BEING WOMAN ENOUGH
What is the bias implicit in asking a woman to prove her sex? The stories of Dutee Chand and Santhi Soundarajan highlight how tests of testosterone levels can ruin the careers of some of the best athletes in India and other parts of the world
There is a saying in my village, ‘Khana khao khud ke mann se, aur kapda pehno doosre ke mann se’ (Eat what you like, wear what others like). No one can force you to eat, but if you don’t want to feel bad about what others say, wear what they want you to wear,” says 22-year-old Odia sprinter Dutee Chand.
She has been up since 5.30 am, training at the mud tracks at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI) facility in Hyderabad’s Gachibowli. When asked if Chand herself follows this dictum, she smiles. “Not really,” she replies.
Chand shot into the limelight between 2012 and 2014, when at just 18, she became India’s best bet for an Olympics medal. But hours before the Indian contingent was to leave for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, she was dropped, because a complex maze of medical tests had found high levels of testosterone in her body, referred to then as hyperandrogenism.
“I was not told by anyone, not even the doctor from SAI who conducted tests on me, what they were for. The papers were calling me a man. How does one turn into a man overnight?” says Chand.
A controversial yet obscure rule of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body for world athletics, introduced in 2011, capped naturally occurring free testosterone level at 10 nanomoles per litre, about three times the typical female range. Anything above that gave the athlete an unfair advantage, the IAAF reasoned, and offered two options: Retirement, or medical intervention.
Chand stunned the sporting world by doing neither. Instead, she challenged the rules at the Centre for Arbitration of Sport (CAS), an international tribunal in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 2015, the CAS suspended the rule for two years and asked the IAAF to prove a causal link between higher testosterone level and increased performance on track. In April this year, based on a study funded by the IAAF and the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA), the IAAF clamped testosterone quotas, which now stand at five nanomoles per litre, for events from 400 metres to the mile.
The new IAAF rules titled, “Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification (Athletes with Differences of Sex Development)” come into effect in November.
Chand competes in the 100m and 200m category, and just like that, she had won. But the impact of her harrowing experience lingers, one that is echoed by countless women athletes across the world who struggle against arbitrary testing shrouded in secrecy.
“I felt like an alien. Everyone disliked me. Some called me a girl, some called me a man, some called me both. Other than my family, I felt that no one liked me. In my village, people would ask me, is it true what we heard in the news? I’d tell them believe what you see with your own eyes,” says Chand of the time when news of her high levels of testosterone broke.
‘I DESERVE RESPECT’
Santhi Soundarajan’s life began at a brick kiln. Had it not been for her extraordinary grit, it would have ended at one too. The 37-year-old was born into a poor Dalit family in Tamil Nadu’s Pudukkottai district. Her father eked out a living in conditions starkly resemblant to bonded labour.
“In brick-kiln work, there is little or no food, one gets trapped from day to night, and wages are uncertain and mostly exploitative. The reason Dalits get into this is because of the way caste is organised in India,” says Kathir, who runs a Tamil Nadu-based NGO, called Evidence.
Soundarajan’s first glimpse of escape was at 14, when she won the annual sports meet at her school. Her grandfather, a small-time athlete, pushed her to participate in state meets by training her on a dirt track. “We never had any money and food was so scarce that some nights we would starve,” she says.
But Soundarajan’s troubles with gender perception had already begun. In her village, people didn’t approve of women running, and many mocked her for her shorts and shirt. “They would make fun of me, say that a boy is walking by. I had no support, only discouragement.”
Her caste ensured she had little resources to act as a crutch once she burst into the national-level championships. The first international meet she went to, in south Korea in 2003, she had to depend on someone to sponsor her passport. And, at the airport while her peers changed wads of cash into foreign currency, she had just ~2,000. “I felt helpless, disgusted. But when we returned, I would make sure I was the happiest, by winning the most medals,” she says. But her happiness was soon to be shattered. Soundarajan ran the race of her life at the Doha Asian Games in 2006, winning the silver medal in the 800m category in a photo finish. Less than 48 hours after the biggest night of her life, she was unceremoniously dumped from the national contingent, bundled on a flight after a harrowing evening of tests, during which, she alleges, she was made to stand naked for half a day.
When she landed in Chennai, television anchors screamed that she had “failed a gender test” – using photographs and derision to point at her deep voice, her muscular frame and her chest.
To this day, Soundarajan claims she doesn’t know what she was tested for. All she knows is that her friends withdrew, her medal was rescinded, she was forced to go back to the kiln for a living for several years, before finally finding a government job as a coach. “They destroyed my life. I have a deep pain within me. I have lived my life as a woman and I deserve to be respected.”
‘UNFAIR’ RULES?
Who is a woman and why she should be tested are among the oldest and the prickliest, questions in athletics. Biological sex remains a means to distinguish between sportsmen and sportswomen, but the seemingly obvious distinction is a messy mine- field of biology, determinism and fast-changing notions of what it means to test gender.
The most notorious example of this is the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, who was tested without her knowledge before she participated, and won, the 800m race at the 2009 IAAF World Championships; but even as she ran the race, the results of her test were leaked to the press and the next day, Time.com ran a report with the headline: ‘Could this woman’s world champ be a man?’
Chand, who grew up in a small village in Odisha’s Jajpur district and started to run at the age of four on dirt tracks running along the local Brahmani river, says that the experience devastated her.
Payoshni Mitra, an athletes’ rights activist and research consultant, reached out to Chand after her disqualification. Mitra felt it was vital that Chand did not feel compelled to quit or take medical steps. “There are severe side effects to many of these medications, plus the surgery requires prolonged hormonal treatment.they shouldn’t be forced to undergo medical intervention just for the sake of competing. It is unethical.”
On the other side of the debate is the Indian Athletics Federation (IAF) which needs to implement the rules of the international body. Adille Sumariwalla, a council member of the IAAF and the president of the Athletics Federation of India, says the new regulations are based purely on data and proof. He asks how an athlete would feel if she finished outside the top three, and one of the medal winners had hyperandrogenism. “If there is something natural within your system, why should it be a disadvantage for a majority of the people who are within the limit?” he asks.
Jyotirmoyee Sikdar, one of India’s mostsuccessful women athletes who is now a part of the national athletics selection team, is less sure. “I don’t know whether there should be gender testing. But athletes should have a level playing field while competing.”
Her dilemma is the central question in athletics today: Whose bodies should be controlled to build a level playing field for all athletes? And, at what cost?
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
What impact the new guidelines will have on a new generation of women athletes in India is unclear, especially in the absence of a national institutionalised grievance redress system.
Ashok Ahuja, former head of sports medicine at SAI, underlines that confusion abounds. The SAI has never done a study and so doesn’t know how many athletes have this condition. “Plus, the tests currently are only on an anonymous complaint, and not random. But there should not be any witch hunt,” he says.
Bruce Kidd, vice-president of the University of Toronto and a long-time advocate for equality in sports, says the guidelines are sure to be challenged in court. “The new IAAF regulations are discriminatory, based on faulty, unproven scientific evidence and they have tremendous potential for harm in the way that the previous policy caused incalculable stress and harm,” he says.
The new regulations will induce fear among women in middle-distance athletics, Kidd avers. “Nor am I convinced that such regulations are necessary to ‘ensure a level playing field’. Of all the differences among top athletes – height, weight, physiology, biochemistry, personal and national income, etc – why single out just one factor for policing?” he asks.
Earlier this month, Semenya challenged the new rules, calling them “discriminatory, irrational, unjustifiable”, thereby shining a light on how difficult the journey of athletic success can be for women who don’t conform to what society thinks women should look like or behave.
For Chand, who is currently training at the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad to make a comeback, and has already won the 100m gold in national championships in March, the experience has left her quite cynical.
“The public only looks for problems. They don’t see the extensive work that goes into winning that medal. I left my house at a young age, and haven’t lived with my family since then. When I lose, they’ll say, Dutee has grown old. When I win a medal, then they think it’s ‘hyperandrogenism’.”
But Soundarajan, who was forced to give up her career and is now a coach in Chennai, is more hopeful. In her village, the 37-year-old has created facilities for young girls – most of them Dalit – to start running for their dreams. She points at a young woman crouching at the starting block. “I know they will fulfil my dream. They will bring the medals I was not given a chance to,” she says, breaking into a radiant smile. In the distance, her student’s lithe body is taut moments before Soundarajan blows a shrill whistle. “On your marks, get set, go”. The girl starts running.
DUTEE CHAND, WHO GREW UP IN
A VILLAGE IN ODISHA’S JAJPUR DISTRICT, SAYS THAT THE EXPERIENCE DEVASTATED HER