CAPE TOWN, South Africa (`) – Champion runner Caster Semenya goes into this year’s World Championships with virtually no chance of winning.
On Wednesday in Eugene, Oregon, the 31-year-old three-time world 800-meter champion will contest the 5,000-meter dash instead. She is not considered a serious medal contender. It’s the first time anyone has said that since she began dominating her favorite distance over a decade ago.
The South African has chosen a race she doesn’t really want to participate in and isn’t good at because she has refused to submit to the rules in athletics that require her to be on hormone-reducing treatments when she is wants to enter the 800.
They are rules that Semenya, in a statement from her attorney, describes as “an affront to the spirit of sport.”
Semenya was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl, and identifies as a woman. She has an intersex condition called 46,XY differences in sex development that causes male and female characteristics and testosterone levels above the typical female range. She was disqualified from her best event after losing her appeal under a World Athletics rule that made women with her condition ineligible for some races.
She is not transgender. Nonetheless, her case and the case of others who share similar intersex conditions has strong implications for how transgender athletes are treated and classified.
Semenya’s situation and the similar plight of Olympic 200m champion Christine Mboma are the most relevant examples of just how complex the rules of athletics are regarding the participation of women with high natural testosterone, and what some say is an unfair athletic advantage over other women.
For example, the rules, which will soon be revised, prohibit Semenya and others from running distances between 400 meters and 1 mile unless they are suppressing their testosterone. You are free to run in other events. So while Mboma was eligible to run in the 200, Semenya has to sit out the 800.
Mboma is injured this summer and did not travel to Eugene. Semenya wasn’t supposed to come either, but out of nowhere her name popped up on the entry list for the longer race.
The related but separate issue of transgender women in sport came under the spotlight again last month when internationally leading swimmers changed their own rules. They banned transgender women from elite competitions unless they started medical treatment to suppress testosterone production before the onset of puberty or before age 12, whichever is later.
Athletics world president Sebastian Coe was quick to show his support for the swimming step, saying the track’s governing body will review its rules by the end of the year, likely with a view to making them stricter.
“The balance between inclusivity and fairness will always be on the side of fairness now, I think,” Coe said on the eve of these worlds, hinting at where the journey could go when his rulemakers meet in November.
Such a recalibration of the rules would probably only hurt, not help, Semenya’s cause.
In a rare interview she gave on HBO’s Real Sports earlier this year, she said she once told track officials, “It’s fine. I’m a woman, I don’t care. If you want to see that I’m a woman, I’ll show you my vagina. Good?'”
World Athletics critics say the recent trend of essentially lumping transgender and intersex issues together is problematic. Coe has often used the phrase “biology trumps identity” as an all-encompassing defense for limitations in both, sweeping over the nuance.
Track’s two rule sets have an overlap, as both broadly require athletes to reduce their natural testosterone in order to compete.
While DSD regulations, in place since 2019, have a real impact on athletes and careers, transgender regulations currently have no impact as there are no transgender women in athletics at the highest level. There is no such thing as swimming.
For example, Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado Boulder professor and sports governance expert, concludes that the leaders of these two major Olympic sports are in a “moral panic” over transgender athletes who just aren’t around.
“We only do shadow boxing now,” said Pielke. “As if there weren’t bigger issues for the sport to deal with.”
The blanket ban on swimming sets a bad precedent, said Joanna Harper, a transgender woman and an advisor to World Athletics on its transgender and DSD policies. It supports some regulations, but FINA, the sport’s international governing body, left no room for compromise.
“Did they upset the world? You bet they did,” Harper said. “But I don’t think it was necessary and I don’t think it was warranted.”
Harper said FINA’s move was obviously influenced by American transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who, amid controversy, broke through college-level barriers and spoke of her desire to one day swim at the Olympics, which FINA in put on alert. But if USA Swimming adopts FINA’s ban and actually affects an athlete as a result, Harper said it was “very likely” Thomas would go to court.
This legal risk is relevant when trying to gauge whether a wave of sports will follow the transgender paradigm of swimming and whether outright bans may persist.
As well as the swimming decision, the arrival of young Namibian sprinter Mboma could have been an important catalyst in World Athletics’ move to reconsider its rules. At last year’s Tokyo Olympics, her first major competition, she won a silver medal in the 200 meters – a distance at which she is still eligible to compete. The win came just months after Mboma was forced to switch from the 400 due to high natural testosterone levels.
The then-unknown teenager broke the U20 world record three times in one week on her way to her silver medal, overtaking some of the world’s best runners with the roughest running styles. She managed what Semenya hasn’t been able to before, exploiting the distance gaps in the DSD rules to win a medal. It went against what World Athletics was aiming for when it passed the rules.
Testosterone regulation advocates have cited Mboma’s sudden success as evidence of testosterone’s benefits in races outside of the currently regulated distances of 400 meters to 1 mile.
Harper believes both sides need to reach a compromise on transgender and DSD rules that leads to “a reasonable outcome that may not make anyone entirely happy.”
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