Tag Archives: Dutee Chand

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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Olympics Gender Rules Reach New Lows

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Caster Semenya

Debbie says:

Laurie and I have written about Caster Semenya, Dutee Chand, and Olympics gender testing, viewing the whole crooked game through a sexist lens … and there’s no doubt that the gender rules have a nasty sexist streak. But I didn’t realize before this month how racist these rules are as well.

The International Association of  Athletics Federation (IAAF), the organization that oversees track and field rules, has released its new guidelines. A visitor from another planet might wonder about the new rules, which set a maximum testosterone level for female athletes … only in “international track events from 400m to one mile.”

Lindsay Gibbs, writing at Think Progress, breaks it down:

If that selection of factors seems curiously specific to you, your suspicion is justified. Caster Semenya — a South African Olympic champion runner who has been subjected to rigorous sex testing and unfathomable levels of scrutiny about her body during her nine years in the international spotlight — just happens to compete in the 800m and 1500m events.

Make no mistake about it: This is a racist, sexist rule implemented by rich, white men solely to control the bodies of women, primarily women of color from the global south with intersex traits. It’s a rule propped up by ersatz science and logic that don’t pass even the most basic of inspections, and while the rule appears custom-made to derail Semenya’s dominance, its existence will damage the bodily autonomy of many others.

The IAAF has some studies — financed by *drum roll* itself — which purport to support these rules. And of course, they claim that the purpose is “to be fair.” Read Gibbs’ article for the statistical flaws. And then notice, again, that the events targeted are ones where Semenya (who is from South Africa) and Dutee Chand (who is from India) are standout competitors. Pole vault and hammer throw showed the highest performance advantage for competitors with higher testosterone levels, and are not included in the new regulations: We note that when dark-skinned women from the global south are not key competitors, somehow the sports don’t seem to need the same protections.

Dutee Chand

Jeré Longman also wrote a somewhat less political piece about this issue for the New York Times.

Many factors affect performance, and the I.A.A.F. has struggled to show conclusively that elevated testosterone provided women with more of a significant competitive edge than factors like nutrition, age, height, weight, access to coaching and training facilities, and other genetic and biological variations like oxygen-carrying capacity.

In a follow-up article today, Gibbs chronicles how South African professor Steve Cornelius, an expert on sports law, has left the IAAF over these issues. Cornelius,  who had only held his post a short time, resigned in an open letter to the IAAF, which says in part:

Sadly, I cannot in good conscience continue to associate myself with an organization which insists on ostracizing certain individuals, all of them female, for no reason other than being what they were born to be. The adoption of the new eligibility regulations for female classification is based on the same kind of ideology that has led to some of the worst injustices and atrocities in the history of our planet.

Neither Semenya nor Chand–nor probably dozens of other affected athletes–ever had a reason to question their gender, or identify as anything other than simply female–until the predominantly white male IAAF decided to be the gender police. Of course, they are not ashamed of themselves … but they should be. Along with Steve Cornelius, Lindsay Gibbs, and a host of other justice-minded people, I’m ashamed of them.

Thanks to Lisa Hirsch for the link to the New York Times article.