By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. I am a woman and I am fast. Semenya has been scrutinized since Caster Semenya, as she is usually known in the press, first gained worldwide attention in when she competed in the meters at the world championships in Berlin.
But the idea of testosterone testing has sparked a lot of criticism. Next Up In Identities. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. For more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. The Latest. And if I try something else, I might get caught somewhere else, and something might go wrong with my body.
Testosterone is a driver of red blood cell count, and the more red blood cells a person has, the more oxygen they can carry to their muscles, allowing them to run faster for longer amounts of time.
Men typically have higher testosterone levels than women, which is one of the reasons why, on average, they outperform women in athletic competition. And if people take testosterone as a performance-enhancing drug, they will generally perform better, says Dr Richard Holt, professor in diabetes and endocrinology at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton.
Research shows, however, that if you take a group of elite male athletes, all with varying testosterone levels, the ones with higher levels of the hormone don't necessarily perform better than those males with lower levels.
Dr Holt says the same is true of elite female athletes, which is why testosterone can't be the whole story when it comes to athletic performance. The problem, though, is where to draw the line between a testosterone advantage and other natural, genetic advantages. Joanna Harper, the author of Sporting Gender, argues: "If you're going to pick one advantage to separate the two categories [female and male], you want to pick an advantage that one group has that the other doesn't.
And you pick a biomarker that is widely divergent in the two groups. There had to be a line of demarcation at some point, and unfortunately Mboma and Masilingi were on the wrong side. Harper, a transgender athlete herself, says: "It's not an elegant solution by any stretch of the imagination, but it places fairly minimal restrictions on people Even if these rules could be considered justified, they should apply to future athletes as soon as possible after puberty.
Secondly, justice is about giving priority to the worst off in our society — but this ruling adds disadvantage to the worst off. Those with intersex conditions are already stigmatised, discriminated against, in many cases cannot bear children even if they want to. They are the socially disadvantaged. This ruling adds further discrimination and disadvantage. Thirdly, it sets back integration of intersex people, by stigmatising and marginalising them.
We have told them: be yourself, society will accept you. At the heart of this decision is the fear of displacement of cisgender women on the podia by increasing debate over transgender athletes.
Read more: Explainer: what does it mean to be 'cisgender'? This is a separate issue. Transgender athletes have normal testosterone receptors and would have grown up in the presence of male levels of testosterone acting on normal receptors.
Intersex athletes have not grown up in this way and are typically raised as female. The perceived problem of transgender domination of female sports can be dealt with by separate rules that do not disadvantage existing intersex athletes, though they will raise contentious issues of their own. All methods of reducing testosterone involve some risk. For example, the administration of high-dose birth control medication involves risk of clots, including fatal lung clots. Read more: How to choose the right contraceptive pill for you.
These interventions interfere with a normally functioning organism for highly uncertain benefits to other people. This is disproportionate and unreasonable. I have argued athletes should be able take performance-enhancing substances within the normal physiological range.
This would reduce any advantage Semenya may have. Semenya received the London m gold medal after the original winner was disqualified for doping. Even the International Olympic Committee is realizing that there is no one parameter that makes a person biologically male or female.
Needless to say, formulating rules about which athletes should compete as male and female is complicated, both for transgender athletes and cisgender athletes cisgender individuals are those whose gender identity is the same as their sex assigned at birth.
Research ,which analyzed 24 studies of transgender athletes, indicates that testosterone-blocking hormone therapy has a significant effect on the athletic performance of trans women. For example, after 12 months of this hormone therapy, trans women have significant decreases in strength, lean body mass and muscle.
Just four months on hormone therapy also reduces Hgb and HCT levels which impact oxygen levels in blood down to the levels of cisgender women. In , the IOC ruled that transgender athletes who identify as female could compete on female teams if their testosterone levels were below ten nanomoles per liter for at least 12 months before the competition.
In , World Athletics lowered the maximum level to five nanomoles per liter. By comparison, most cisgender female athletes have testosterone levels between 0. In addition to the rules impacting transgender athletes, World Athletics ruled that women who were assigned female at birth but had naturally high testosterone also needed to meet the five nanomoles per liter testosterone requirement in order to compete with women in the , , and one-mile women's races.
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