But understand the difference between the transgender athletes story,
which obviously spent the last couple of years has been
pretty significant,
and the DSD athletes story.
You can have an opinion on whether each set of
athletes should be included or not,
but the facts of how
it's a debate at all are vastly different and important
to consider.
There are effectively 2 binary sexes for the vast majority
of people,
right? Biological sexes. Sex is male,
sex is female and those things are characterized by the
presence of AY chromosome effectively.
And in individuals that have ADSD the
the Y chromosome has either been
implanted in the wrong place as or parts of it
have been kind of jumbled up.
And that's when you get some like individuals that have,
for example, like a 46 XY female or
a 46 XX male, which is which is less common
in the kind of athletic space.
And basically what that means is that in the feed
as the fetus is developing when the
X chromosome is kind of choosing is the wrong phrase
biologically,
but is, is kind of forming the kind of sex
organs,
if you will, are sex kind of characteristics.
The signal to remove the male gonads or than what
the precursors to male golden ads isn't there.
But there is also the signal to retain the female
golden ads.
And then what you kind of have is you have
sometimes where the
both sets of sex related biological organs,
if you will, are being developed at the same time.
And then you kind of result in individuals in some
cases.
There's a lot of DSDS,
there's a lot of disorders of sex development.
This is the one that's kind of most talked about,
I think for for our space here anyway.
It changes the way that their body develops secondary characteristics.
So that X chromosome is the thing that determines things
like testosterone levels or the
kind of manifestation of the external genitalia sometimes.
But what that can kind of mean is that then
you have an ex-wife female who has higher circulating testosterone
levels,
which is we've seen lots of
not all of those people have androgen sensitivity though,
which is an important characteristic for us.
So having, having the presence of,
of testosterone, but not having the,
we'll say that's as the key and not having the
kind of
ability to open locks to get it into cells and
stuff is,
you know, some part of a
part of the story as well.
If, if you are to have
ADSD and if to be an advantage to you athletically,
you would need to have that hydrogen sensitivity as well.
And you'd need to have a number of other genetic
characteristics that would be beneficial for you for competing.
Some of our work in genetics
has kind of shown that there's a couple of single
nucleotide polymorphisms that have like advantages that would help here.
So you'd kind of need a collection of all of
these things.
And as well, there's been a lot of work,
molecular work recently identifying different genetic variations that exist with
DSD people,
not athletes
that can give them certain physical characteristics.
Some of them will be beneficial.
Some of them will not be.
There are athletes that are as strong at that at
the weight
that these boxers are that there's no suspicion of.
It's a difficult position for this person's medical records to
be questioned,
Even so much so that their their father has come
out and shown their birth certificate,
which doesn't necessarily tell us much on medically necessarily medicate
to compete in a sport is
a very difficult moral digestive thing.
So for example, the World Medical Association has pretty much
condemned that idea.
Sporting organizations have done the same in our surveys where
we've asked elite athletes,
they do not believe that it is ethical to request
this.
Like people don't know who you are in DSD.
Like you don't know it,
you're standing in the start line that you're,
you're with or the final line you're with standing beside
eight people
who knows they know their medical records.
Nobody else knows their medical records.
It's just whether you think you're guessing because people have
more masculine characteristics.
I mean, I think we,
we've all seen females that are bigger,
stronger than a lot of males,
etcetera. So you can't really tell anything by looking at
at people To look for the Y
chromosome, pretty easy To look for the effective part of
the YSO chromosome,
the
SRSRY gene, easy. Relatively speaking,
it's expensive. You've got to take blood and do genetic
testing,
et cetera. But to really understand the raft of genetic
mutations that currently exist in DSDS,
it would be quite, quite difficult,
but but ongoing because people are looking for these diagnostic
criteria right now.