What I would suggest as a pathologist who deals with diagnosing these: the incidence of differences of sexual development is somewhere between 1 in 1000 - 4500 births. So this policy will not unlikely diagnose someone with a DSD who didn't know.
Women with DSD on averave have a higher testosterone level. Testosterone generally makes you better at sports. The Olympics select for the very best athletes.
In other words: the Olympics are selecting for women with DSD, so once you start doing 100% testing you'll find an incidence far above that of the general population.
If you have male chromosomes, but you have woman genitals, then that’s a proof that you are testosterone insensitive. In other words, testosterone doesn’t make you better at sports at all. The topic is way more complex than this.
There are proofs that male chromosomes are beneficial for example in boxing for women, but it’s not because of testosterone as far as we know. In almost every other sport, it’s not beneficial at all, and even negative because of the mentioned testosterone insensitivity.
If Semenya had been categorized according to his sex, he wouldn't be considered amongst the very best athletes. He is basically a middling standard 800m male runner who has been able to make a career on the back of what is essentially an administrative error.
Talent scouts specifically sought out males like Semenya who were erroneously registered as female at birth, knowing that their male physical advantage would give them an edge in women's competitions.
The specific condition he has (5-alpha reductase deficiency) is one that only affects males, conferring upon them internal testicles and a micropenis. But male development, including all the testosterone-driven advantages that distinguish male and female athletic performance, is otherwise normal.
His gold medal in the 2016 Rio Olympics women's 800m, along with silver and bronze being taken by two other males with similar conditions, is the reason why World Athletics (then the IAAF) and, later, the IOC started to move policy away from eligibility by identity documentation to empirical testing of sex advantage.
The policy change discussed in the linked article wouldn't have happened without athletes like Semenya taking advantage of the previous flawed policy, to the detriment of female athletes.
Caster Semenya is a woman, not sure why you're referring to her as him. The fact that she has a potentially unfair advantage due to her unusual genetics in women's competitions doesn't in any way make it fair to refer to her in this way.
If you look at accounts from Semenya's early life there is evidence against his account of growing up as a girl. For example, there have been school photos published showing him wearing a boy's uniform near to a group of girls who were all wearing girl's uniforms. His former school headmaster, when interviewed years later, said he thought that Semenya was a boy and was very surprised to hear that he was now competing in women's athletics.
And of course he would have gone through male puberty, not female puberty. This would have been obvious then, and the result of this is obvious now if you see him in interviews. Male-typical build, male-typical vocal tone. Even his now-wife assumed (correctly) that he is male when she first met him.
Semenya has to double down on this narrative that he is a woman otherwise he will have to admit that his successful sporting career as a woman will have been a lie.
Even if you believe that it is the case that she lived her early life as a male, at the point that a person has made it clear that they have some preferred pronoun/is trans would it not just be disrespectful to intentionally refer to them counter to that?
It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.
In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.
I wouldn't call it cheating. But I have no trouble drawing lines that exclude some people, if that levels the field for a bigger group. In this case the female olympics would soon be known as the intersex olympics given the selection pressure. I can understand the decision to make the competiton more interesting by barring intersex people. No need to frame it as cheating though.
Since we don't actually do genetic tests at birth, this would only ocurr in the context of national qualifying, think about what the experience of someone who trains to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics, then gets this test and is told, "Sorry, you aren't really a woman. Too bad. No Olympics for you. Sorry you wasted all those years training."
How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?
And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.
When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits
These are pretty common, physiologic structures associated with infections. They can be just a handful of cells on a slide or be quite large, and I don't know what they found in these infections. I didn't read the original paper. The ectopic lymphoid structures go away after the infection resolves. It seems that the immune system has ways to set up mini lymph node architecture right by the site of infections, which is very sensible. The same process is going on in a more organized way in the draining lymph node in parallel. Research into these was really hot in the 2010s, but people don't seem to be as into them anymore (but my research has also transitioned to innate immunity from adaptive, so it's likely that I'm no longer in that universe).
In general, it doesn't surprise me that when you prime the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system works well. The problem is that pathogens have an incredible suite of tools ready to evade these mechanisms. The doses of the pathogens are typically insanely high too, which I do not think model natural infections well. Anyways, this is intriguing, so I'll take a look at the original paper one of these days. Vaccine research generally is so boring. It's like, we vaccinated, and it worked, or didn't, no mechanism.
I have noticed something similar. With the computer science undergrads and grad students I work with, Air is much more common than with the premeds and med students, many of whom have MBPs (who I am presuming do not need that much power).
I think its because compsci people know what they need to a greater degree than other majors. It's easier to upsell a computer to someone who doesn't really know about computers.
It could also be possible that compsci kids have a powerful desktop at home, or are more savvy with university cloud computing, for any edge cases or computationally expensive tasks.
It’s possible that their departments give them computer recommendations that exceed what they actually need.
I’m not sure why this happens or who formulates these recommendations, but I’ve seen it before with students in fields that just don’t do much heavy duty computation or video editing being told to buy laptops with top-of-the-line specs.
I think there is a tendency to simply give in and buy bigger hardware if something doesn't work. With friends and family, I sometimes feel like having to talk them off the roof with regards to pulling the trigger on really expensive (relative to the tasks they're doing) hardware, simply because performance is often abysmal due to the fact that they trashed their OS with malware and bloatware and whatnot and can't understand all of that.
It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.
It's true. You wouldn't believe how many people I've SIGECAPS'd during my medical training. I didn't realize this article was the beginning of this approach, but it certainly helped get care to people who previously wouldn't have received it. Though I'm sure there are also many who may require intervention that aren't captured by a SIGECAPS exam. The double edged sword of the checklist manifesto, though I overall think it has been beneficial.
SIGECAPS is an acronym taught in US medicine for the diagnosis of major depressive disorder: Sleep disturbance, Interest loss, Guilt, Energy loss, Concentration loss, Appetite changes, Psychomotor agitation, Suicidality. And must have Depressed mood or Anhedonia (inability to enjoy things previously enjoyable).
The history of the SIG E CAPS acronym is also interesting, I've heard it was short for SIG (old shorthand for "to be prescribed") Energy CAPsules.
I thought about defining it up front but decided to move it to the second paragraph.
I would say it's worth talking to a doctor about how you feel. There are many things that can help. If you are in the USA, if is likely that they will use the PHQ-9 form, so consider looking at that questionaire to see how it aligns with your mood. medcalc is a common site that many of the residents at my institution use for these questionaires and other various scoring systems.
I was taught that it was more a memory device for recognizing major depressive disorder as a state of sadness and low energy. The treatment, I presume was still SSRIs first line.
It's funny, because sales tax is considered among the most regressive form of taxation we employ from my understanding, which is supported by my econ friends. But I'm certainly not an economist.
Economists argue that they are the fairest because they tax consumption rather than production.
Also everybody pays them, including people that avoid taxes (including criminal activities and tax evaders).
The argument against this is that lower income households pay more of it as a portion of their income thus the consensus is that to be fairest you need rebates and no taxes on many essentials (which is why often medicines or milk, bread etc have very low or no sales tax/rebates).
IIRC, consumption taxes are more efficient in that, ceteris paribus, they result in the least economic distortion in terms of global wealth and productivity compared to alternatives like income taxes. But they're the least fair in the sense that those lower on the income bracket bear a higher burden in terms of marginal cost due to the higher fraction of necessary living expenses relative to income. Your first $1 of income and consumption has more marginal value to you and society then the second $1; so an X% tax on that first dollar has a higher marginal cost than X% on the second dollar. It's unfair in a very meaningful sense, not just a hand-wavy rhetorical sense; everything in economics is about marginal pricing.
Think of it this way, which has more marginal value, a) $1 spent on food required for a person to live, or b) $1 spent on a fancy fixture for a new yacht? The answer is (a), both from the perspective of the individual and society has a whole; society because $1 spent sustaining a living individual contributes more productive capacity to society than $1 spent toward a yacht fixture, even after accounting for the fact someone was paid to make the fixture.
AFAIU, it follows that efficiency and fairness (in the sense of marginal cost) are fundamentally related. But it gets really complicated from there--complexity that the "ceteris paribus" above is hiding--and drawing concrete policy conclusions much more fraught. Relatedly, consumption taxes can be structured in a progressive manner similar to income taxes, but... it's complicated; it's not so easy to ameliorate the unfairness issue, and once you start graduating rates it becomes difficult to compare schemes directly. For instance, I think just as a practical administrative and accounting matter progressive income taxation is easier to accomplish than progressive consumption taxation.
It is a good point. It depends on how regressive is defined. There are many competing arguments here, but two I am aware of are
1. Regressive deals with % of income spent.
2. Regressive deals with an ideal state where those with more excess income contribute more than those with less.
In both of these, I suppose sales tax is regressive if it applies to all items, but only 2 is regressive with sophisticated rebates and untaxed categories.
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
I think one of the most interesting techniques for burn victims is using placentas. I haven't seen it too much in my current hospital system, but have seen it talked about at medical association conferences and think it's pretty exciting.
Here is a gift link for an article about them in the New York Times from about a year ago.
