Toronto supporters help Indian sprinter overturn competition ban on women with naturally high testosterone levels
Women with naturally high levels had been barred from competing in sanctioned meets
Indian sprinter Dutee Chand hasn’t raced internationally in more than a year, but on Friday she recorded the biggest victory of her career in Switzerland.
That’s where the Court of Arbitration in Sport suspended an IAAF rule barring women with naturally high testosterone levels from competing in sanctioned meets. The rule has kept the 19-year-old Chand out of action since last July when the IAAF, the international body governing track and field, ruled her ineligible days before she was scheduled to compete in the Commonwealth Games.
Within days of that ruling an international team of supporters, including Toronto-based lawyer James Bunting and U of T’s Bruce Kidd, formed to help Chand launch an appeal. After a four-day hearing in late March and a four-month wait for a verdict, the CAS suspended the IAAF rule placing limits on a woman athlete’s natural testosterone levels. The ruling was made public Monday. The IAAF has two years to show the CAS scientific proof supporting their rule, but in the meantime Chand is eligible to run, and her legal team considers this a big win in the ongoing battle against sexism in sport.
Under IAAF rules men don’t face similar strictures on naturally-occurring testosterone.
“It’s an extra hurdle we’re forced to con- tend with that only exists in sport,” says Stanford University bioethicist Katrina Karkazis, who testified on Chand’s behalf. “(The CAS) ruling treats women the same way as men in this realm, which they should have been doing all along.”
Chand’s supporters included the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and Payoshni Mitra, university researcher and Indian Sport Ministry employee.
She was the one who first approached Chand about filing an appeal. The lawyers and experts worked pro bono, while the Sport Ministry covered other costs.
For them, the ruling is an important landmark at the intersection of sports, sexism and racism.
In court the IAAF argued its rules governing “hypernandrogenism” were justified because women with high levels of natural testosterone had an unfair advantage. Under the rule, women with elevated natural testosterone could undergo surgery or hormone therapy to bring testosterone levels in line with IAAF guidelines, or stop competing against women. Chand’s team countered that there’s no definitive link between high natural testosterone and an outsized boost in performance. In 2013, Chand placed sixth in the 100 metres at the IAAF world youth championships. Her fastest time that season was 11.62 seconds, 15th fastest worldwide among women in her age group that year.
Further, Chand’s lawyers argued penalizing a woman sprinter because her body produces too much testosterone is akin to sanctioning a woman basketball player for being too tall.
Chand can’t help elevated testosterone any more than WNBA star Brittney Griner can help being sixfoot-eight, and Bunting says penalizing either would violate fairness and common sense.
“It’s normally athletes who have outlying traits who tend to do better in sport,” says Bunting, lawyer with Toronto-based Davies, Ward, Phillips and Vineberg. “No other regulation penalizes athletes for their natural attributes.”
Chand’s suspension and re-instatement draw comparisons to Caster Semenya, a South African 800-metre runner subjected to gender testing after winning a world title in 2009. The case sidelined Semenya for more than a year before she eventually won silver at the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Chand’s story also echoes the discussion surrounding tennis star Serena Williams, whose physique inspired a New York Times article which said rivals “choose not to” emulate her musculature in favour of maintaining figures that hew more closely to narrowly-defined standards of femininity.
And just as observers point out a racialized double-standard in criticisms of Williams, opponents of the IAAF’s hyperandrogenism rules see racism at work.
Karkazis has been tracking sanctions under the rule since 2011 and says every woman the IAAF has scrutinized has been either a South Asian or a sub-Saharan African. At the time of the Chand ruling, five Kenyan women were under investigation over natural testosterone.
Karkazis speculates Indian and black African women athletes sometimes trigger suspicion simply for not conforming to white, Western standards of beauty. She points out the Kenyan women being investigated wear their hair short and without chemical relaxers, a style that might be common in their country but interpreted as masculine to observers unfamiliar with it.
Kidd, meanwhile, isn’t as forgiving. He calls the IAAF’s rule “hateful.”
“It’s motivated by a distrust of fast, strong, powerful women,” said Kidd, a professor of kinesiology and physical education at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
“Because Usain Bolt is too tall do you cut him off at the knees? So why should these women be asked to change what is naturally theirs?”