Caster Semenya (Flickr)
South Africa’s Caster Semenya competes in the women’s 800 and 1500 meter races and consistently defeats the women in the race by 3-4 seconds.
Caster is the Olympic champion.
The runner from Pretoria has raised eyebrows due to her stocky, muscular physique and apparently masculine characteristics, including facial hair and a deep voice.
Semenya, in black, is married to a woman. Caster admits his wife thought he was a man when they first met.
Caster Semenya was born intersex. She has both female and male organs and a very high testosterone level.
In May the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled that Caster will need to lower her testosterone levels to compete with women in the future.
After a recent race in Doha, when asked if she would take testosterone-limiting medication, Semenya told Al Jazeera: “Hell no.”
She is just fine with her high testosterone levels and thinks it’s fair for her to compete with women.
Now this…
The IAAF ruled in court that Caster Semenya is a biological male.
The Daily Caller reported:
Women’s Olympic champion Caster Semenya is a biological male, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the world’s largest sports governing body, argued in court.
Semenya, the South African runner who dominated the female competition in the women’s 800M at the 2016 London Olympics, is fighting an IAAF requirement that biologically male runners suppress their testosterone below a certain level in order to compete in female events.
Media reporting on the subject has often left out the fact that the IAAF’s rule only applies to runners with male chromosomes rather than female runners with high testosterone levels.
The IAAF called the requirement “an extremely progressive compromise” between protecting the integrity of women’s sports and accommodating “certain biologically male athletes with female gender identities” like Semenya who want to compete in women’s sports, the court documents show…
…Semenya’s case, the IAAF reiterated, “is not about biological females and how their bodies respond to testosterone; it is about biological males with 5-ARD (and other [male sexual development disorders]), how their bodies respond to testosterone, and the performance advantages of that response when they compete against biological females.”
Athletes with 5-ARD are “biologically indistinguishable… in all relevant aspects” from typical male athletes, with the only major difference being the “size and shape of their external genitals,” the IAAF argued.
