They want to put you in a box since its easier to control you there
The IAAF won the right to control Caster Semenya. Plain and simple.
I want to start off apologizing to everyone who reads this for taking the week off, especially given the big news last week of the Court of Arbitration of Sport decision on Caster Semenya.
I had a number of initial thoughts jumbled in my head after the initial decision, but a lingering sinking pit of my stomach about the ruling’s implications and the online discussion about what it meant just made that worse. However, I set up this newsletter to talk about uncomfortable topics just like this, and I thank those of you who have signed up to read this newsletter, so here we go.
I think the Semenya ruling is profoundly worrying, but also incredibly unsurprising for the route the IAAF has taken ever since Semenya burst on to the scene in 2009.
Mainly, a lot of ink has been spilled about the notion that the science behind the testosterone and how the IAAF applied it in this case, but ultimately to start with understanding the implications of the Semenya ruling you have to start with the notion of human rights.
Make no doubt about it, Semenya’s human rights were utterly trampled over with this ruling. The IAAF have a legal decision in the sports world that allows them to charter its events with a rule that says women like Semenya can no longer be classified in the way that they had been, and the only way that they can compete in the classes they have their entire lives is to modify their bodies through medical intervention that does not have the backing of the World Medical Association.
This ruling does not only apply to Semenya, but athletes that fit in with what the IAAF calls “Difference of Sexual Development,” for women athletes, which the IAAF has now approved regulations that apply to only certain distances.
These regulations were first implemented by the IAAF and challenged by Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, which led CAS to determine the IAAF didn’t have scientific backing to implement these regulations. The international federation came back and changed which distances it claims athletes affected by what it calls DSD had an unfair advantage, argued that before a court set up by the IOC to legislate the realm of Olympic sports, and successfully won.
This entire system set up benefits its primary stakeholders which is the Olympic movement and the federations which populate it, at the expense of, well, anyone that is not a part of the movement.
While, this creates a unified set of values and goals that the IOC, which is an NGO aimed at promoting the universality of sport, can execute a vision, it also has been afforded a set of privileges most non-profit organizations around the world would kill for.
You see, sport is autonomous. Society has allowed that for sport to exist as a common unifier it has to exist outside of our political frameworks, which have created in this moment a patchwork of over 200 states with different ideologies and goals. So, that’s why since the Cold War Olympic boycotts ended, the Olympics have worked to grow record participation from all states, to justify its mission of universality in sport to get more funding to achieve that goal. It’s a system that has largely worked!
But it’s also a system that has put forth its ideals and values resting on the protection of human rights while expanding the system so everyone can participate. The Olympic Charter even says in its beginning:
The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Olympic Charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
The reasoned CAS decision says that to uphold the protected class of women’s sports that there is room for discrimination to prevent those from manipulating the system. This was done by an arbitration court set up by the IOC to handle matters solely related to sport, so it would not be subject to a patchwork of sovereign laws in different states around the world. And it ruled that Semenya’s human rights are less than that of other athletes because those athletes are protected and Semenya is not.
It’s hard to view this in context and wonder what kind of slope is created from that kind of reasoning. Barring Semenya has already led to other countries holding back runners they fear may be subject to these regulations, and the UN has already weighed in stating its opposition to the regulations before the verdict was handed down.
Governments are waking up to the notion that sport may have overreached here and is using its power as an autonomous actor in our world to subject its narrow view of how we should classify ourselves in competition on a world that is slowly working to understand and accept the broadness of human gender and sexual identity. Sport’s autonomy has granted the Olympic movement a total monopoly of how it organizes itself, and its latest ruling is just a continuation of a centuries long history of those organizations, largely run by men at all of the highest levels of power, have used that monopoly to present their vision of how competition should be run.
CAS has now stated that international sport federations can discriminate for the sake of continuing its own system as long as they have some evidence in place that backs of their beliefs. Given that around the world science has been used to justify the end goals of a range of beliefs from despots with ethnic cleansing, to small-government beliefs warning (nonsensically) that governments were poisoning our children, the need to a more robust discussion before forcing individuals to medically alter themselves just to compete in the Olympics is key.
After all the discussion about the human rights violations that these policies have at the individual level, we still are left with the wrangling and frankly demeaning conversations about what is the right way to classify gender in our modern society by those who want nothing more to reinforce the gender binary for their benefit.
The Semenya ruling exposed what the entire debate surrounding this CAS case was about: the belief that because women’s sport emerged as a protected class, its inherent structure needs to be preserved for the empowerment of women.
Now I’d like to note that I am a cisgender presenting man, offering my opinions on this subject. I am not an authority on the subject, but I think it’s important to call out what is going on, but I want to add I am not trying to speak for anyone in this column and my beliefs are 100% rooted in my own personal experiences.
That being said, the arguments in favor of the the IAAF decision are rooted in the idea that to continue to allow for the growth of women’s sports and provide more opportunities to grow the universality of sport, that this class of athletes needs to be protected. And honestly, in our current climate it’s probably correct that we need to keep fighting to grow women’s sport. But, it also needs to be said that it comes at the expense of athletes that are intersex and/or have transitioned and want to be afforded the basic human rights as others.
Two many columns have been passed around recently (that I’ve seen) defending the decision by CAS to uphold the IAAF’s regulations, Andrew Sullivan writing for the New Yorker and Doriane Coleman writing for Quillette. Both have spoken incredibly authoritatively (Coleman, was an 800m runner in the 1980s at the height of the Eastern European doping schemes) about how this protected class in sports needs to be upheld at all costs to protect those in the system.
This is the kind of language presented. From Coleman:
Ms. Semenya proved Dr. Tucker right, of course; but the effect of the testosterone rule’s suspension was even more powerful than even he had predicted: Her 100% chance of winning gold turned into a 100% win share for the three suspected 46, XY DSD athletes in the race, and a 0% share for the biological females in the field. (Note that two of the three—Ms. Semenya and Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi—have publicly acknowledged that they are affected by the regulations and thus that they are 46, XY males with DSD. As of this writing, the third, Margaret Wambui of Kenya, has not made a similar acknowledgment; however, she and the Kenyan press have hinted at her status on a number of occasions.) In other words, it is likely that no biological female won a medal in that event at the last Olympics. At least one study suggests this is a decades’ long pattern, reporting a “presumed…over-representation of [46, XY DSD athletes of] approximately 1,700-fold at the podium level.”
And from Sullivan:
And, of course, this relates to the entirely separate controversy over trans inclusion in sports. There is no question that developing as a biological male under the influence of testosterone substantially improves athletic performance, even if subsequent T levels are suppressed. Including someone in the female category who was biologically male until a couple of years before the contest gives her a real advantage, however suppressed her current T levels are. Like Semenya, these trans women have done nothing wrong. And it’s a genuinely painful thing that they might be excluded, or have their achievements qualified in any way. But reality is a stubborn thing. At some cosmic level it may be unfair that I cannot have a child by having sex with another man. But I still can’t. And it is simply biologically and empirically unfair that women who have T levels in the male range — or physically developed with them — should compete with those who do not. This is not transphobia. No one is worried that trans men who were once biologically women will dominate their events.
Caster Semenya has been the best 800m runner in the world for quite some time. She has fought back against the IAAF at every step of the way. And her 2016 triumph, according to Coleman, a law professor at Duke University, is just an example of the pervasive invasion by athletes that are affected by the IAAFs DSD regulations (mind you none of these athletes have ever released their chromosomal makeup or testosterone levels because its their medical history that none of us are entitled to have because they are public figures. Yet, that doesn’t matter to Coleman) and the erosion of the protected class of women’s sports.
These rules in place for Semenya only apply to intersex athletes, as Katelyn Burns points out wonderfully in this article for WIRED, though the IOC has said it is waiting for the ruling to once again begin working on its guidelines for transgender athletes to participate in the Olympics, so unfortunately the debates get interlinked.
Now, for Sullivan, the fact remains that they understand the effects of what a male puberty on an athlete who transitions after puberty is completed without providing a single link to back them up when writing these paragraphs waxing poetic about how unfair it is that as society’s understanding of sex and gender begins to be broadened that the binary which they understand to be true may be questioned.
Nevermind that Kristen Worley, who wrote a book about her experience, fought for years to get a TUE from WADA so that her body would not break down since she starved it of testosterone, while her female competitors were able to naturally produce growth hormones to recover normally. When WADA would or could not even give her the barest minimum of explanations, she fought them, the IOC, and the International Cycling Union in a human rights tribunal, which led to the IOC ending its draconian policy on gender testing, and allowed the UCI to create a much broader transgender inclusion policy.
That policy allowed for Rachel McKinnon to compete, lowering her testosterone to the approved level, she managed to win a world championship in the age 35-44 women’s sprint competition at the 2018 Cycling Masters World Championship. Yet despite following the rules that the IAAF defenders vigorously say are needed, McKinnon was subjected to endless harassment and little backing from the UCI. While she may get aggressive at times with her talking points, McKinnon has spent the last year fighting back on the tightening of restrictions on intersex and athletes who have transitioned, and desperately trying to get the general population to understand her perspective.
Joanna Harper, the lone transgender member of the IOC’s commission that is looking to revise is transgender athlete inclusion policy has done preliminary research on asking the question of who should compete in women’s sports categories believes that this idea of going through a male puberty should never discount someone who has gone through hormone replacement therapy and lives a woman should not be excluded from this protected class of sports.
Harper believes in a codified set of regulations, as noted by her work with the IOC on the last transgender athlete policy, and her research is just one piece in a broader set of science that is needed to go forward.
The truth of the matter is, we still don’t have a robust set of longitudinal studies on athletes that are intersex or have gone through transitions to truly understand the impacts their lives have on their athletic careers and performances. We have a summary of a CAS decision that was ruled on years after the IAAF lost a high profile case on the same matter, which essentially told the IAAF how to come back with new evidence to win. Think about that: we do not even have the full reasoned decision from CAS and proponents of the decision have declared total victory to uphold the current structures in place saying that robust evidence has won out.
And that’s what this is all about. Sport wants to maintain its place in society without question, so we trample human rights, and use limited information to maintain the structures that benefit the people that run the organizations. And when research questions our basic assumptions about how society is ordered with regard to sex and gender, that research doesn’t prompt a more scientific discussion, it prompts doubling down on baseline assumptions and classifying it as Andrew Sullivan calls “left’s version of climate change denial”.
Instead the notion that our inherent biases controlling our scientific pursuits and end goals is just a radical belief that is oppression disguised as equality, and the incremental change we have experienced over the last 150 years of modern sport needs to continue at its current pace. For a group so set on enforcing the belief the empirical evidence forge our path towards equality, they chose not to see that we really don’t have all the answers to create a reflective society going forward.
I don’t have the answers on how to best order sport going forward. Perhaps the male/female binary will only continue to hurt that progress, but I will admit I have no better alternative to offer. I do know that the progress we have made by pushing for equal access to women’s sports, needs to be applauded and continued at all costs. But we need to recognize as a society that pushing this forward as is, will continue to punish marginalized peoples during their successes.
It is sickening to keep reading articles justifying forcing Caster Semenya to have to undergoing a medical intervention to continue to compete in her chosen profession, while lauding her pose and fighting spirit through all this. Those who applaud her, but justify the stripping of her humanity to fit their molds, just want to put her in a box so she cannot fight back from the radical control there.
We like to think we are better than that as a society, but maybe we are not.
What I am reading/writing
-I have a piece up in Front Office Sports, which breaks down the complexities of the Tokyo 2020 ticketing operation, which finally opened up. I was glad someone accepted this pitch, since its really a follow-up to having reported on the saga of the Rio 2016 ticketing scandal. Spent a lot of days in a Rio police station chasing quotes. Hopefully Tokyo won’t end up in this situation, but cracks in the system will always be there.
-If you live in Japan, registration is now open until May 28 for the first lottery of Olympic tickets, by the way.
-You know those obstacle course races which are taking the world by storm? Could we see them in the Olympics? Reuters reports on the sport’s drive to make the biggest stage worldwide.
-After hosting an anti-doping summit last year, the United States government tips its hand for the 2020 WADA budget: include more athlete leadership or we will not be funding you, BBC reports.
-We have a lot more temporary measures taken in Rio to keep the 2016 Olympic Park operational for the time being, but nothing long term is set, UOL reports.
-AIBA is threatening to sue the IOC if the organization strips the federation the right to organize Olympic boxing, the Guardian reports.