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Caster Semenya: governing bodies need to find courage and see opportunity

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The IAAF has a wonderful opportunity to lead a movement of modernisation of the world of sport. An opportunity which will require courage, to be at the forefront of debates about how sport governing bodies can make themselves and sport relevant again. Will it seize it or will it be too lazy to probe the status quo?

The Caster Semenya case highlights the mindset within sport governing bodies: They would rather violate a person’s human rights than question the relevance of man-made rules. They would rather take away human dignity than evolve with the times. They would rather tamper with a living organism to make it fit into artificial categories than adapt the rules to the human body. They would rather make a person lesser of themselves than examine whether the organisation and its rules are obsolete and reactionary.

The IAAF has a wonderful opportunity to lead a movement of modernisation of the world of sport. An opportunity which will require courage, to be at the forefront of debates about how sport governing bodies can make themselves and sport relevant again. Will it seize it or will it be too lazy to probe the status quo? It already missed an opportunity a few years ago, when Sebastian Coe became the president of the organisation. He had a two-week window to declare his intentions of reforming the organisation and its culture, fighting corruption, financial integrity, doping… yet he didn’t, and then it was too late.

It is 2019. Has the IAAF, or rather its 27 council members proudly including six women, not heard that the concept of binary gender is being questioned? Can it really be that, well into the 21st Century, a largely male group is still deciding what a woman’s body should be like? Because let us be reminded that the masculinity of the female body did not seem to bother anyone when it served the interests of the organisation.

In a sport which requires so much power, the use of performance-enhancing drugs is rife. Female athletes have been abusing their bodies for them to conform to the demands of elite competition. Female bodies took on masculine traits, yet no action was taken at that point to save athletes from themselves and almost inevitable long-term damage and disease. As long as whatever was going on was providing the entertainment and the revenue potential no intervention was required. Marion Jones was the darling superstar of American athletics and it really didn’t take an expert to know that she was doping, yet what did the IAAF do? Did the authorities jump to defend the opponents robbed of their moments of glory?

The Caster Semenya case is almost the exact opposite. Her body produces endogenously a substance which may potentially enhance her performance, and the establishment is ready to go full length to take her down. So how exactly is that fair?

The world of sport fantasises that the rules enable fairness. But sport is inherently unfair. As much as we try to make the playing field as level as possible, the unfairness of life necessarily finds its way on to the track. Some people are born tall, others short, some strong, others not, some clever, others less so, some rich, some poor, some with parents who are in the sport and it goes on. Through a lot of hard work, and sometimes through luck, you can mitigate some of these factors. And sometimes you can’t.

I feel sorry for the athletes who are complaining about Caster Semenya’s unfair advantage. But not because she has an unfair advantage. I feel sorry for the fact that they are part of Caster Semenya’s cohort, in the same way as I feel sorry for tennis players who played their best under the era of Federer – Nadal – Murray – Djokovic. The victory was always going to be out of reach because it just so happens that these four players are so much better than all the others. Is that something you can control? No. Is that something you can fix? Not unless you break their legs. Or drug them to be less fast, less powerful.

Sport can be an incredibly powerful educational tool, which can teach you an important lesson to take back into real life. One of them is that sometimes, other people are simply better than you and there is nothing you can do about it. It hurts. It makes you humble. It makes you find your own path. No matter how hard you are going to work, you just won’t be Caster Semenya.

Or you just won’t be Usain Bolt. Usain Bolt had the unfair advantage of being 12cm taller than the average of sprinters. He doesn’t have higher levels of testosterone, but surely having levers that are longer than his fellows is unfair? So why didn’t we cut 12cm off his legs to level the playing field? Or why don’t we make him start the race behind the other sprinters? Yet we are willing to chemically modify the body of a young woman to make her fit into the average? It is inconsistent reasoning, and that is unfair.

So far, we have identified that the governing body did nothing to level the playing field with regards to exogenous drugs and to other bodily advantages.

Caster Semenya’s case is giving a headache to the IAAF, because it has regulated its activities based on a construct which is appearing to crack at the seams as the norms are lifting around gender. It is based on the assumption that Nature is simple, and that there is a simple binary differentiation of beings. You are either female or male, and if you are not one, then you are the other. Ms Semenya is the living proof that things are slightly more complicated than “penis vs vagina”.

This is the time to talk about courage. The IAAF Council are hiding behind lawyers and rules to avoid having to take a moral stance, yet the rules are now outdated and can no longer answer questions which they were not made to address. The Mens and Womens category system was implemented at a time where society was not aware of the complexity of gender. Society and knowledge have outgrown the rules. The IAAF has to venture out onto the dangerous territory of making a decision about what is right rather than what is legal.

Can it really be right to ask Semenya to stifle her own greatness by taking pills to impede her natural performance? To quote Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Caster Semenya is Nature’s answer to athletics’ deepest desire. Athletics pushes back the limits of the human body. Some do it within the rules by carefully eating, training and recovering. Others, anywhere in between a tenth and half of the population depending on the research you read, do it by taking performance-enhancing drugs. Nature has given us a person who does both naturally, which doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have to work extremely hard to get to where she is, and probably harder considering the bullying she has to face. And instead of being grateful for this amazing show of grace and power, we want to shut her down, by either segregation or alienating the integrity of her body.

Let us all be reminded of the tragic case of Alan Turing who was chemically castrated to better fit into social norms. Homosexuality was not yet accepted and he was ordered to take pills to be allowed to be part of the community. As a result, he took his own life and humanity lost a genius. Thirteen years later homosexuality was legalised in his country. It can absolutely never be right to ask people to be less or different than who they are and produce less than what they can produce in order to fit into social norms. Social norms evolve, and cases like these appear as invitations to question them.

Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Based on this, the IAAF should at least explore solutions and measure whether these solutions can ever justify degrading a person’s dignity. If we accept that gender is a spectrum and that there are more than two different types identified, this would require a different class system, probably similar to Paralympic sports. This would indeed be possible, albeit logistically challenging. The choice is, therefore, to maintain a binary system and be flexible on the inclusion criteria or move to a much more diverse class system. Unless the IAAF can make such a massive change during the inter-season, I suggest it acts with courage. It should allow Semenya to compete with women. It should tell her unhappy competitors that they should be grateful to have the opportunity to be competing in a time of great adversity. This will only allow them to achieve more than if Semenya had not been there to emulate and teach them such a valuable life lesson. DM

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