World Athletics is right: Caster Semenya has an unfair advantage

The precise medical name for Caster Semenya’s difference in sexual development, or DSD, is 5-alpha reductase deficiency. It is a condition that influences only male sexual characteristics before birth and during puberty. Those with it have one X and one Y chromosome in each cell, plus testes that may be internal due to the shortage of a hormone, dihydrotestosterone, which can disrupt the formation of external sex organs. In other words, Semenya is 46XY: genetically male. And this should be where the athlete’s case to be considered eligible for the female category should begin and end.

But in an extraordinary twist to this tortured saga, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found that the Swiss government did not protect Semenya from being discriminated against when, in 2020, its Supreme Court refused to overturn a verdict that athletes with high levels of testosterone had to take medication to reduce it in order to compete as women. The ruling is long and complex, but the ramifications are potentially profound, with the South African’s legal team already calling on World Athletics to change policy to accommodate DSD runners.

On the contrary, this is a moment for the global governing body, which introduced rules mandating testosterone suppression for DSD athletes in 2018, to hold its nerve. We only need to recall the decade before that shift in approach, when the DSD controversy had grossly distorted fairness for women in the middle-distance events. Take the women’s Olympic 800 metres final in 2016, an astonishingly lopsided race in which the entire podium was, to use an alternative shorthand, intersex.

Prevailing by a margin rarely seen over two laps, Semenya took gold in Rio de Janeiro with ease. Behind her were Margaret Wambui of Kenya and Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, both also 46XY and thus biologically male.

Britain’s Lynsey Sharp, who needed to produce a personal best to finish sixth, was in tears afterwards, embracing the other two runners who had missed out on medals in a show of unity. “You can see how emotional it was,” she wept. “We know how each other feels. It is out of our control and shows how much we rely on people at the top sorting it out.” 

Eventually, World Athletics did disentangle the mess, and it has promised not to budge from its position of compelling DSD athletes to embark on a course of testosterone suppression. But Semenya is clearly determined to have this recognised as a violation of human rights, with her lawyer characterising her fight as a crusade to “compete and run free”. Why the female pronouns, you might ask, when Semenya is already established as having male biology? The reason is that in this sad and fraught case, Semenya has, ever since her earliest years in a grindingly poor part of rural South Africa, been legally and socially female.

In 2009, not long after Semenya’s first world championships gold in Berlin, I visited Ga-Masehlong, the village in Limpopo province where she was born, and where family members rushed to explain how she had been brought up as a girl. Her mother Dorcus, using Caster’s first name Mokgadi, said: “Mokgadi is a girl. Ask any neighbours here, they helped to raise her. My child is a girl.” 

There was palpable horror in this community to the idea of someone she was one thing being informed she was something else. It suggested, in the eyes of those closest to Semenya, an attempt not just to reclassify but dehumanise her. And that is why there needs to be an element of compassion in this case. Semenya has no control over her chromosomal abnormality, and she is not dragging her grievances through the courts in some narcissistic effort to warp fair play for all her female rivals. She is simply convinced, having spent all her 32 years being treated as female in every sphere of society, that she should be recognised as such in her chosen sport, even if the medical realities indicate otherwise.

But it is these realities that must ultimately hold sway. You cannot guarantee a level playing field for women by letting in athletes according to what they perceive themselves to be, only according to what they immutably are. Semenya has a congenital condition restricted only to boys and men. That is why any justifications for her entering elite female races fall apart. And that is why World Athletics, far from caving into the ECHR, should double down.