracious pork-eating (and producing) nations. Millions upon millions of pigs have been culled and Beijing is proposing a wholesale restructure of the industry. The effects are already rippling across the global meat and grain markets, not to mention the global economy. Ears up – this will be a big one.
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Quote of the week
"The summary ... did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation."
– Robert Mueller alleges that William Barr's summary failed to convey the true meaning of his extensive report. Humour us: if the expendable qualities of context, nature and substance are missing, what is left?
Headline of the week
A Gay Atheist Plots to Save His Catholic Country
– Bloomberg
Special mention
Shout out this week to the brave gatekeepers of the Collins Official Scrabble Words. They have finally accepted that "OK" – the initialised version of "Okay" – is a legal word to play. Such a move deserves our praise because lord knows the wrath of prudish purists is severe. To them we say: do like the English language does and grow up.
Some choice long-reads
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EDITOR'S NOTE: The hesitation among some Western news outlets to describe what transpired in Venezuela this week as an attempted coup d'état is a curious thing. Yes, a mutiny, a rebellion, a putsch and a coup are different things but not discretely so. You'll notice that this kind of philological hair-splitting only ever crops up when one's own nation is the major power backing regime-change.
Keep in mind that disdain for one autocrat or another – however justified it may be – is not reason enough to intentionally erode the meaning of words. It muddies the water at a time when clarity around language and meaning is paramount.
Tom Wharton
@trwinwriting
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