No woman should endure what I did
My body was shamed, humiliated, surgically altered even though I did not need it
Nine years ago, sports authorities told me to do the unthinkable: have surgery to make my body more “feminine”, or quit running.
I was a 20-year-old woman and a middle-distance runner from a poor family in rural Uganda. The national athletics federation had named me Athlete of the Year in 2011, and I was due to compete at the 2012 Olympic Games. Sport gave me a purpose.
A few weeks before the team were scheduled to leave for London, athletics officials told me that I would not be going. My manager said it was something in my blood. I was devastated. What had happened? I did not take drugs. I felt healthy. I was in my best shape and aiming to make it to the finals in London.
In July 2012, on the advice of the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics), I travelled to France where I met doctors who conducted intrusive tests. I was then referred to a surgeon in Uganda and told that if I wanted to keep running, I needed to have a medical intervention. At the time, I thought it was going to be like a needle pulling fluid from my body.
It was not until I woke from the anesthesia, with bandages on my abdomen, that I realised something very different had happened. No matter how hard I trained, I never regained my strength. I was not told that I would need lifelong hormone therapy after that surgery. My university cancelled my scholarship, and my manager stopped contacting me for competitions. I became deeply depressed and experienced joint pain. I moved home and started working as a manual labourer.
It was not until 2019, when athlete rights activist Dr Payoshni Mitra reached out to me, that I learnt in detail about World Athletics’ 2011 testosterone regulations that pushed me out of my sport.
Two years ago, I read an article in a medical journal about four female runners, published in 2013, by doctors in France. I believe I was one of those four athletes. Reading it was revealing and revolting. I was never told that I would be part of a scientific report. The article detailed our ages and familial relations, descriptions of our genitals and pubic hair, as well as our breasts and history of menstruation. It also stated that the surgeries we underwent were medically unnecessary.
I learnt that the science behind World Athletics’ claim to support its testosterone regulations was not, in fact, clear. This was painful for me. My body was shamed, humiliated, surgically altered even though I did not need it to be.
I have since consented for my name to be mentioned in reports by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, alongside women such as Caster Semenya, who I idolise because she is an Olympic and world champion. The reports say that World Athletics violated our rights, and that the regulations should be revoked.
I am a woman, an athlete, and a person who never deserved to be treated this way. I have been granted asylum in Germany, and I am on the medication I should have been given following surgery.
I welcome the International Olympic Committee’s policy on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination published this week. I am grateful to the IOC for listening to me, along with other black and brown women, and for upholding the principles of inclusion and justice.
World Athletics’ regulations are harmful. My body is the site where harm was caused, and I cannot forget that. I cannot undo what happened, I cannot go back to the body I had before I was operated on. But I can try to stop other women going through what I did.
In a competition between competitive aspirations and one’s right to health and bodily autonomy, the latter should be prioritised. I feel vindicated because the IOC has upheld that. It has warned sports governing bodies not to presume advantage without evidence-based research. World Athletics has flouted these principles in my case, and I hope that we can all come together to ensure that its discriminatory differences of sexual development regulations are revoked now.