by Fifteen years ago this month, a teenage runner in South Africa was publicly scrutinized because of her gender at a major sporting event. The lesson everyone was supposed to take away was: never again.
Yet the humiliation suffered by Caster Semenya has been repeated for two women boxing competitors at the Paris Olympics, exposing more female athletes to hurtful remarks and online abuse amid a contentious divide over sex, gender and identity in sport.
While Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting might be celebrating winning fights for their country, their gender is instead being questioned in front of the world after the Olympic-banned boxing federation claimed they had failed gender verification tests last year but gave little information about them.
Olympic officials called the arbitrary tests “so flawed that they are impossible to review” and stressed that both boxers were assigned female at birth, identify as such and are eligible to compete in women’s competitions. Both boxers have consistently been bombarded with hateful remarks, sometimes from figures outside the sport.
“It has consequences, huge consequences,” Khelif said in Arabic in a recent interview with SNTV, The Associated Press’ sports partner. “It can destroy people, it can kill their thoughts, their spirit and their soul. It can divide people.”
Their stories share many similarities with that of Semenya, the runner whose arrival in elite athletics at the 2009 world championships forced the sporting world to confront a highly complex issue that is still largely characterised by the same misconceptions as then.
Semenya was just 18 when she was thrust into the spotlight 15 years ago. She was subjected to gender verification tests and became the subject of unsavoury rumours about the details of her body.
She became a two-time Olympic 800-meter champion, but she is probably best known as the woman whose medical condition means she is effectively banned from competing in women’s athletics unless she medically reduces her testosterone levels.
The rumors surrounding Khelif and Lin have largely been ill-informed protests, with many repeating false claims — amplified by Russian disinformation networks — that the two men are men or transgender. Semenya has faced similar vitriol. Her reaction to the degrading treatment of Khelif and Lin has been to wonder how the sports authorities failed to prevent it from happening again.
“Sports is for all and the constitution prohibits any discrimination. But the moment they allowed women to be shamed, we are disoriented,” Semenya said in an interview with the website SportsBoom.com this week. She called for leadership that “protects, protects and respects women.”
Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to gender testing and false claims that they are male or transgender.
Semenya was born with one of several conditions known as differences of sex development, or DSD. She was assigned female at birth and has always identified as such. Her condition gives her an XY chromosome and high levels of testosterone.
Some sports, including track and field, believe this gives her and other women like her an unfair advantage and have developed eligibility rules that exclude her on that basis. Semenya has challenged those rules, and the correlation between testosterone and athletic advantage is inconclusive.
Another female athlete, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, has also waged a legal battle against testosterone regulations and several other runners have been affected and sidelined over the past decade in athletics, the sport that has been hardest hit by the issue.
Male athletes are not required to regulate their natural testosterone levels.
Female athletes with a more masculine appearance have long faced harassment and questions about their gender. This effect is amplified for those whose gender is questioned during a highly watched international event.
In one of the most personal details of her fight, Semenya said she was so angry, hurt and confused by her treatment at the 2009 championships that she told track and field officials she would show them her vagina as proof she was a woman. It took her more than a decade to tell that story publicly when she revealed it in a 2022 interview with HBO.
Semenya expressed her feelings that her gender and identity were suppressed by others throughout her life. She described references to her biological sex as “deeply hurtful.”
Christine Mboma, a young Namibian runner, also suffers from DSD. She won a silver medal at the last Tokyo Olympics at the age of 18, becoming the first woman from her southern African country to win an Olympic medal.
But upon her return home, she was met with more skepticism than praise after her condition became public. The recent “Tested” podcast by public broadcasters NPR in the United States and CBC in Canada featured Mboma, explaining how Namibians began to wonder if she was really a woman.
“It’s a public humiliation,” Mboma’s coach Henk Botha said on the podcast. “We have to understand that this is someone’s life.”
Like Semenya and Mboma, Khelif and Lin will go home with medals, but perhaps weighed down by the reactions and misconceptions that may surround them. Khelif is 25 and Lin is 28.
The extremely difficult debate over whether women with certain medical conditions have an unfair sporting advantage is relevant to sport. But Semenya said the way Khelif and Lin were treated was “a question of life principles.”
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/paris-olympics-2024
