The European Court of Human Rights is expected to deliver what could be the final word Tuesday in Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya’s yearslong legal challenge against rules that force her and other female athletes to lower their natural hormone levels through medical intervention to be allowed to compete in women’s track and field races.
The testosterone limits have effectively put a stop to Semenya’s career by barring her from running in her favored 800 meters event — where she is a two-time Olympic champion and three-time world champion — since 2019.
The South African athlete has refused to follow the rules and take medication to artificially lower her testosterone. She says the regulations enforced by the sport’s governing body, World Athletics, are discriminatory and violate her right to freely compete in women’s sports despite her being legally identified as female at birth and identifying as female her entire life.
Semenya has also pointed out what she says is the irony of being told to take artificial substances to be allowed to run, in a sport that has strict rules against doping.
Now 32 years old and sidelined from the sport, Semenya has already lost appeals at sport’s highest court in 2019 and at Switzerland’s supreme court in 2020, leading her to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
The judgment expected Tuesday from the European rights court is seen as likely to be her last legal avenue to overturning the rules.
Semenya’s case has been at the forefront of the highly contentious, complex and divisive issue of sex eligibility in sports for nearly 15 years since she emerged on the international track scene as a teenager in 2009. It has been connected to the fight over the inclusion of transgender women in female sports, but Semenya’s case is different to that issue even if there is some crossover.
WHAT IS SEMENYA’S CASE?
Semenya’s case at the European Court of Human Rights is against the government of Switzerland for not protecting her rights when its supreme court ruled against her over the rules three years ago.
Her lawyers argued in their submissions to the Strasbourg, France-based European court that her rights have been violated because she has been discriminated against and denied an “effective remedy” to that discrimination in her previous legal challenges.
Semenya’s highly complex case, which meshes ethical and scientific arguments into one highly-emotive issue over fairness in sports, would set a precedent for other athletes affected.
The core of her argument is that she has always been legally identified as female and should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, even if she has a testosterone level that is higher than the typical female range. Semenya says her testosterone should be considered a genetic gift in the same way as, for example, an athlete’s height or a swimmer’s long arms.
While World Athletics can’t challenge her legal gender, it says Semenya has a medical condition that makes her “biologically male” and her resulting high testosterone gives her an unfair advantage in the same way as a male competing in women’s sports. World Athletics says it needs rules to address that.
The “biologically male” assertion by World Athletics provoked an angry response from Semenya in what has been a bitter battle between the two for over a decade.
IS THIS THE SAME ISSUE AS TRANSGENDER WOMEN COMPETING IN SPORTS?
No, although the issues are intertwined in some ways. Semenya is not transgender.
