Tag Archives: Castor Semenya

Testosterone, Testing, and Terrible Decisions

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Imane Khelif

Laurie and Debbie say:

The testosterone police have been around in sports for many decades, and they are always most toxically active around the Olympics. This year, the athlete they wanted to make into a victim was Imane Khelif. Greg Beacham, writing for the AP Wire, says:

Khelif was assigned female at birth and it says so on her passport, which is the International Olympic Committee’s threshold for eligibility for boxing because of the rift between the sport’s governing body and the IOC.

Khelif is a formidable athlete with respected fighting skills, contending in top international events — including major amateur boxing tournaments over the past six years, such as the Tokyo Olympics. She’s won a few regional gold medals.

Her gender has only been questioned by an extremely dubious Russian sports policing body, which even the gender-obsessed International Olympic Committee despises. Nonetheless, her gold medal became a viral source of controversy with “experts” like J.K. Rowling and Megyn Kelly feeling fully qualified to dispute Khelif’s win and to describe her as “trans,” which is both inaccurate and dangerous, as being trans is illegal in Algeria.

Castor Semenya looking victorioous after a race
Castor Semenya

We have been writing about testosterone in sports since 2016, particularly here, here, and here. These articles generally focus on Dutee Chand (from India) and Castor Semenya (from South Africa). Here’s the brilliant Elizabeth Adetiba writing about Semenya in 2020:

Based on the tones of disgust used to discuss her physicality, one might think that Semenya is the only runner to ever possess a body that so greatly differed from everyone else’s in the field. It seems the sports world has forgotten the peculiarities of Ira Murchison’s stocky, 5’4 frame, which earned him both the nickname “Human Sputnik” and an Olympic gold medal in the 4×100. Or that world record-holder Usain Bolt was taller with longer legs than any of his competitors.

Unlike those men, Semenya’s body is often deemed unwanted and out of place, most notoriously by her sport’s governing body.

To be clear, none of Khelif, Semenya, Chand, and most of the other athletes in these stories are transgender. All of them are “women,” by which we mean that they were assigned female at birth, that they have always thought of themselves as women, that their birth certificates, their families, and their countries all see them as women. Only the mostly male, mostly white arbiters of the Olympics and other sports have the temerity and cruelty to question these simple identifications.

Christine Mboma, from Namibia, is one of the newer additions to the ranks of Semenya and Chand.

In 2021, the 18-year-old set an unratified world under-20 and African senior record of 48.54 s in the 400 metres, which made her the seventh-fastest woman of all time at the event. The mark was established in June, while Mboma had previously twice broken a world U20 record in April of that year.

Prior to the Tokyo Games, World Athletics had announced that Mboma and fellow Namibian sprinter Beatrice Masilingi would not be allowed to compete under the female classification in events between 400 metres and one mile due to its regulations on testosterone levels for athletes with XY disorders of sex development.

That unreasonable limitation was later extended to preventing Mboma from running at all unless she took testosterone reducing drugs, which she has elected to do rather than lose the discipline she loves.

An interesting contrast here is the late 1990s story of “male” athlete Chris Boardman.

In 1998 Tour de France, when the Tour began in Dublin, Ireland, Boardman won the prologue, but this time crashed out of the race on stage 2. In 1998 he was diagnosed with osteopenia due to low testosterone levels. Treatment to prevent a worsening of his condition would have required him to take testosterone, which is banned under anti-doping rules. The UCI refused to allow Boardman an exemption on medical grounds. Faced with either retiring to allow treatment for his osteoporosis, or continuing to cycle without taking testosterone, Boardman chose to continue in cycling untreated for a further two years, hoping to finish his career on a high note at the 2000 Summer Olympics.

Most of the victims of the ridiculous testosterone rulings are Black and Brown women, which makes Boardman’s case particularly interesting. Khelif, Semenya, Mboma, and so many others are punished for having naturally high testosterone. Boardman was punished for having naturally low testosterone. Just as Mboma has been forced to choose between taking medication she does not need or giving up running, Boardman was forced to choose between foregoing medicine he did need or giving up cycling.

Chris Boardman

The entire process is free of facts and data, and is simply powerful petty people exerting control over people who can do things the arbiters can’t do, like win medals. In an ideal world, testosterone levels would simply not be a factor in athletic competition, and everyone would acknowledge that there are no bright lines around gender and people should compete against the group most suited to their skill level. Until we reach that ideal world, however, we advocate for setting a single level of testosterone for people of all genders, and making no differentiation between unnaturally high testosterone in “women” and “men.”

For more on the whole sordid history and complex picture of gender in sports, check out our articles linked above, and also the CBC podcast series Tested, which brought Mboma to our attention. And thanks to Stef Schwartz for the Boardman story, which helps clarify just how inutterably stupid and cruel the entire testosterone-level standard game is.

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Castor Semenya: Shameful Context of an Athlete’s Persecution

Laurie and Debbie say:
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World Athletics remains committed to a centuries-old, white supremacist notion that defines “womanhood” in terms of the white, cisgendered female body, rendering everyone else, especially women of African descent, socially unacceptable aberrations. 

We have written about Castor Semenya several times, most recently here and here.  Semenya is an Olympic-class runner who has been continually harassed and demeaned by World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF), which is committed to the proposition that she’s not a real woman. Elizabeth Adetiba, writing at SB Nation, goes deep into the repulsive historical, contemporary social, and biological background to this substance-free “controversy.”

Read the whole article, don’t rely on our selections:

Based on the tones of disgust used to discuss her physicality, one might think that Semeya is the only runner to ever possess a body that so greatly differed from everyone else’s in the field. It seems the sports world has forgotten the peculiarities of Ira Murchison’s stocky, 5’4 frame, which earned him both the nickname “Human Sputnik” and an Olympic gold medal in the 4×100. Or that world record-holder Usain Bolt was taller with longer legs than any of his competitors.

Unlike those men, Semenya’s body is often deemed unwanted and out of place, most notoriously by her sport’s governing body.

Adetiba names two other contemporary African runners who are receiving similar treatment. Annet Negesa, from Uganda, was pushed into invasive surgery by World Athletics, and is suffering both physical and mental consequences. Adetiba goes on to cite the repugnant 19rh century “scientific” theories of Sir Albert Cook, who categorized Black women’s bodies by their “ape-like” features.

Before Cook, Sarah Baartman, more commonly known by her derogatory nickname “The Hottentot Venus,” encompassed Western society’s fixation on black women’s bodies. Captured and enslaved in what is now South Africa (Semenya’s home country), Baartman was brought to Europe in 1810 and exhibited in circuses and public squares until her death, when scientists assessed and dissected her elongated labia. That work was promoted as more evidence that black women’s so-called deficiencies made them less “womanly” than their white counterparts.

The impact of such ideas can still be seen today within the medical community through widespread diagnoses of “labial hypertrophy,” a medical term for an elongated labia, despite the fact it is not a major (nor, for the most part, even minor) health concern.

She goes on to discuss J. Phillippe Rushton’s spurious 1995 claims about Black people’s levels of testosterone. “Scientists have spent the last few decades refuting Rushton’s claims, and ironically fanning the flames of racial pseudoscience.”

Stepping back 150 years, Adetiba addresses other racial stereotypes:

In 1851, physician Samuel Cartwright wrote that, “It is not only in the skin that a difference of color exists between the negro and the white man, but in the membranes, the muscles, the tendons, and in all the fluids and secretions.” Cartwright’s work, which Hoberman claims was read widely by slaveholders, gave (pseudo-) scientific, biological justification for maintaining racial hierarchy and slavery, even as moral opposition grew in other parts of the United States. Implicit in Cartwright’s work was the idea that black men’s physicality is acceptable only when it can be manipulated for profit.

Today, we see Cartwright’s legacy in sports. Exceptional male bodies, often characterized by great strength and size, often inspire awe, and not ire, because for the last century sports institutions have forged and refined mechanisms to make money off of them. Strong women’s bodies, however, haven’t yet been nearly as profitable, and thus have been much more easily derided.

And she minces no words in making her key points:

World Athletics simply sees little use in acknowledging and developing female talent, particularly black female talent in the Global South. As exemplifiers of a particular strain of racialized thinking, those women, to them, are not “real women.” And when World Athletics refuses to elevate the athletic prowess of a black woman, within a body that defies centuries of white supremacist, colonial, gender-essentialist myths, it chooses, instead, to humiliate her on every level.

It is impossible to read this article in April 2020 without also thinking of the Black women being denied hospital care for coronavirus, of whom Rana Zoe Mungin is only one example.

We can only join Adetiba in our outrage.

… these women shouldn’t need to advocate for themselves. As society continues to confront the racial legacies of social institutions in other ways, sports organizations like World Athletics have a clear opportunity to address the harm done as a result of the implementation of racist, sexist ideas. No more hiding behind biased science, doctors, and metrics. Semenya, Niyonsaba, Negesa, and other African female athletes with hyperandrogenism need not alter or manipulate themselves to fit ideals of womanhood that were constructed explicitly around their exclusion. Their bodies are simply not the problem.

They never were.

Thanks to @LisaIronTongue on Twitter for the link. Follow Debbie on Twitter.