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She’s a he with XY chromosomes & undescended testes. Shouldn’t even have been an issue.

Caster has often been referenced over the years as a genuinely intersex person. If that's the case, things can get pretty convoluted. S/he may be a unique case. BUT: there seems to be a conspiracy of silence in the media about the details of "her" condition.

I gather from various reports that s/he has undescended testes and has no uterus or ovaries. "Her" general appearance is masculine, when clothed. One complication, however, is that when s/he was young and before s/he became an elite international competitor, s/he apparently was required repeatedly to submit to visual physical exams. The South African youth sports authorities at that time allowed her to compete as female, so I've always presumed that her genitalia pass that test.

What I can't find is any information about whether she was sexually ambiguous at birth. Sometimes the parents and docs huddle and make a choice. Sometimes a little surgery is done on infants; this is the true situation in which a gender is "assigned at birth." Sometimes the docs and parents make a mistake.

S/he was raised as a girl and has always competed against girls. But the nitty gritty details seem to be withheld. Does she have XX or XY chromosomes? Do we know this for certain? There are some very rare cases in which XX and XY chromosomes themselves get scrambled, or when really weird stuff (that's a technical term) blocks the normal expression and development of male or female sexual characteristics. Does she have a penis or some kind of vagina? Is this natural or was it surgically done when she was very young? I gather that she is the husband in her marriage and that her wife is pregnant; that is old news at this point, but there seems to be a blackout on followup. If there is a child, how did they manage it?

Caster may be an extremely rare case. My frustration is the blackout on specific, detailed information. Yes, s/he has a generic privacy right concerning her medical condition. But she is also the subject of nonstop speculation, she is a possibly ambiguous case forcing her way into women's athletics where s/he may or may not belong, and I would think that transparency is the best solution. Will there be some knuckle dragging idiots who would treat an intersex person as a freak? Yes, probably. But overwhelmingly -- in this day and age -- people will be sympathetic to a unique and difficult case. The backlash is caused by the secrecy, which suggests that s/he is cheating. It has gotten very political, with racial grievances factoring in. (If Caster were white and competed for a first world country, the whole situation would be treated differently.) And the gender radicals are exploiting the confusion to insist that subjective gender identification should be dispositive, which is really not a useful contribution to what may be a difficult case.

Just what, exactly, is her condition?

If she is genuinely intersex, where should she compete? That might be a tough question. S/he would be an extreme rarity. It's not as if we could arrange an intersex Olympics. One solution might be to openly acknowledge the uniqueness of the situation, allow her to compete against women, put an asterisk in the record books, and if she medals in an event, award two golds, two silvers, etc., one to Caster, with an asterisk, and the other to the "normal" woman.

And yet she is and has this issue because of what is referred to as Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome - what makes someone truly intersex. She has undergone numerous physicals showing external appearances as a woman (whether being modified at birth for having ambiguous external genitalia) (and medically, most who are told they are intersex are surgically modified at birth or soon after as a girl - yet she is also sterile.) and has competed as a woman since she was a child.

Her condition has been the subject of lawsuits and problems for the decade she's been competing at the elite level. As for looking masculine, I look masculine when I put on some kinds of clothes. So?

As for the details concerning her particular situation, almost all of it is under seal because of the extensive court cases surrounding her and have been for years. But because of her situation, she has been accused of cheating almost her entire professional career.

But forcing her to take medication to lower her natural testosterone production to level the playing field is wrong. But allowing men thinking they are women to compete with women will destroy women's sports - which I think many men would cheer privately.

My idea? Allow her to finish out her career or buy her out for good - somewhere in the field of $25M and then set up rules that a genetic test is required and if you are XX then you compete in women's sports and XY for men's - regardless if you think you're a woman or not.

Anything less than such is a Bill of Attainder and illegal.

Bad cases make for worse laws.