We can measure the physical anatomy. We can't measure the brain.Clearly we are not communicating well.
We can measure someone's height. We can't measure their gender even though we can observe that most people have one.How the heck do you figure we can observe they have one but can't measure what it is?!? That's like saying we can observe the sky has a color but can't measure it to be blue.
In any event, yes, of course we can measure their gender, the same as sociologists can measure class or anything else they study. When you wrote "She's got a vagina. ... If you asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina could ever be a man, and didn't reference DSDs or chromosomes, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", that was you proposing a method to measure Semenya's gender.
I have a "relative" that is manic-depressive. We have no physical test that can detect manic-depressive so clearly there's no reason for her to be in a locked facility! (Suicide attempt.)
And, since you said the sky is blue: I was recently reading a bit about astronomical photography. In many cases the camera will record a very different color than the human eye sees. (Some common spectral lines are at points with a considerable discrepancy between how eyes and cameras see them and monitors aren't even capable of doing spectral lines.) Or just go outside wearing polarized sunglasses. Tip your head to the side. Which is the right "blue"?
And why do you think there's lying involved? She grew up being female. She doesn't feel that growing a penis changed that.In the first place, you're clearly as usual equivocating between gender identity and gender. If we ever really need to test someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender, well, ever since trial-by-ordeal was abolished 800 years ago courts of law have been evolving techniques for recognizing liars and they've mostly gotten pretty good at it, and if necessary FMRI and AI are showing promise at giving us better polygraphs; but that needn't concern us here since nobody is disputing Semenya's sense of self. For present purposes we can take your "having stated her gender very clearly" criterion as an adequate test of "someone's sense of self when it comes to their gender". What I disputed was Semenya's gender, not Semenya's sense of self when it comes to his/her gender. I am of course no no more of an authority on someone's gender than anyone else is; society as a whole is the only authority on social constructs. What makes me more of an expert on someone's gender than someone else is my willingness to pay attention, educate myself as to society's criteria, and apply them.
But I put "Yes". Thus you don't get to call me "it".Free country. Poli used to have "All pronouns okay" under "Gender:"; that meant you had his permission to call him "it". What "It's a free country." means is you don't need my permission.Would it be okay for me to refer to you as "it", as in "I was trying to have a conversation with Bomb#20 and it kept missing the point"?

Why shouldn't it be? We don't get to define how she sees herself.None of that is in dispute -- nobody is blaming Semenya for identifying as a woman. Half of us would no doubt do the same if we were born without penises and grew them at 12. But you keep taking for granted that Semenya's self-perception is relevant. If you want us to believe it's relevant, show your work.
Truth by poll??Gender? I said "If you referenced DSDs and asked 100 random guys if someone who has a vagina and a penis and testes and a prostate and no ovaries and no fallopian tubes and no uterus and no cervix could ever be a man, how many of them do you think would say "yes"?", and you said "Again, I think there would be some confusion but I think nearly all would give a qualified "yes".". That was a gender evaluation.
And gays weren't allowed to marry. Doesn't make the exclusion right.Sex is relevant to gender but is not the final word on the matter. The final word is determined by society's criteria for categorizing people into genders. Sex is relevant because our society habitually uses sex as its main criterion. Self identity is irrelevant because our society habitually ignores self identity in its categorization criteria. In pre-women's-suffrage times, how many women were authorized to vote because they said they thought of themselves as men? In conscription times, how many men were exempted from the draft because they said they thought of themselves as women?
The problem is that you are assuming all aspects of the person develop along the Mullerian or Wolffian pathways. In terms of physical anatomy any given part must be one or the other because all the anatomical changes are a transformation. That doesn't prove the mind works that way, though. Look at sexuality: does someone being attracted to women mean they can't be attracted to men? Of course not. Why should we assume gender is like the physical parts that transform and not like the mental parts that clearly can be both? The least surprising answer to me would be that a mental difference is more like sexuality (another mental difference) rather than anatomy (a physical difference.)Emily and seanie's contention that a "woman" is a "biologically female adult human", where "female" means having taken the Mullerian developmental pathway, is something they haven't adequately argued for; but neither have the trans-rights-activists here adequately argued against it. As a matter of logic, it is of course entirely possible that there is some rare DSD that creates adult Mullerian bodies that western civilization has been generally categorizing as male for the last 1500 years, or Wolffian female. If so, the people with that condition are respectively male men or female women. That is their gender; more than that, that is their sex, going by common usage. Biologists don't own the words "sex", "male" and "female" any more than trans-rights-activists own the words "men" and "women". If such a DSD exists, then biologists calling such a common-usage man "female", or such a common-usage woman "male", are using those terms as technical jargon. Biologists are of course perfectly entitled to make up and use any technical jargon they please; it doesn't make the rest of us wrong to stick to common usage. But then, as a matter of logic it's also entirely possible that there's a teapot orbiting Jupiter. So far nobody here has exhibited such a DSD.