Don’t let sports competitions be shaped by misguided “T Talk”

The myth of testosterone is now not only used ti stop transgender women from competing in sports. It is also used to attack intersex women.

In this article  Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis documents that the current attacks against female athletes is based on misunderstandings and a misguided understanding of fairness in sports. You cannot reduce athletic abilities to the amount of T in their blood.

The new rule of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF)  is unscientific, unethical and discriminatory, Jordan-Young and Krkazis argue:

In three of 11 running events [in the research used by IAAF], the lowest T group did better, and the strongest association across all events was the negativeassociation between T and performance in the 100 meters, where lower T athletes ran 5.4 percent faster than the highest T athletes. In none of the events where high T athletes performed better was the gap greater than 2.9 percent.

One independent group requested and obtained a subset of the IAAF data, concluding: “The results of [the IAAF’s first study] are clearly unreliable, and those of [the second study] are of unknown validity,” making it “impossible” to discern the real relationship, if any, between T and performance. Clearly, though, neither this study nor the broader sports science literature support the IAAF’s claim that targeted athletes “have the same advantages over [other] women as men do over women.” 

The IAAF seems to be targeting trans and intersex women, leaving other women with high testosterone levels out of the policy:

Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the most common reason that women have naturally high T levels, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were recently explicitly excluded from the 2019 regulations even when their levels exceed the threshold, though the IAAF has argued that women with PCOS and CAH derive “advantage” from high T.

Likewise, recent IAAF statements highlight sex-atypical chromosomes and gonads, which functions as a dog whistle to suggest that the targeted women athletes are not “really” women.

This is not about fairness. This is about bigotry and the need to force women into a narrow view of normalcy. Indeed, Stéphane Bermon, the director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented an “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences, namely La Maja Desnuda by Francisco Goya (which I cannot include here because of tumblr’s ridiculous female presenting nipple policy). But believe me, this ideal is not based on science.

You can read the whole article here.

Photo of Caster Semenya. Getty Images