Why are some athletes asked to change their bodies in order to compete?
I first heard of the runner Caster Semenya in the late 2000s, when Western media began to report on her as a South African athlete who was breaking records and attracting scrutiny from sports officials for her masculine appearance. |
Raised in rural South Africa, Semenya was a capable soccer player who switched to running when she realized that a career in track and field might better enable her to support her family. Growing up, she was sometimes mistaken for a boy, as she writes in her new book, "The Race to Be Myself," and she felt different from other girls. But she was still a girl. |
Right before her first major international competition, in 2009, athletics officials sent Semenya to a hospital for gender-verification testing. She was 18 years old and was subjected, unexpectedly, to her first gynecological exam. Afterward, she learned she had XY chromosomes (rather than the expected XX pairing), that she had undescended testes and that her testosterone level was too high to qualify her to run against other women. In the following years, she took estrogen, which lowered her testosterone levels and made her feel awful. She won gold medals in the 800-meter races in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games. |
I might have known the broad outlines of Semenya's story, but I didn't know how she felt during this time or her arguments for why she should have been able to compete without altering her body, until I read her memoir. I adapted part of the book into this Times Opinion guest essay. The book gave me a new perspective on issues of sex and gender in sports. |
Semenya writes that it's not possible to know the degree to which or even whether her hormones have powered her success. After all, she writes, she's not as fast as elite male runners, and some women who don't have a difference in sexual development are faster than her. At what point does unique human biology — a gymnast's flexibility, a marathoner's endurance, a swimmer's broad shoulders — stop being a lucky break and start becoming grounds for disqualification? This question feels especially resonant today, given the recent fraught debates in the United States about the rights of trans girls to compete against cisgender girls in youth sports. |
Is the solution to establish another category of gender for people who don't fit into neat binary categories of gender? Semenya doesn't think so. She's clear: She's a woman. "For me, participating in a third category of human gender identity would be accepting being othered, accepting the discrimination that I had fought against," she writes. "It would mean giving up the identity I'd been born with and had never questioned to take on a new one I didn't believe." |
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