Tab59 from Düsseldorf, Allemagne, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
CASTER SEMENYA: RAISING QUESTIONS OF GENDER AS ONLY BINARY BY CONNIE WARDMAN (SHE, HER, HERS) As of this writing, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has counted 82 anti-transgender bills recently introduced in states across the U.S. to ban trans youth from playing sports, to require teachers to refer to students only by the name on their birth certificate, to criminalize doctors who would provide gender-affirming care to trans youth – even to imposing a criminal penalty ON CHILDREN! Minnesota’s HF 1657 threatens kids with arrest and juvenile detention for using the school locker room or playing sports. The sports ban is aimed primarily at athletes in junior and senior high school levels. There are important takeaways from this story on elite intersex athlete Caster Semenya, not only from the way she and other athletes like her have been treated over the years but now, for the continuing questions over appropriate legal powers sports authorities (and today’s state and local governing bodies) should have over a student-athlete as well as their moral obligations to that student’s welfare.
28 COMPETE march-april 2021
While continuing to train for the Tokyo Olympics starting in July without knowing if she’ll be able to defend her Olympic 800m title, South African elite mid-distance runner Semenya, who lost her appeal to Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court in September, is now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to protest the rules requiring medically controlled testosterone levels in female runners. In the meantime she continues her fight for the rights of intersex athletes, those individuals born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the rigid boxes of either “female” or “male.” The double Olympic and triple World 800m intersex runner was at the center of what is a landmark 2019 legal case to decide whether or not an official sports organization has the authority or moral right to force an athlete to take testosterone-suppressing hormones in order to compete. According to eyewitnesses interviewed by The Guardian, the case was complex, “including science and sociology, gender and genetics, health issues
