“I consider women with high testosterone to be my sisters, both on and off the track – to have the same rights as me, both on and off the track.”
— Kyle Knight (@knightktm) December 9, 2020
-- Olympian @Madeleine_Pape on why sex testing regulations in sport need to be a thing of the past. pic.twitter.com/jH0WRwgf1J
by Minky Worden
Madeleine Pape, an Australian Olympic runner, competed against South Africa’s Caster Semenya in the 2009 Berlin World Championships and lost. Those championships are now infamous because they are the moment Semenya won the gold, and because athletics authorities shattered her privacy by openly suggesting she had an unfair anatomical advantage. It was also the beginning of a journey for Pape.
Semenya’s humiliating saga is all too familiar. For decades, sport governing bodies have regulated women’s participation in sport through “sex testing” regulations which target women athletes who, through variations in their sex characteristics, have higher than typical natural testosterone levels. The regulations deny these women the right to participate as women for running events between 400 meters and one mile, unless they submit to invasive testing and medically unnecessary procedures.
For Pape, who is now a sociologist after a career-ending injury sent her to graduate school, her initial instinct was to believe the harmful myths. Read more via HRW