Caster Semenya Continues the Fight: Female Athletes Sanctioned by Men

“Do not use Nelson Mandela to say that sport has the power to change the world. What world are you talking about?” Caster Semenya, the South African athlete, speaks in Tampere, Finland. She appears as a 21st-century Muhammad Ali. Empowered. Beside her, Uganda's Annet Negesa narrates, in contrast, slowly, with unbearable pauses, how they ruined her body and her career by subjecting her to a monstrous operation that changed her life. The room silently accompanies her gaps. It embraces her pain. I have never seen anything like it. To their left, Kenya's Evangeline Makena, timid, breaks through her depression for the first time to tell the public how she too was humiliated. They are not transgender athletes. They do not dope. They are athletes with DSD (Differences of Sexual Development). Their bodies naturally produce high levels of testosterone. Athletics authorities say they run with an advantage. It expels them.

After fifteen years of controversy and difficult legal battles, Semenya, a double Olympic champion and triple world champion in the 800 meters, managed last July to get the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to rule that the athlete never received a "fair trial" when World Athletics (the former International Association of Athletics Federations) ordered her to undergo treatment to reduce her testosterone levels if she wanted to continue competing. The order violates legislation in some European countries. Caster always refused. In its ruling, the ECHR also ordered Swiss justice to pay court costs (nearly 90 thousand dollars) and allowed Semenya to demand a new trial. I return to the room in Tampere, Finland, at the recent Congress of the Danish organization Play the Game. Now Negesa is speaking. Hers is a chronicle of dignity. But also of pure pain. I understand why Semenya rejected the possibility of starting a new trial.

Negesa takes us back to the period before the 2012 London Olympics. She is only twenty years old, has eight siblings, and is one of Uganda's best athletes, a gold medal hope in the 800m. But they forbid her to run. They suspend her for her natural high testosterone levels. They appeared in a 2011 blood test, the results of which were communicated to her almost a year later, only when she secured her ticket to the Olympic Games and threatened to reach the podium. A doctor from World Athletics—who denies the accusation—advises her to have surgery. Negesa travels alone to Nice. The doctors speak to her in French (she speaks English and Swahili). She says athletics is her life. She agrees, pays 900 dollars, and is operated on in Kampala. She believes it is a simple operation and that in a few weeks she will run again as always.

It is not so. Negesa did not know they would cut her body (a gonadectomy to remove internal testes she was never informed about), nor that she would then have to undergo hormone therapy. The pains are intense. She feels fatigue and nausea. Her body is not the same. Everything changes. She suffers in silence. She is ashamed. She becomes depressed. She loses her university scholarship. She loses national support. The country wonders if she is a man or a woman. "Cheater or cheater." She does not know how to tell what is happening to her. She earns a living painting houses, building stables. Until she is introduced to Payoshni Mitra, an Indian former badminton player, defender of athletes mistreated for their diverse bodies, also present in the Tampere room, in the debate led by Christina MacFarlane, a precise, sharp, and sensitive BBC journalist, especially when she does not invade Negesa's eternal pauses, extreme vulnerability, and, in her own way, also empowered, now an activist.

The defense of the athletes gains strength when it is Roger Pielke's turn, an American political scientist and researcher who has spent a decade studying athletics regulations for women with DSD or who are intersex. "They are regulations loaded with incorrect data," says Pielke, while comparing times and records of men and women, and denounces that the authority establishes precarious conclusions and yet uses them to ruin the careers (and often the lives) of young athletes. They are a very small number and, their supposed advantage, Pielke says, is much smaller than suggested and is not scientifically supported. However, they are accused of being "cheaters." Of being "men." Even more so if they are Black women from the Global South who do not conform to hegemonic Western patterns, as Semenya's discourse asserts.

They are the same authorities that never questioned the different testosterone levels among male athletes. And that, in their time, endorsed the prostheses of the athlete Oscar Pistorius, South African but white. The advantage of swimmer Michael Phelps's unusually long arms, the giant feet of his colleague Ian Thorpe, and the record heights of basketball players, all also natural physical attributes, but masculine. In the Tampere room, Semenya is asked why she gave up pursuing her lawsuit against World Athletics. She speaks of the money needed to litigate in Switzerland, before white European judges, of how they destroyed emotions she is now re-educating through her two children. And that she will no longer set records, but now helps change lives. And that the fight does not cease. Because she was born in South Africa, a country, she says, of "freedom fighters." Two days earlier she had been asked what she would do if she were an authority. "I would not allow men," she replied, "to regulate women's sport." They gave her a standing ovation.