ATHLETICS’ UNFAIR CONTEST?
The female athlete on the left, whose testosterone levels are three times higher than normal, is taking on Britain’s new track star Laura Muir ... just one of the gender issues convulsing women’s sport
WITH bags of charisma and an ultraaggressive, elbows- out running style that might have been designed to get TV viewers jumping on their sofa, Laura Muir is the new golden girl of British athletics.
The 24-year-old who, when she’s not on the track is training to be a vet at Glasgow University, has carried all before her this season, setting five British records in the past six months, and winning 1,500 and 5,000 metre titles at the recent European Indoor Championships.
She has even outstripped the national record set by the double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes.
Muir’s swift ascent from virtual obscurity to household name is set to be completed at the Olympic Stadium in London next week, when she begins a quest for glory in the 1,500 metre event at the World Athletics Championships. Now ranked number one in the world over the distance, and feted by fans for her buccaneering ability to win races from the front, many regard the plucky Scot as a virtual shoo-in for the title.
Or, at least they did. For in a development already overshadowing what Muir hopes will be the defining moment of her career, she will now be forced to line- up against one of the most divisive — and in some ways tragic — figures in modern sport.
Caster Semenya is the South African runner who won gold in the 800 metres at last year’s Rio Olympics, and whose raw speed is matched only by her unfortunate ability to generate controversy.
In an outspoken TV interview, the strapping 26- year- old declared this week that she will compete for not just the 800 metre crown, but also the 1,500 metre one in London.
That sets her on a collision course with the darling of the home crowd, and will surely reignite a fierce debate that has dogged women’s athletics since Semenya emerged on the scene eight years ago. At its centre is a straightforward issue of human biology.
Through absolutely no fault of her own, there has long been disagreement over whether the South African runner should be allowed to compete as a female.
Though raised as a girl, in the impoverished Limpopo province of her homeland, Semenya is technically ‘ hyper-androgynous’, meaning her body has the ability to produce and absorb an excessive amount of male hormones. She also has no womb or ovaries but, owing to a chromosomal abnormality, has internal testes.
In less enlightened times, doctors might have called her a ‘hermaphrodite’. These days, the accepted term is ‘intersex’.
Semenya’s condition is important due to its dramatic effect on her sporting career. For it has given her testosterone levels which are more than three times those normally found in a woman, and approaching those of a man.
As a result, her appearance, body-shape, and muscle tone are startlingly masculine — and on the track, she boasts raw power and speed to match.
Some rivals have therefore argued Semenya should be banned from competition, or even stripped of previous medals because she enjoys what is effectively an unfair advantage over females. After all, an athlete who
artificially raised their testosterone levels to her level would be banned for doping.
Her supporters point out that she can hardly be blamed for an accident of birth. It’s a tricky and sometimes heart- rending debate which can’t be easily settled, and which has for years spawned allegations against those who criticise Semenya of everything from cruelty and casual racism to violation of her human rights.
During her career, Semenya has been subjected to often traumatic public scrutiny, along with a series of deeply invasive medical examinations.
All of which helps explain the headache now facing the sport’s governing bodies as they attempt to square the seemingly impossible circle of being both considerate to hyper-androgynous athletes and fair to such rivals as Laura Muir.
The issue is now coming further to the boil thanks to Dutee Chand, a hyper- androgynous female Indian sprinter who in 2015 went to the Court of Arbitration in Sport to challenge rules over testosterone levels which had been introduced in 2011 by the IAAF, the governing body of athletics.
Brought in as a response to Caster Semenya’s domination of the sport, the disputed regulations stated that athletes competing as women must have less than ten nanomoles of testosterone in every litre of blood (most females have between one and three, while men tend to have 10.5 to 30).
Athletes who were above the threshold were required to either undergo surgery to lower their hormone level, or have hormone replacement therapy to artificially lower their testosterone levels.
Initially, using hormone replacement treatment, Semenya kept within the new rules, causing both her muscle mass and race times to decrease dramatically. At the 2012 Olympics in London, she was forced to settle for a silver medal.
However, when Dutee Chand brought her case in 2015, the Court decided to suspend the testosterone rules for two years while it considered whether there was sufficient evidence that hyperandrogynous athletes really enjoyed improved performance.
As a result, Semenya ceased the HRT. Her performances duly spiked, and she won the 800 metres Olympic gold with ease in Rio the following summer. In court, over recent months, the IAAF has argued that this indicates that the law needs to be re-introduced. It says that studies show 800 metre runners with high testosterone levels have a 1.8 percent advantage in performance over rivals with lower scores.
‘We are not saying anything about how people should live their lives; we are only trying to create categories within which we can have equitable competition,’ Dr Joanna Harper, a transgender person who gave evidence in court supporting the rules, told The Times this week.
‘Given the level of science we have right now I think [placing a limit on levels of] testosterone is the best we can do.
‘Yes, we allow genetic advantages in sport, but we don’t allow all genetic advantages. We don’t let 100 kg boxers into the ring with 60 kg boxers.’
This is not the only gender issue that is sparking growing controversy in women’s sport. The other is the issue of how to fairly categorise transgender athletes at a time when society is increasingly challenging long-standing notions of gender. This week, Tory minister Justine Greening suggested we will soon to be able to alter our birth certificates without having to undergo a sex change.
Such a dramatic shift means it is becoming increasingly tricky to reconcile the rules of sport with public attitudes and the law. Historically, female athletes whose gender was under suspicion were forced to undergo humiliating medical examinations that would nowadays be deemed invasive and unacceptable.
From the Forties onwards, female competitors were required to bring ‘femininity certificates’ from a doctor who had verified their gender.
By the early Sixties, in response to public concern that Soviet and Eastern European nations were deliberately entering vast numbers of men in their women’s teams, in addition to injecting female athletes with male hormones, officials implemented a mandatory genital check of every women at international events.
This often involved a so- called ‘nude parade’ at which women were required to one-by- one disrobe before a panel of doctors.
Later that decade, the International Olympic Committee did away with the humiliating ritual, introducing a chromosome test of all women athletes as part of a more modern ‘ gender verification’ strategy.
That remained official policy for decades.
In 2003, the International Olympic Committee finally modernised rules to allow transgender athletes to compete, under certain conditions, at the Games.
Athletes born as women, but who wished to compete as men faced no restriction because it was assumed they were unlikely to gain
Some rivals argue she must be banned ‘100kg boxers don’t fight 60kg boxers’
any physical advantage. But athletes born male who ‘identified’ as female were required to undergo a sex change operation and spend at least two years taking hormones to artificially lower their testosterone to normal levels. Only then could they compete against women.
Those rules were then softened in advance of last year’s Olympics, with the IOC deciding that it was no longer necessary for a transgender athlete to have had any surgery. Instead, they needed merely to have undergone hormone therapy to keep testosterone levels below the ten nanomole threshold for at least a year prior to competition. (Don’t forget most women have a testosterone reading of between one and three.)
IOC documents leaked in advance of the Rio games suggested that, owing to the new rules, at least two transgender athletes would be competing for Team GB. However their identities were kept secret.
Controversies over gender issues have not been limited to athletics. In 1976, for example, a professional women’s tennis player called Renee Richards was prevented from entering Controversy: U.S. sprinter Andraya Yearwood, 15, is biologically male the U.S. Open after it emerged that she had been born Richard Raskind.
As a man, the 6ft 2in Richards had captained the Yale University tennis team and enjoyed an undistinguished career on the pro circuit in the late Fifties. After transitioning in her mid- thirties, she began to enjoy considerable success playing women.
Today, women’s tennis has identical rules to the Olympics regarding transgender athletes. Although there are not currently any transgender athletes on the Tour, some believe the system is open to abuse: in theory, a cynical male professional could now choose to compete on the lucrative women’s circuit without having to undergo a sex change operation, provided he reduced his testosterone levels below the ten nanomole threshold.
In other sports, the situation is already messy. Mixed Martial Arts boasts a transgender fighter called Fallon Fox who competes on the professional circuit — criticised by the sport’s biggest female star, former Olympic judo medallist Ronda Rousey.
‘She can try hormones . . . but it’s still the same bone structure a man has,’ Rousey has said. ‘It’s an advantage. I don’t think it’s fair.’
Then there is the case of Andraya Yearwood, a 15- year- old from Connecticut who ‘identifies’ as a girl yet has not undergone either sex change surgery or hormone therapy, so is in biological terms entirely male.
She recently won both the 100 and 200 metre state championships. Like all transgender athletes, Yearwood would, of course, have to undergo hormone therapy to compete on the professional circuit, and in theory her performances would suffer. Yet for now the same does not apply to their hyper- androgynous peers, who enjoy what is essentially a loophole in the law and are, in the case of the Olympic champion Caster Semenya, allowed to have far higher testosterone levels than a transgender athlete. There seems little doubt that Britain’s Laura Muir will face questions in the coming days about the controversy over her opponent. This week, Semenya herself used a rare TV interview to address the critics. ‘ I don’t understand when you say I am a man or I have a deep voice,’ she said. ‘ I know I like man’s stuff, that is not a question, the question is where do I fall in?’ Regardless of the outcome of the showdown with Laura Muir, that’s a question women’s sport needs to get its head around in a world in which the issue of gender is becoming a very hot potato indeed.
Athletes used to suffer a ‘nude parade’