Update: Caster Semenya was given the all clear by the International Association of Athletics Federations last week to resume her career. The 19-year-old has not competed in 11 months following the debate over her gender that erupted during last year’s World Championships in Berlin.
OFFICIALLY, she is this year’s fastest woman over 800 metres, but now faces a more gruelling test: to prove she is female.
The tall, muscular South African beat her nearest rival by a cool 2.45 seconds to take the gold medal at the athletics World Championships in Berlin, Germany, last week, but the (IAAF) has asked her to undergo a battery of gender tests, including psychological, gynaecological and endocrinological examination. The results are not expected for several weeks.
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Men caught masquerading as women will simply be disqualified. Semenya, however, was raised as and considers herself a woman. Straightforward deception is in any case unlikely, says of Florida International University in Miami, because athletes are watched while providing the urine samples required for drug testing, and any obvious male anatomy should already have been noticed.
Semenya may well prove to be a straightforward female, possessing two X chromosomes rather than the male XY pair. Another possibility is that she has a rare congenital condition such as androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which women possess a male Y chromosome, but their bodies don’t respond to male sex hormones, causing them to develop female genitalia as well as internal testes.
Compulsory gender testing of female athletes at the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia, identified 8 out of 3387 tested as having a Y chromosome – and all were subsequently allowed to compete as women. After this the International Olympic Committee abandoned gender-verification testing.
Conditions like androgen insensitivity may in fact be disadvantageous. “Their bodies are insensitive to testosterone, whereas in the case of normal women they’re perfectly responsive to testosterone,” says , a paediatric endocrinologist at Yale University School of Medicine. “There’s certainly no reason why you would preclude a female athlete simply on the basis of her possessing a Y chromosome.”
Other conditions that will be checked for include those that result in excess male hormones. In congenital adrenal hyperplasia, for instance, women may look masculine even if their genitalia are female. Some types of tumour can also produce high levels of testosterone in women. As 91av went to press, there were rumours of higher-than-normal testosterone levels in Semenya’s test samples. But although the IAAF accepts that such conditions can be advantageous, they would not disqualify female athletes.
Neither does being a post-op transsexual disqualify you from competing in your assumed gender, provided you have been on hormone therapy for two years – enough time for the effects of the sex hormones of your birth gender to have worn off.
The IAAF abandoned compulsory testing in 1992, though it retains the right to test should suspicions arise. In Semenya’s case, Simpson argues, testing could be a mistake: “The only issue that should disqualify her would be if this is a male masquerading as a female.”