Don’t cast her out
Enforcing the “female” body just reveals how tenuous it is
The female body in all its wondrous complexities has been the object of shame, ridicule, dictation and degradation since the beginnings of human culture. To be a woman one is supposed to act in a certain way, and move and speak in a particular manner. If you don’t appear perfectly female or fail to play the role, you are labelled — or at least questioned.
In 2009 at the International Association for Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) World Games in Berlin, Caster Semenya was called out by one of the other athletes.
Semenya does not fall into the neat little box of what a woman “should” look like. Magazines such as the New Yorker called her “breathtakingly butch” and compared her torso to an armoured chest-plate.
At the time Semenya was only 18. She came out of nowhere, becoming the 13th-fastest woman ever to run the 800m.
She was on the road to becoming one of the world’s athletics greats until her petite racetrack competitors — who had their asses whipped by this incredible woman — cried foul. They accused Semenya of being a man, said they could not race against her and demanded she be tested, but not for drugs.
Her competitors wanted Semenya to prove she was woman enough to run with them.
Shortly after making her personal best time of 1:55:45 and taking gold, she was dragged through all sorts of tests to see how close she was to being a “woman”.
Each sporting body handled the situation more shockingly than the next, including the South African authorities. No one seemed to know how to respond, and most seemed to forget Semenya was simply a teenage girl who wanted to do what she loved most: running.
There were massive headlines that read: “Tests show that controversial runner Caster Semenya is a woman ... and a man!” Australian newspapers said she could be forced to undergo surgery to “fix the poten- tially deadly condition.”
She was subjected to the most “invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details” of her being. This is how she saw it; this is how she felt. But it did not stop there.
The sporting fraternity wasn’t the only one who wanted her to fit the mould; Drum magazine tried its best to “feminise” the athlete.
“We turn SA’s power girl into a glamour girl — and she loves it,” screamed the headline in September of that year.
Semenya did not like it, but she took it in her stride and tried to appease by wearing a sequenced silver dress and black tights with red nails, heels and makeup. Her usual sporty attire apparently didn’t cut it.
Just like the other women at the starting blocks, the local magazine had prescribed how a female athlete should look.
Based on pure speculation, it was said that Semenya has inverted testes, and no womb or ovaries — she was not your “normal” woman.
A condition called hyperandrogenism gives her a high level of testosterone, and based upon this factor — without any knowledge what the hormone does to her body, or if it is effective in any way — she was labelled and scorned.
Startlingly, the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made up the process, tests and regulations as they went along. Prior to 2011 the federation had no regulations to deal with Semenya’s case, though she is not the first female athlete to have this condition.
Page after page of the regulations released that year treat women with the condition as though they are no longer women. Chapter after chapter show how little research was available for their new regulations.
“Despite the rarity of such cases, their emergence from time to time at the highest level of women’s competition in athletics has proved to be controversial, since the individuals concerned often display masculine traits and have an uncommon athletic capacity in relation to their fellow female competitors,” reads the regulations’ preface.
The regulations state “females with hyperandrogenism may compete in women’s competition in athletics, subject to compliance with IAAF Rules and Regulations.”
Semenya’s situation, handled in the worst way, was ultimately the test case for the IAAF’s testosterone level definition. After investigating what the “acceptable” levels of testosterone in women are, the federation set the limit at 10 nmol/L.
This was allegedly based on a study done of the women competing in the World Championships, where it was found that 99% of the female athletes had testosterone levels below 3.08 nmol/L.
However, another study, published in 2014, found that while a small number of female athletes had higher testosterone levels, it also showed how “16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels, with complete overlap between the sexes.”
The federation and committee refused the data from this study because of its emphasis on the apparent overlap.
They seem to be saying: “Men are men and women are women; it’s unfortunate for you if you don’t fall into these boxes.”
Furthermore, the authors of the study noted that the IOC’s definition of a woman as one with “normal” testosterone levels was untenable.
Silvia Camporesi, a bioethicist lecturing at King’s College in London, believes that the IAAF regulations are complete “bullshit”.
“The answer to who is a man and who is a woman is not to be found in science, because it is complicated — we do have a continuum between men and women in biology,” she said.
On numerous occasions the IAAF said that the only reason they were so focused on lowering testosterone levels was the “protection” of other female athletes.
However, many conditions may lead to women having high testosterone, including polycystic ovary syndrome, which causes the ovaries to produce extraordinary amounts of the hormone.
One of the key questions asked by Camperosi is how the IAAF can pick on testosterone honestly, as if it is the only genetic variation in elite athletes.
“There is no level playing field in sport — there are many biological advantages that make up super-athletes,” she said.
During this time Semenya was running her worst times, coming nowhere close to her 2009 performance. After the release of the regulations it was alleged that she was forced to take testosterone-supressing medication.
The IAAF and many others gave Semenya an ultimatum — for her to participate in the one thing she loves, she had to look, act and run like a “woman”. “IAAF are only picking on this condition because of how society believes a woman should look, and according to them Caster does not fall into this category and she is running too fast. If she wasn’t running so fast people wouldn’t care, as in the case of [Dutee] Chand,” said Camperosi. “There is some available data that shows that testosterone can provide performance enhancement, but the arbitration [court] for sports last year July suspended the regulations as there was not enough evidence.
“It’s problematic that the Court of Arbitration would even say that right now there is not enough evidence to uphold the regulations, but if there was, they would reinstate that ridiculous clause,” said Camperosi.
Six years later, after Semenya began to run better times again, got married and was happy, as it seemed the controversy had subsided. Then a littleknown athlete from India who also didn’t fit the mould decided to publicly fight the system.
Dutee Chand was the first Indian sprinter to reach a final at a global athletics event three years ago, and at 18 she was already the 100m and 200m national champion. But just like Semenya, she “failed” a hormone test and was banned. There were allegations that the sporting bodies asked her to take medication or even perform a gene-modifying operation, which she flat-out refused.
She took the matter on review at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, arguing that she was born a female, has run as a female and won all her medals as a female.
Numerous biologists and scientists testified on Chand’s behalf, saying that there was not enough evidence for the IAAF and IOC to burden certain sportswomen with their draconian and invasive regulations.
Chand won her appeal and the IAAF hyperandrogenism rules were suspended for two years. They will be scrapped if the IAAF cannot provide new evidence.
This ruling upset many who wanted the sport to remain “pure” and women to be protected from those with such a condition.
The IAAF and IOC have used Semenya as a guinea pig, tweaking their regulations as they go along to best fit the scientific data they have at hand.
It is not fair or justifiable to continue persecuting her when it is widely agreed that there is a problem with the current regulations, and there is not enough scientific evidence to cast Caster out of the sporting world because she does not fit the desired profile.
Caster Semenya is only one of many women who have found themselves in a sordid masquerade. Women must play the part, and if they don’t, humiliation will be visited upon them.