Caster Semenya

Britain’s Jemma Simpson acknowledged that “it’s obviously a human rights issue,” but quickly added that “human rights affect everyone in the race, not just one person.” Simpson, who placed fourth during Sunday’s race, went on to say: “I think every competitor has got to be considered in this kind of thing, and it’s just like, maybe for the spectators it’s fair, but we spend our whole lives trying to do this. We train hard, and it can just be taken away from you.”

Canadian competitor Diane Cummins finished eighth and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, less delicate in her commentary: 

We have levels that we are not allowed to test over, so even if she’s a female, she’s on the very fringe of the normal female athlete biological composition from what I understand in terms of hormone testing. So from that perspective I think most of us sort of just feel like literally we are running against a man because what we know to be female is a certain testosterone level. And if that isn’t the case, they need to change everything.

Well, yeah. Even before the I.A.A.F’s official verdict was delivered, it was apparent that this approach wouldn’t settle a thing: Ariel Levy’s exhaustive New Yorker article made clear that there is no medical consensus on how to accurately conduct a sex test. Semenya, and others who call into question ”the way we’ve organized our entire world,” as Levy put it, will continue to be poked and prodded, literally and otherwise. This issue simply isn’t going away — not for Semenya and not for the exceptional female athletes that will inevitably come after her.

We can all easily sketch out the differences between the sexes: Women have breasts, ovaries, a uterus and a vagina; men have testicles and a penis — end of story, right? For most folks, it is, but then there are the exceptions: A person can be born with one testicle and one ovary, or with a penis, uterus and ovaries. Someone with XY chromosomes can have both a vagina and undescended testes because of a condition that blocks their bodies from responding to testosterone. You can have two X chromosomes, one of which is merged with a region of the Y chromosome. And, and, and …

I could easily go on, if you had a couple of hours. As Alice Dreger, author of “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex,” tells Levy, “People always press me: ‘Isn’t there one marker we can use?’ No. We couldn’t then and we can’t now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that’s what it means to be male.”

The International Association of Athletic Federations, which is investigating Semenya’s sex — still! — “does not define the criteria that its group of experts must use to reach their determination,” Levy reports. Dreger, a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, refers to it as the unscientific “I know it when I see it” approach. Worse still, the organization allows for any athlete to undergo testing if someone, anyone raises a stink about his or her sex. In Semenya’s case, all it took was a speculative blog post and the gender hounds were unleashed. The good news is that IAAF is holding a conference at the start of the new year to review its policy — but it’s hard to be too optimistic about the outcome considering that they’re asking the wrong question to begin with.

Levy, however, asks the right question: “If sex is not precisely definable, how else might sports be organized?” She considers a couple of different solutions to this foundation-shaking query: There is the possibility of categorizing athletes “by size, as they are in wrestling and boxing” (downside: “women would usually lose to men”) or “skill level” (downside: ”the strongest elite female athletes would [almost always] compete against the weakest elite male athletes”). A more drastic scientific approach would be “to divide athletes biochemically” since testosterone has an enormous impact on athletic performance. In that case, “the division would be determined not by gender but by actual physical advantages that gender supposedly, yet unreliably, supplies,” she concludes.

Of course, international athletic competition isn’t about fairness and equality; ultimately, someone is supposed to win. “Different bodies have physical attributes, even abnormalities, that may provide a distinct advantage in one sport or another,” she argues. For example: The many N.B.A. players with a condition that causes growth hormones to go into overdrive and the double-jointed Michael Phelps with his primate-like arms and legs. If the speculation about Semenya’s biology is true, why is her particular abnormality worth policing? The IAAF attempts to control for potential physical advantages by dividing athletes by sex, as opposed to any other criterion because it’s the easiest shorthand we have — in sports and generally in navigating day-to-day life — but this case shows just how incredibly fallible it can be. Unfortunately, Semenya is suffering now because it’s so much easier to point the finger at her than it is to call into question the way we’ve organized sports — and, as Levy puts it, “the way we’ve organized our entire world.”