Read on Twitter
Michael Phelps' body produces half the lactic acid of his average competitors, meaning he can push himself to athletic extremes and recover quickly. He's celebrated for it. https://twitter.com/AP_Sports/status/1303390475261554689
Semenya has to artificially curb her extraordinary abilities to appease a transphobic, misogynist panic about what a woman is, looks like, is capable of. And I thought gender was natural?
And lets not pretend that her womanhood isn't triply under scrunity because she's black.
You need to be really good at running. No, that's too good.
For the borings out there: He also has unusually long arms, unusually short legs with large hands and feet, he's double jointed and his lungs hold reportedly *double* the capacity of the average human. They're treated like natural gifts, rather than disqualifying deviancies.
High testosterone levels are sometimes treated with suspicion in men because they can be evidence of doping - aka unnatural chemical interference to enhance someone's baseline athletic talents. In Semenya's case, people argue *for* chemical interference to reign in her talents.
People arguing why testosterone is different to lactic acid need to make an actual argument for that rather than reheating sexism and serving it up as science.
This is why appeals to biology aren't the dispassionate, unbiased gotcha some people think they are - we are always already talking about politics when we talk about the biology of sex difference.
