Olympic champion Caster Semenya has won an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The court found that the runner did in fact have her rights to a fair hearing violated. Now, her original case will go back to the Swiss federal court.
As Al-Jazeera reported:
The original case between Semenya and Monaco-based World Athletics was about whether female athletes who have specific medical conditions, a typically male chromosome pattern and naturally high testosterone levels should be allowed to compete freely in women’s sports.
Semenya has been subject to intense media and regulatory scrutiny over naturally occurring levels of testosterone in her body. She has been targeted by transphobes who argue that her testosterone gives her an ‘edge’ over fellow rivals. The athlete’s treatment is a perfect storm of misogynoir towards her as a dark-skinned Black athlete, and transphobia in relation to something she was literally born with.
Semenya’s fight
In 2023, the Canary’s Alex Rose Cocker reported:
Two years after Semenya’s win at the 2009 world championships when she was 18, the IAAF (International Amateur Athletic Federation, as World Athletics was previously known) introduced new rules for the first time. They stated that hyperandrogenic athletes could compete on the condition that they display androgen levels below those recorded for cis men.
And:
Then in 2018, the IAAF made it mandatory for athletes to lower their testosterone levels via drug treatments to under 5nmol/l. Competitors would have to do this for six months in order to compete in international events from 400m to the mile. Notably, these are Semenya’s main distances.
A couple of years later, Semenya is still beset by legal challenges for something naturally occurring in her body. Now, as a 34 year old that has moved into coaching, she says that her legal fight is for principle rather than her own direct gain. The fact that women must lower their androgen levels dependant in order to adhere to an arbitrary baseline is, as Semenya articulates, a disgraceful threat to women, both trans and cis.
After leaving the court, Semenya said:
This is a reminder to the leaders [that] athletes need to be protected.
Before we can regulate we have to respect athletes and put their rights first.
The athlete’s lawyer, Schona Jolly, said:
As of today, the governance of international sport needs to sit up and take notice of an athlete’s fundamental rights.
It’s not possible to put this aside and say ‘the substantive rights of the athlete don’t matter’. They firmly do.
‘Modern eugenics’
The Economic Freedom Fighters, a South African political party, released a statement condemning the treatment of Semenya:
What Semenya has faced is not about fairness in sport but about protecting whiteness and outdated ideas of femininity. Other African women athletes such as Christine Mboma, Beatrice Masilingi, and Annet Negesa have been similarly targeted, forced out of their events or into dangerous medical procedures.
They added:
These testosterone-based rules are modern eugenics: using fake science to exclude African women from global competition, and must be abolished.
The group also wrote:
This marks another important step in a long and painful journey that has exposed the racism and sexism entrenched in international sport…although the ruling does not overturn the discriminatory regulation outright, it opens the door for further legal challenges.
It also strengthens the global movement against the policing of women’s bodies in sport.
Back in 2023 when Semenya won a different discrimination case at the ECHR, Human Rights Watch called her victory:
a human rights victory.
They wrote:
International sporting bodies set regulations with scant regard for international human rights norms, as if they are exempt from human rights standards. The European court decision debunks that, finding that the Swiss Federal Tribunal had ‘failed’ to uphold human rights norms despite ‘credible claims of discrimination’.
Two years later, as Semenya wins another discrimination case it is apparent that athletics regulatory bodies are setting forth wild discrimination against Black women and women of colour more broadly.
White supremacy
The fact is that the misogyny, racism, and transphobia simply cannot be separated out when understanding how Semenya is still banned from her sport. The only options offered by athletic bodies wBlas for her to undergo unnecessary medical intervention. Transphobes often claim to be protecting the sanctity of womanhood and keeping women safe. But, as ever, they mean white women and women who further their white supremacist narratives on gender.
As Florence Ashley and Blu Buchanan write in Truthout, there is a common link between the raft of rhetoric espoused by people who are simultaneously anti-trans, anti-abortion, anti-critical race theory:
a fundamental belief that whiteness — both the category and those who occupy it — is under threat. The validity of this belief is less important than its influence; studies demonstrate that white Americans tend to see racism as a zero-sum game they are now losing.
They argue that:
White people, as a category, tend to think of themselves as victims in a “winner-take-all” battle between supposedly “natural” racial groups, in which survival (and reproduction) of the fittest determines the dominant group.
From this perspective, any advance made by non-white racial groups is seen as a direct attack on white supremacy and the ongoing ability of white people to reproduce — not just children, but the power and privilege of whiteness itself.
White supremacy underpins the bigotry on display when transphobes coalesce their racist efforts around policing the bodies of women. It is no accident that the women they police are women of colour: it’s by design.
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Guardian Sport
This post was originally published on Canary.