IOC’s gender stance ‘insensitive’ to athletes
Indian sprinter back in limbo, fighting IOC’s push to return hyperandrogenism rules
Dutee Chand wants to run with the body she was born with. The young sprinter from India fought for that right all the way to the international Court of Arbitration for Sport.
She thought she had won last July when the court suspended the athletics governing body’s gender test and declared her eligible to compete. Now, she’s not so sure. The International Olympic Committee has released recommendations that, once again, raise questions about whether Chand and women like her, whose bodies naturally produce high levels of testosterone, will be allowed to compete at the Rio Olympics this summer.
Chand’s team of advocates, which includes Canadian and American experts, are now taking on the IOC and what they see as an “insensitive and harmful attack on women with hyperandrogenism.”
“We call on the IOC to commit to publicly respect the (court’s) decision and declare that it will not introduce hyperandrogenism regulations for the upcoming Rio Olympic Games,” states the letter sent to IOC president Thomas Bach on Monday.
It was signed by Bruce Kidd, a Toronto sport policy advisor, Katrina Karkazis, a Stanford University bioethicist and Payoshni Mitra, the university researcher who first approached Chand about fighting her case, and the rule itself, in court.
A woman who injects testosterone, or a man for that matter, will generally get an athletic benefit from it. That’s why it’s a banned performance-enhancing drug.
But, as Chand’s pro-bono lawyer, James Bunting, a sports law expert at Toronto’s Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg, was able to show, the science is far less clear in the case of hyperandrogenism.
The court stated that it was not satisfied that the degree of advantage is any greater than other variables that determine sporting excellence, ranging from good genes to proper nutrition, coaching and training.
The court determined that the policy of the international governing body for athletics, the IAAF, which set a line in the sand for testosterone — above 10 nanomoles per litre and women were considered male and barred from competition until they had surgery or hormone therapy to reduce their levels — was discriminatory and lacked scientific evidence.
It gave them two years to provide scientific proof for the rule and set it aside for the time being.
The IOC’s hyperandrogenism recommendations, released publicly in late January as part of an update to its guidelines for transgendered athletes, didn’t address the scientific or ethical arguments. But it urged the IAAF and other sport organizations to return to the court “with arguments and evidence to support the reinstatement of its hyperandrogenism rules.”
Could that happen before Rio? And, if not, will the IOC decide to implement rules of its own ahead of the 2016 Games? No one knows and that leaves Chand back in limbo. “Last summer when the sports court declared me eligible to compete and suspended the IAAF regulations, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I could finally go back to focusing on my training with Olympic qualification in mind,” the 20-year-old said in a statement. “But now the stress and anxiety has returned.” The IOC and IAAF could not be reached in time for deadline.
For Chand, this saga began in 2014 when she was suddenly pulled from the team heading to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games after being singled out for gender testing in India because her body appeared “masculine.”
The IOC’s statement “raises the possibility of the exact same thing happening again,” Karkazis said.
Chand’s supporters believe that the attempts of sport bodies to determine who is a man and who is a woman based on something as narrow as testosterone levels, with tests triggered by how “masculine” women look, is little better than the naked parades some athletes were forced to endure in the 1960s.
“An investigation can be triggered because of how someone looks,” Karkazis said. “This affects all women.”