Bittersweet Infamy - #39 - Caster Semenya

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

Taylor tells Josie about South African runner Caster Semenya and the history of sex testing in women's track and field. Plus: the wild story of America's biggest party, Spring Break.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy. The shocking, the unbelievable and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Josie. Taylor. Hey, hi. I like your outfit today. Oh, thank you. Do you want a little update on a story that we've covered in the past? They are making a documentary about Miss Cleo. Really? Yes. So this comes courtesy of Ramon, who's one of our listeners, who's my favorite listener. Screw you, mom. Alice, you too. You're done too. Jonathan, you're all done. It's over.

Just Ramon now, because he gave me this information about Miss Cleo. According to Deadline, nonfiction entertainment studio XTR and production company Majority are producing a documentary about Miss Cleo. It's being directed by Senane Keschke, who said in a statement, Yurei Harris may have been an accomplice or perhaps a victim in the psychic reader's network fraud, but she also had talent and personality for which for women doesn't always translate into access or wealth. Her story is an example of how brown and black women have historically been marginalized and exodified in society and popular culture. The enduring image of the dark mystical woman still continues to perpetuate the stereotype. As a woman of color and a director who wants to

explore stories from diverse perspectives, I am moved by how Yurei found a way to navigate her life on her own terms. Oh, that's cool. So it looks like an empathetic director has gotten a hold of the Miss Cleo story, which we covered back in our season premiere in episode 31. And I'm really interested to see this documentary because if you listen to that episode, you remember that a lot of the particulars of her private life were really shrouded in mystery. Yeah. Mystery is maybe overstating it, but she kept her family's privacy and the folks who ran the PRN kept their own privacy very well and so on. A lot of boundaries. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of boundaries. So I'm interested in seeing, they mentioned that they're going to be interviewing figures from Miss

Cleo's past. And so I'm like, oh, I wonder who they've gotten, you know? It seems like I'm excited to to see. Yeah. Do they have a release date scheduled or forecasted? Deadline says, no expected release date for the Miss Cleo film was announced. Consult your favorite psychic for a prediction on that. Oh, I'm already, I'm already hooked. I mean, I already was double hooked. If you've never sat down and researched Miss Cleo for your podcast, Bitter Sweet Infamy, you might not know this, but every single article ever written about Miss Cleo, every statement anybody has ever given about Miss Cleo is exactly, it's up to psychic fun. It's just, that's the whole thing from the top to the bottom. On brand, just constantly on brand.

I love that. All right, I'll check it back to you, mama. Take over the show. Make me your bitch. Battle cut out. Just in the same breath, same intention. That's my favorite. Taylor, I see that today you got the guns out. I assume that the sun is not out in Vancouver. No, the sun is not out in Vancouver. In fact, there's snow on the ground in its nighttime. And so if you're in a snowy, dark area of the world, then you get your butt south and you get ready for the best, the raunchiest, the hardest going spring break of your life. Spring break, Florida, 2023. Fuck yes, absolutely, absolutely. 2023. Wait, what is, I feel like the year actually

is important. Oh, no, this is just a history of spring break. Fantastic. Fantastic, a raise. Spring break, though, when I was in school in Canada, it was just reading week in February. It was a very different kind of. They were very conscious to suggest that we read, yes. Yes. It was also in February, so it wasn't like pushing it so much into spring. It was more like go on a ski vacation, go, which I couldn't afford. So February is kind of an ancient month in Vancouver, in my opinion. It's the last dregs of winter and everyone's getting real, real sick of it. And then they keep tickling your balls with all these fake springs. It's a tedious month. So you get yourself south, my dude, for good old-fashioned American spring break. RVs,

bikinis, daisy dukes. Is that RVs or RVs? Both. Both, perfect, okay. So 1938 is the first record. Don't laugh. Why are you laughing? It's a date. No, because I imagine I just want to know what it was. It's the Great Depression. I got to think decency laws. There's still very much a thing. I don't know. Let's hear it. The swim team at Colgate University, their coach has decided to break up the monotony of a gross March late, late winter and bring the swim team down to this brand new Olympic-sized pool in Fort Lauderdale. An icon we stand. The boys go down. They swim it up. They get a tan. They party their fucking asses off. As one does in Fort Lauderdale, home of Miss Cleo, actually, by the way.

Hey, connections. Links. We're finding links. Swim team goes back. The next year, there's more swim teams there. There's more and different sports that come down to Florida. They start wintering in Florida, all of these college students. And over the years, say, like 15 or so years, it gets so popular that it's not just related to a sports team or whatever. It's any and all students are coming down to Florida, in particular, Fort Lauderdale. Where all the good things are happening. 1958, an English professor from the Michigan State University by the name of Glendon Swarthout. Swarthout. Yeah, enjoy that. Swarthout. Glendon Swarthout. My father owns you. Yeah, no, exactly. But like he's wearing tweed.

And he's most likely in his 40s or 50s. He tags along with his students to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. He's doing it under or with the purpose, perhaps under the guise of research for his novel. Oh, my. What's the novel? Why? I've never heard of this man's novel. Well, I don't know. It's called Where the Boys Are. Oh, maybe I have heard of this man's novel. The original title was meant to be Unholy Spring. Sounds like this guy did his research. Totally. So the book comes out Where the Boys Are. It's fairly popular. It's, you know, fictionalized version of all this raucous happenings down in Fort Lauderdale spring break with the kiddos. And it's called The Finger Guns You Were Doing There Without a Control. Teddy Roosevelt. You were just firing him off.

Primarital sex at that time is called Playing House. So the novel features much playing house. Oh, my God. So for the record, I have used that. I use that expression often and not even particularly euphemistically. So to me, playing house is when you're being fake boyfriend, fake girlfriend with each other, but you're not actually in a relationship and neither of you like, you don't want to be, but you're just kind of like, I don't know, giving each other some facsimile of intimacy that's lacking in each other's life for now. Dang, dude. That's good. I like that. That's when I say playing house. That's what I mean. 1960, the novel gets picked up and it is made into a movie called Where the Boys Are. I'm sending you the trailer for this movie right now.

Where's the beach? According to this, it's across the street. Join the fun as the gang tears loose where the boys are. It's funny. Sometimes when I talk to my parents and they something like, I don't know, who's that made? Hazel. Hazel will come on the TV and they'll be like, I don't know that either of my parents particularly cares for Hazel. This is just the last old thing I happen to watch with them, but they'll be like, or you know, they're watching back to the future or whatever. They'll be like, oh, I miss the old, you know, the kind of nostalgic everything was so fucking syrupy. But when I look at it, I'm literally just like, I don't know, this doesn't conform to my ideas and my lived experience of how human beings

actually are, which is fine if you're using it as some sort of like horrific David Lynch pod person concept. But if you're playing it straight, it's tough with me. Anyways. So this movie is wildly popular. It is the springboard for all of the beach genre movies. So like gig shit, beach blanket bingo, which in that genre of movie also launches the beach boys, that whole kind of subculture. It can all kind of be traced back to this movie, which is really wild. That movie is so popular that all over the country, college students are like, spring break, I'm going to Fort Lauderdale. It's gonna happen. That way, boy got kissed on the cheek. That could be me. That could be me. So it ramps up, of course, through the 60s, through the 70s. And we get to

85 and Fort Lauderdale has like half a million students descending on this town between March and April. And it's gone to such a fever pitch that Fort Lauderdale is like, no, no more. Yeah. We're not welcome here. That makes perfect sense. Well, apparently like businesses were having to shut down early because people would be so these students would be so you're belligerently drunk by three p.m. Like, like, of course, they're students like people shitter. They don't want to spend any money. There's like all of this. I fuck with that. Business, you're like, you're going to come all the way here. They don't spend anything. What if I just get drunk, come into your restaurant and take a handful of spaghetti

of someone else's plate and walk out eating it out of my hand? What now? Sneering it on my face like a toddler. Spring break. So 85, the city of Fort Lauderdale is just like, nope, nope, nope. They enacted some tougher drinking laws. The fines rose significantly. They just said, no, no, no. The mayor actually went on Good Morning America and said, you need to take your raucous partying. Good Morning America. That's Good Morning America. People don't descend on Fort Lauderdale in the same way, but instead they pulled to Panama City Beach, further south in Florida, Daytona Beach, and then also just expanding across the U.S.

You're not running out of lawless beaches in Florida, are you? No, neither are you in Texas. South Padre Island becomes a a festering bubble of spring break. Not festering. Festering. Let these people live, my God. A weak rock. Just a writhing pit of humanity or something like it. This is where Girls Gone Wild got started with spring break traditions. Yeah, and then of course in the 90s, MTV came in with a huge spring break special. Every March. Did you ever watch those?

I have a limited capacity for heterosexual nonsense. Fairness. In the nicest way. I love y'all. Like straight up. No, no, no. Allies. Sometimes you need space to do you. We all need space. Do that, be that. We, oh, trust me, we can't throw stones. So you just do you. That's all, that's what I gotta say.

That is fair, that is fair. So of course there's all these different offshoots to the Florida, Texas central spring break. There's one spring break iteration in particular that takes a take strong route in Atlanta, Georgia. So in about 1983, there was a group of students who were in the city and they couldn't leave. They couldn't either, you know, for whatever reason studying finances, they couldn't get to the beach. So they just decided to have a week long celebration for students who were in town. And over the years that grew and grew and grew. Oh, I bet the city loves that.

I should say specifically, this was black students in Atlanta City, in Atlanta. Atlanta City, Georgia. Atlanta City, Georgia. The AC, they call it. Everybody knows that. Come on. Everybody. And so this picnic tradition came out of like black college, black historical colleges. And so it grew and grew and grew into what became known as freak Nick. Have you ever heard of freak Nick?

I've never heard of freak Nick. It became this huge infamous street party that took over Atlanta for that week of spring break. And students would come all over the country. Black students would come to Atlanta just for freak Nick. So even though there was no beaches, it was like, fuck it, freak Nick, let's do it. There was fridges. There was fridges. There was beaches because it was fucking Georgia.

Boom. Hundreds of thousands of students until finally in 1999, the mayor shut it down. He's like, no, you're not getting any permits to do this. I did observe that you were referring to the event in past tense. Yes. Yes, yes, it is. Dunzo. RIP.

But spring break as this gnarly juggernaut of debauchery continues to this day. There were concerns in Florida about all of these gnarly college students descending on the state and upings spiking the COVID numbers like crazy. Yes. Yes, I remember. I'm sure you remember. And this year will probably be no different. It's spring break has spread out to different, even different countries.

Cancun has a huge spring break. Yes. Like Orah as so does Punta Cana and the Dominican. So it's being exported all over the place, all through the Caribbean. And we'll just hope and pray that people stay safe. I do have some little stats here on spring break. Please. We love, listen.

Edit their way. Analytics, baby. Between Florida and Texas, students spend one billion US dollars during spring break season. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me when you factor in the huge amount of people and all the alcohol they're buying and all the food they're consuming and lodging and all that. Exactly, exactly. Um, I'm sure it's more when you count like all the cocaine stuff that isn't being. Oh, that's true, all the black market things that aren't being.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Half of sexual encounters are unplanned or random. Oh, that's high. One half of sexual encounters are unprotected. That's very high. Rubber up, kids.

I know. No judgment if you don't. Listen, I come from a, what's it called, a harm reduction approach. Rubber up if you can. That's just fine. Bittersweet infamy. Follow us on Instagram. 60% of students have run-ins with police officers.

60. 60%. A majority. A majority. Also, 60% are injured during spring break. A majority. Often self-inflicted. You fall off a balcony kind of thing.

Yeah, no, dude, you don't listen. You don't got to talk to me about self-inflicted drunk injuries, okay? I think you'll, I think if you flip open that book and look on the back, that's my picture on the book jacket, okay? As you fall off a balcony. Yeah, it's me, it's me like thinking I could make that gap and I couldn't. Like that's, that's the picture. But yeah, no, that's, that's, so if you're, if I am zipping up, I'm, I'm, you know,

Betsy or Hal and I'm ready to go where the boys are. And I'm zipping up my little travel bag to go off for my weekend of wholesome fun in Fort Lauderdale or Panama Beach or wherever the fuck I'm going. I have a better than 50% chance of either, either getting injured possibly at my own hand and or having some sort of bad encounter with a police officer. Yes. It's more likely that that happens than that it doesn't happen. Yes. I have never been to a spring break like this and I, I hope to never have to go.

It seems very loud. Crowded. A little claustrophobic for me. Sweaty. Sweaty. Sunburn. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Really dehydrated. You really have to watch your drink too. You have to really make sure that nothing goes into your drink. I imagine if you go into like a random pharmacy to get like some pads or something, that's not happening. You got beat there probably. You know shit like that. But you know what?

Here's to spring break Taylor. Cheers, baby. Spring break 2022. We're 2023. We can't quite figure it out. Nope. We're playing in the head. We're playing in far ahead.

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Visit flyporter.com. Porter actually enjoy economy. On spring break? No, I'm, it's spring break is ended. I'm home. I'm sunburned. The aloe vera is all over me. Yeah, yeah.

Got that white stuff on your nose. The zinc? You're in the jacuzzi. Just, just, just trying to get the muscle aches out. I wish that I could. But mind you, it's the jacuzzi at like the Y. So you've got like a hard 20 minutes in there and then they, the lady comes around with the towel and politely gestures you toward the steam room.

Did you know jacuzzi is somebody's last name? No, but that's fun. Isn't that fun? I guess it makes sense. I just, I must put a good name. I want to, I want to be the heir to, that's my new persona, heir to the jacuzzi fortune. Taylor jacuzzi. Dude, that is, I am so excited to debut this in a party that I don't want to be at.

It's going to be so good. I'm, I hope I could be there too. I want to be that party that you don't want to be at. Thank you. I think I fucked up this week because I, I came in with the, with a particular intention of picking a really light and fun story. Because, you know, sometimes when you do too many of these or just 50 plus people die. You got to watch out.

It takes a, you know, it's a, it's a psychic weight, right? It surprises you sometimes too. It does. And if you want to tell stories in respectful ways, it involves a lot of empathy and stuff like that. And so I just wanted something that was like frivolous, garbage with no consequences. And somehow along the way, I just sprinted in the complete opposite direction.

And I ended up picking up like a very serious and frustrating story. So that's. What an intro. Wow. That is what I come in with. It's not the funniest story that I've ever picked. But I do think that it's a story worth hearing and worth telling. Okay.

My story this week is a bit of a companion piece to the episode that you did about Elena Mukina, the Soviet gymnast. Yeah. In that they're both about high level female athletes who encounter significant adversity. And of course I've, I've chosen to do this just as the Olympics have ended. And the, we will no longer get any search engine traffic from them. So guys, I mean, people are still talking about, uh, what's her, what's her name? Young, what's her name?

Are they? Because you don't seem to remember her name. Specifically, I am going to tell you about South African runner, Caster Semenya. Oh, shit. Cool. Who rose to unwilling infamy in 2009 when the International Association of Athletics Federations, aka the IAAF, the governing body for track and field leaked medical information indicating that she had tested positive for an intersex trait.

Since then, the IAAF, which is now known as World Athletics, I'm going to refer to it as the IAAF because it was referred to as that for most of the story. And so in most of the sources that I pulled from, it's called that, but it's the organization is now called World Athletics. Okay. Since then, uh, the IAAF has made significant changes to its sex testing policy, which many allege are specifically targeted to keep Caster from competing. Yep, yep, yep.

Yeah, this is a, this is a, this is kind of a heart-wrenching story. Yeah. Yeah. Like I say, it's, it's, I really, and I use the term, the word sprinting fell out of my mouth under advisement. I wasn't planning to say that, but it ended up being apt. I really did sprint headlong into a story with like every conceivable is um, discrimination, etc. Unfortunately.

But it's important to hear. Yeah, of course. And if you don't know what intersex means, I have great news. So back in my day, uh, when I was like 18, 19, when I absolutely should not have been in front of a classroom acting like an expert on anything, I would go to high schools and I would do what were called pride speaks and they were basically like anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia talks, workshops, clearing up, uh, misinformation, stuff like that. And I say high schools because that was most commonly what we did, but like I spoke to the

BC nurses union, um, you know, the, uh, various like service providers, care providers, medical stakeholders, stuff like that. So for like one night only pride speak Taylor is back. This, this is, I'm, I'm drawing on like my much younger self in that spirit. I'm going to give everyone a little primer on sexuality, sex and gender, just to make sure that we all have the same info. So, um, Caster Semenya is not transgender, but people, including news outlets have misunderstood or misinterpreted her story to indicate that she is.

There is a larger conversation about transgender athletes and sport that I'm not going in too much because I'm not sure that I could do it justice in this context. It's also a different story. You know what I mean? It's a different story. Yeah. And it's an important story and find a podcast about that story. Absolutely.

But for me, I really kept the scope to this, to the story of like sex testing of intersex athletes in women's track and field was, is, is my lane here to use a track and field term. Um, I hope I don't encounter any hurdles. Any hoot, any hoot. Sorry. Got to pass the baton back to the story here. Um, so, see, we found the joy in the story, isn't that? Yeah, the puns.

And it's, it's track and field puns. With that, with all that said, any time you have a story where people are trying to suss out somebody's sex or gender, there's inevitably a lot of transphobia as well as misogyny, as well as in this case, racism that appears in that context. So I'll give you a little sex and gender breakdown just so we're all working off the same info and cause not everybody knows everything. And that's chill. It's also very nice to define your terms.

Define your terms. We love to set the table. If nothing else, we are constantly putting down placemats on this show. And in that spirit, I want to open a space of no judgment where it's okay not to know things. So Josie, if you have any questions, just ask. And if I don't got the answers, I'll look them up. Oh, thanks.

Okay. No problem. Lastly, I want to say that Caster Semenian, specifically her physical body, have been really intensely scrutinized. And so I want to establish a tone of respect up front and just compassion and sensitivity in general in my descriptions of what it means to be intersex. This is a community that's been really medicalized. I'm all about the beauty of physical difference, and I hope that comes through.

Table set, let's eat. Mokradi Caster Semenia is born January 7, 1991, in a South African village called Gah Maselang. Oh, she's a baby. She a young, she a young little baby. So she's born in a South African village called Gah Maselang and grew up in another village called Fairly. She has three sisters and a brother. She's a jock and she begins running as training for association football.

She takes to it quickly and notches her first big win in the 800 meter at the 2008 Commonwealth Youth Games. Her events, yeah, her events, by the way, are everything from around at this time, they're everything from the 500 to 1500 meter running events. And then after that, she, because she gets hit with these bands, that by coincidence happen only to affect her specific events, not all running events, just casters events. She expands, I think, into the 400 meter after that. But I gather, just from doing some reading on her, I gather that the event that she really

kicks the shit out of is the 800 meter. That's her sweet spot. Okay, okay. In 2009 in the African Junior Championships, Semenya wins both the 800 meter and 1500 meter races. She improves her personal best by seven seconds in less than nine months. Oh my. Including four seconds in that race alone.

So she, she went from like five to nine in that race. Holy shit. The 800 meter time becomes the world leading time in 2009 at that date. It's also a national record and a championship record. And then in August, Semenya wins gold in the 800 meter at the world championships in Berlin, again setting the fastest time of the year. Following this victory though, the Berlin victory, this is like a really landmark thing. Her quick improvements.

I don't even know if it was following the victory or like as she was generally performing in Berlin. Her quick improvements come under scrutiny. As does her physical appearance. Caster is a strapping muscular woman with a deep voice. And that in combination with her rapid progression, makes somebody at the IAAF, again the governing body, decide that she needs to take a sex verification test to prove that she's female. That is so problematic.

Yes. I'm just so many different fucking levels. Yes, it really is the royal flush of just every possible piece of bullshit, isn't it? So the results are never formally published, but because humanity is a shit heap, some unverified data is leaked indicating the caster has an intersex trait. This is widely reported on in the media with all the precision and sensitivity that you would expect out of 2009 era reporting on sex and gender. Yes, good.

Fuck, and today's reporting of sex and gender. Yes, still not fantastic. I don't want to single anybody out to rake across the coals because the conversation wasn't as evolved at the time. And my hope is that when we know better, we do better, but the conversation around caster and everybody we're going to be discussing today, because I'm going to obviously talk about other similar cases as I do, involved a lot of headlines to the effect of is she really a he? And insinuations of deception, which is commonly something that's lobbied against anybody who

doesn't present in a gender conforming way. And just to make it text, because for some listeners, subtext isn't necessarily enough and making inference isn't necessarily enough, I really want to underscore that I didn't include a lot of comments that I thought were quite cruel because fuck that. But pretty much everybody from the athletic bodies to her fellow competitors to random people sticking their beacon had something really something I didn't even want to say about her about her, her gender, her race or whatever. For example, and this is the only one of these that I'm going to give airtime,

one of her competitors said something to the effect of well, I'm, you know, confident that I'm the real winner of this race because I'm I was the first real woman and I was the first European. Whoa. So it's no, it's a lot of like people talk with like a lot of like really mask off unambiguous discrimination against her when they talk about her. By contrast, I dig Caster Semenya. I've never heard her say shit about anybody. She just fucking minds her business runs fast and stands up for herself.

So so sorry. I don't know. That's not trying to get heated over here. No, no, no, you did. You have more than enough reason to get heated. Get in that jacuzzi. Yes. So what does it mean to have an intersex trait?

Let's start with a little breakdown about sexuality, sex and gender. For all y'all who already know this shit, I apologize. You can skip ahead, but I rolled it over in my head and it feels like the most humane way to go about this. Since we all get grouped together in the alphabet soup, if you're not well educated on these issues, it's easy to get a little bit confused because despite being categorized together in whatever version of the LGBTQIA plus acronym you encounter, we're not all the same. So before I explain to you what intersex is, let me tell you what intersex isn't. Ooh, okay, I like this deep dive.

Let's go. Sexuality is about who you love. So if you're gay or lesbian, you love folks of the same sex. If you're bisexual, pansexual, something like that, you love folks of many different sexes or genders. If you're asexual, you're not trying to bang, although you may have romantic feelings for people. Caster Semenya's sexuality, who she loves and is attracted to, is not what is in question here. Although for the record, she has a wife named Violet. Yeah, they're happily married.

Yes, happily married, have a child. Rather, her critics are looking at her biological sex. Right. So sex is constituted of a mixture of biological information, chromosomal, genetic, hormonal, and physical factors. To look at this in a very binary way, and this is a bad idea, as we'll find out, but if you have two X chromosomes, an abundance of estrogen, a vagina, a uterus, other secondary sex characteristics, you are typically thought of as female.

If you have XY chromosomes, a penis, an abundance of testosterone, you are typically thought of as male. The idea of sex is separate from the idea of gender. Gender has a lot of different meanings, but for our 101 purposes, let's describe it as how you feel within yourself. You can be assigned as biologically male, but something in your brain, your feelings, your understanding of yourself tells you that no, I may not have a vagina, but I know in my heart and my understanding of myself and my gender that I am a woman. When people look at me and speak of me as male, that isn't right.

That doesn't feel right. Right, something's off. Something's off. Not even just something, I know it's off, it's that. Yeah, what could it be? Wait, no, it's that. It's that, no, yeah, no, it's that. That, broadly speaking, is being transgender.

When the gender you identify as is different from your biological sex. From there, people may see hormone treatment, surgery, etc. to align their sex with their gender, or they may prefer not to. Whether or not a person pursues those treatments, they're still transgender, and the rule of thumb is to refer to the person by the pronouns and identifiers that they'd like to be called. Just ask. Just ask. And if you're like the statistical majority of folks,

where your biological sex aligns with your understanding of your gender, you're cisgender. I am cisgender. I'm cisgender. Beauty. And since we have established that gender is a matter of social construction and self-identification, we may also see people who identify as neither male nor female, but rather somewhere in between or beyond,

which is where we get things like people who identify as non-binary, use they, them pronouns, etc. Our concepts of gender are also culturally influenced, different cultures have third genders. Indigenous folks may identify as two-spirit and so on. So it's a very broad, big idea, and I know it's a lot. I know it's a lot. But we can boil it all down to all you need to know for this particular situation, is that sex describes the physical vessel,

gender describes the way you feel yourself, the vibe. It's just the vibe check. Gender is the vibe. Sometimes gender is unfortunately not the vibe, though, is the problem. Right, yeah. So this is all a quick primer just to get us all in the same sheet of music, and because I wanted to see if I still had it, and I like to think that I do. Oh, now I've transported to the stadium, the school gym, I was there!

Thank you. Thank you, I have commandeered a school gym or two in my day. It's important to note, though, that despite persistent misinformation, misreporting, rumors, Caster Semeny is not transgender. She was assigned female at birth, grew up being referred to as female, and feels confident in herself and in her gender that she is a woman. To loop back to our discussion about biological sex, which again is determined by a mixture of chromosomal, genetic,

hormonal, and physical factors. So you're probably thinking, hearing that, that's actually a few different things going on there. And what happens if somebody is born with an atypical expression of one of those factors, because that's just how genetic organisms do, right? This flower over here has a mutation that makes it that way, this hummingbird has a mutation that makes it this way, and so on. That's just biology.

A chromosomal difference, ambiguous genitalia, a mix of secondary sex, characteristics, or internal anatomy, or even just a slightly higher incidence of a hormone like testosterone or estrogen than usual. Right, yeah. That person may fall under the umbrella term of being intersex. I visited the website Interact, which is an intersex advocacy organization. And according to them, there are, yeah, Interact, I like it. That's good.

They sound keen, they sound keen to do something about it, which is a great quality and an advocate. So according to them, there are many different, many possible differences in genitalia, hormones, internal anatomy, or chromosomes, compared to the usual two ways that bodies develop. The people who are born intersex may never know about it, unless it presents an issue later in life or gets discovered by some other kind of medical investigation. About 1.7% of people are born intersex,

for comparison, a mother has a 0.3% chance of having identical twins. Whoa. So you know identical twins, you know at least one. Oh yeah, the zombie twins, right there, boom. Right there, boom. Well, imagine, I don't know, like, five to six times more common than that is being intersex. Yeah.

That's dope. Thank you for that comparison. Yeah, no, that was, that's courtesy of Interact. I didn't come up with that one. Thank you, Interact. Thanks for interacting. Click. So there are over 40 medical diagnoses that fall under the general umbrella of being

intersex, including androgen insensitivity, client filters, et cetera. Okay. I know I'm saying et cetera a lot, but this is... It's just so fucking broad, though. It's very broad, but also because it is within, it's not within the 99% of the population. It's within the one to two percent of the population. Yeah.

It's also like kind of like a, oh well, anybody who doesn't, it's an umbrella term. Anybody who doesn't fit like a conventionally categorized expression of biological sex, where everything notches up and lines up perfectly, gets kind of put under this umbrella of intersex. But this person may have chromosomal differences. This person may have like, I don't know, you know, less developed secondary sex, like underdeveloped testes, you know, whatever it is, right?

Well, and I think too, because we're so bound to a binary and a very strict black and white binary, that the idea that the gray section one would exist at all is kind of hard for a society to imagine, but that the gray section has so many different shades of gray in and of itself too, is, I don't know, it's really cool. No, that's a, you raise a good point because I think that we're going to see throughout this story that like the issue here, in my opinion, the issue here isn't really how best to determine a level playing field for female identified athletes. It's really just a story about like deep angst and suspicion about things that don't

neatly fit into the binary of man or woman. Yeah, yeah. And I see that second thing a lot more than I see, like I would actually argue that like these people are using the banner of fairness to like, you know, propagate some really unfair and exclusive actions targeting an already marginalized community. But what do I know? So it sounds like, I mean, I, yeah, let's just keep going. There's sounds like a lot of things.

Like I said, I was like, I'm going to pick something real light and breezy. And then I just picked like the most like complicated overlap Venn diagram of racism, misogyny, transphobia, specific suspicion about intersex people. Yes, all of it, all at once. So another term that people sometimes use as DSD or differences in sexual development, the archaic term for this, which is now seen as a slur when applied to humans, in which I only say for educational purposes, is hermaphrodite. Yeah, I've had an analogy that I've been waiting to bust out on a public platform

for a long time, and I'm really excited to do it right now. And that is, that is, so I just explained kind of, you know, the words, the word, the word was this, and now it's this. And a lot of people are frustrated when they're like, okay, you know, why are the words always changing, you know, why wasn't this and now it's this, I grew up learning it this way, but they are, everyone, you know, wants to be special and constantly changing, blah, the analogy that I offer to you is this, words are like bed sheets. And, you know, when you put on that clean set of bed sheets, and you get in it,

and it's just the most like, you could ride around in that bad boy for a day, it's just the nicest feeling, it just so clean, and so maybe you just had a shower, ooh, the best feeling in the world. That's the deepest sleep you're going to get. The best sleep, you're going to wake up and they're still going to be like, quite clean, and you're going to be like, ooh, yeah, clean sheets. Best feeling, top five feeling all time in life. However, the longer you have those sheets on the bed, the more they absorb your sweat,

and whatever sex you've had, and you're farting into the couch, and your dog sleeping at the foot of the bed, and whatever. And those sheets get dirty. So much dandruff. So much, so much baggage. Everything has built up on those sheets, and all you can think of is like, okay, these sheets used to be good. Imagine the crumbs.

Which I do, I eat, and I eat like the shit you're not supposed to. Here's what I, here's what's always in my bed. Are you a cracker eater? Oh, fuck yeah. Bit it up weed, headphones, lighters, I sleep with my laptop next to me. I really need a partner, anyway. Someone needs to help me clean up my act here, because I'm not going to do it on my own. Perfect the way you are, Taylor.

Thank you very much. Point being, words are like bed sheets. They start off with a little bit of freshness, and then as time goes on, they build up the baggage of, you know, whatever society has put on them, and they just kind of need to change the damn sheets. But even the idea of being intersex has fuzzy boundaries. What level of variance constitutes being intersex? Says interact.

Historically, doctors were given authority, but their decisions were biased towards surgery. Best practices now advise against this, except in the most serious cases. It's better to treat being intersex like a naturally occurring biological variance of the type which happens across all species, which it does. Which it is, yeah. Yeah, and to be treated if decided by the consenting patient when they are of age to consent to such things. It should also be noted that many intersex people don't elect for surgery as if you're living healthfully and happily, other than society's obsessive need to categorize every

single thing into man and woman. Who the fuck cares? So I care in the sense that I love and respect difference, and if you want to come over and tell me, like, yo, this is how who I am has shaped who I am, sick. I'd love to have that conversation. Other than that, I am happy to leave you the fuck alone. Or I'll be here whenever you wish. Yeah, I'll be waiting over here with a glass of mixed berry punch, and we can have that chat.

I love mixed berry anything. Important, also important. So all in, being intersex means many things, but it doesn't necessarily affect your gender. As in the case of Caster Semenya, who is, again, a signed female at birth, raised in society as a woman, feels herself as a woman, ergo as a woman. So back in Berlin, 2009, Caster, who's only 18, is obviously mortified about this whole situation. One source describes her as having to be convinced into accepting her gold medal, because the whole incident has been so upsetting.

Says Athletic South Africa President Leonard Choon. She told me, no one ever said I was not a girl, but here I am not. I am not a boy. Why did you bring me here? You should have left me in my village at home. Yeah, super sad. Choon ends up resigning after he admits to having subjected Cemenya to testing the purpose of which he did not know.

And Wilfred Daniel Semenya's coach with ASA also resigns because he feels that ASA did not advise Ms. Semenya properly, and he apologizes personally for having failed to protect her. The media coverage of it, and this goes without saying for everyone I'll discuss, is absolutely horrible. I'm written sneeringly and with no real care about her as a human being, and she's treated as an oddity. South Africa seems to really get behind her, which is good. She's an amazing athlete.

Because she's an amazing athlete and has done absolutely nothing wrong. And there's a lot of accusations made of racism and European imperialism, which the IAAA obviously denies. But is, how, how, you've, you know what I mean? Like, you've already blundered. So how can you pinpoint your blunder? You know what I mean? I did not leave this story with a good impression of the IAAA,

aka World Athletics, even now. They seem like they were employing a lot of like really backwards thinking that isn't supported by much modern research. Yeah. Said Caster in a statement issued a year later, I have been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being. Some of the occurrences leading up to and immediately following the Berlin World

Championships have infringed on not only my rights as an athlete, but also my fundamental and human rights, including my rights to dignity and privacy. Which I agree with. Yeah. And in November 2009, South Africa Sports Ministry issues a statement that Semenya has reached an agreement with the IAAF to keep her meddling award. Good.

Good, yeah. Eight months later in July 2010, she is cleared again to compete in women's competitions. And in August, she wins the 800 meters at an IAAF event in Berlin. To where it all started. Back to Berlin. Back to Berlin, this time tramping. But then in 2011, the goalposts change.

So the IAAF decides that now, rather than chromosomal testing, it's going to come down to whether or not your body produces 10 nanomoles per liter of testosterone. This is so frustrating to me. Frustrating, I know. So frustrating because females produce testosterone. That is a thing. And the more that you work out, the more that you push your body,

the more testosterone you produce. It is part of a natural cycle. And it is so disgusting that they would take that stance. So this is that kind of story. Like I said, I really did think I was going to do fun and light. And then I ended up here. So, yeah, sorry. You know what?

It came out of the pen. I wasn't in control of it. No, you know what? Sometimes a story's in control of you, my dude. So we've all seen the episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark with the typewriter that shit comes to life. You know, it is what it is. So the argument, this is a condition.

Having 10 nanomoles per liter of testosterone is a condition. A state, let's say. I don't even want to call it a condition. It's just a way to exist. And it's known as hyperandrogenism. And the argument that the IAAF is making is that high testosterone equals high performance. Caster is able to pass this new mark,

although she would later say that she was using testosterone-suppressing hormones around that time, which is not a good idea and which we're going to talk about coming up. But it sets into motion this whole change to this testosterone-based ruling. Sets into motion a series of events that will ultimately make casters position in running precarious. So as Josie was kind of arging into the sky about there,

testosterone is an incomplete metric of a person's body factors. Says bioethicist Katrina Carcasus. Testosterone is related to Lean Maudibat. Let's do that again, but not the Mad Libs version. Testosterone is related to lean body mass and building a muscle, but it's not the only thing that contributes to that. Testosterone is not the only factor that's important for an individual's athletic performance.

There are not only physiological factors that could be VO2 max, heart size, any number of things, there are also non-physiological factors. So she is getting at like nutrition, coaching equipment. Right, enough sleep. Yeah, all kinds of shit. Testosterone can't be singled out as the defining factor. And more to the point, there's inherently no way

to make a contest where every competitor is different. Completely fair. Yes. To wit, Olympic promos gushed over the natural physiological advantages of golden boy Michael Phelps. His long torso, his size 14 feet, he's a dolphin of a man. And now he does mental health advertising for mental health. I'm not trying to shit on Michael Phelps.

Get your bag. Hit your ball and go swim. But this is a person who is regarded as being, I don't know, a crucible of the perfect genetic factors to make a bajillion time gold medalist and swimming, but it is fetted because of who he is. He's a white dude who is masculine, presents as masculine, doing a masculine thing.

He fits the archetype of what we want or what society wants. Yes, what is marketable. Yes. Yeah, what is marketable. And then that gets hit home again and again and again. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you want a more, I don't know, subtle version of that,

there's a Finnish skier called Eero Monteeranta. Good name. And he had a genetic mutation that boosted his red blood cell count by 25 to 50 percent, which is basically natural doping if you're up in high altitudes. Right, yeah. And this wasn't penalized. He got his gold medal and, you know, fucking wandered off happy as a clam and did whatever he did for the rest of his life.

Breathe in deep. So could he go too. Respirating, probably just sprinting everywhere. He went because God, if you could, why not? So much time. Oh, just get that blood flowing. Have you ever had like an O2? I forget.

They have like O2 bars now and you can like. Now, by now, do you mean like 2009? What O2 bars open during COVID, Josephine? Where have you been going? Now. No way. You know those brand new oxygen bars they had 17 years ago? Yeah, I do.

Keep going. Part of the issue with sex testing in sport is that there's never been a reliable way to make the distinction because sex is a complicated mix of factors, as we've discussed. And as with the testosterone solution, there's always some problem with the metric being used. So since 1900, when the first women competed at the Olympics, there have been suspicion. There have been suspicions levied at female athletes who didn't conform to the standards of femininity by the mid 1940s. International sports administrators began requiring female competitors to bring

medical femininity certificates, which is like did Margaret Atwood name those? To verify their sex, writes scholar Susan K. Kahn. In the 1950s, Prince Franz Joseph of Liechtenstein, a member of the International Olympic Committee, stated that he wanted to quote, be spared the unesthetics spectacle of women trying to look and act like men. Fuck you. Yeah, I could tell this one was going to piss you off.

These feelings coalesce during the Cold War, your fave, when rumours were whispered about East Germany's female athletes. Not your fave. The rumours, not the athletes. I don't know how you feel about the East German women's athletics. Oh, I'm fine with it. They're great. One of the prominent names to get hit with sex testing around that time was Polish women's sprinter Ewa Klobukowska, who won bronze in the 100 meters of the 1964 Olympics

a few years later in 1966 after Klobukowska dominated the 1966 European Athletics Championships. She was singled out for testing that consisted of a genital inspection that was described as a nude parade. Oh, God. Yeah, and then after she passed that test, whatever, they were said the people who inspected her were satisfied. The next year, again, the IAAF introduced a new measure, which was the chromosomal testing,

which is, I believe it went from chromosomal testing to this 10, 10 nanomoles of testosterone. So this is the progression. Oh, again? This is me saying that in 1966 this happened, and this is what implemented the chromosomal thing. The chromosomal thing would later be changed after in 2011 earlier in our story. I got you.

It goes nude parade chromosomal testosterone. Yes, yes. So Klobukowska did not pass this chromosomal test as she was found to have chromosomes that were a genetic mosaic of XX and XXY. Beautiful. They erased her world records, and that was the end of her running career. Yeah. And the coverage...

That's disgusting. If you think that the 2009 coverage was mean, the 1960, whatever, coverage was even worse. Yep. According to Ruth Padower for the New York Times, who wrote this article that covers a lot of stories like these, and I didn't include all of them, again, Vanessa Williams rule,

like I just couldn't cover everyone this time. I had to make myself not. So according to Ruth Padower, who wrote this article for the New York Times, many contemporary geneticists and endocrinologists, so this is back in the 60s, disagreed saying that relying on science to arbitrate the male-female divide in sports is fruitless because science could not draw a line that nature itself refused to draw.

Boom, yes, I like that. Which is a great way of putting it, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They also, as the guy who came up with the sheets metaphor, I like a good metaphor to explain these things. Give me a metaphor. Everything clicks in when I compare it to something else. The scientists also argued that the tests discriminated

against those whose anomalies provided little or no competitive edge and traumatized women who had spent their whole lives certain that they were female only to be told that they were not female enough to participate. Yeah, that's fucked up. And it raises the question that the caster posed when she first went to Berlin, why did you do this? Why did you bring me here?

Why do you, why? Like, why do we need to do this at all? Because it's such a traumatic and foundational identity. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It sounds awful. You have to have this fucking identity crisis in public with just like the world's least charitable people gathering and heckling you.

It's deeply unfair. I'm like, if anything in this story, I want the world to know that like I am very pro caster. I think she is, I think that we could all learn a lot from the way she has handled a phenomenally shitty situation that she in no way brought about upon herself. I feel strongly in that direction. Call me crazy, anyway.

So, Panauer tells the story of several such athletes and again, I'm not, I can't go into all of them, but one who stood out to me was Maria Jose Martinez-Batino and she was a 24 year old Spanish hurdler who was to run at the 1985 World University Games in Japan. Okay. So, I don't even know, listen, the World University Games, what is it?

Does it still exist? Who can say? So, the night before the race though, a team told her that her chromosome tests results were abnormal and her body produced testosterone, but because of a genetic mutation, her cells completely resisted the testosterone that she produced.

Whoa. So, her body actually had access to less testosterone than a typical woman. Holy fuck, and so the whole premise of testing- It's bullshit. And measuring testosterone- It's bullshit. There's no, there's no metric.

Oh my god, because you can produce all you want, but it might not be absorbed into your body. Fuck. This is- A horrible plot twist. It's so gray and so big. Holy fuck. It's a very big gray umbrella.

And because like I say, you're like, if you have, you know, you're a dude, but you have, you know, some sort of like internal sex, I don't, like, I don't even want like, there, it's not even worth going into examples, because there's so many like, this expresses itself in chromosomal ways, in genetic ways, in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

and it's not always the same thing. There's some shit that they don't even have names for, because it just happened, because that's how bodies happen. Anyway, it's a very frustrating story. I'm sorry. So, before the Spanish national championships, Spanish athletic officials told Maria that she should feign an injury and withdraw from athletics

permanently and without fuss. She refused and won. Good, made a fuss, good. Yeah, made some fuss, and as seems to happen, her test results relate to the press. And so, just remember that feeling that you had right there, because we're going to circle back to it. Patino was thrown off the national team,

expelled from the athlete's residence, and denied her scholarship. Her boyfriend and many friends and fellow athletes abandoned her. Her medals and records were revoked. Patino became the first athlete to formally protest the chromosome test and to argue that the disqualification was unjustified. After nearly three years, the IAAF agreed

that without being able to use testosterone, her body had no advantage. She was reinstated, but her Olympic hopes were already dashed. Yeah, no, and they just waited out, too. That's the other thing is like, well, we need more time. It's like, I don't have more time. This sport and this whole premise is built on the here and now. I got 10 years.

Nowadays, you probably have longer than that, because I think that sports medicine has really, really advanced. That's true, yeah. For the most part, you've got a limited window. Around the 90s, the IOC and the, this is not the International Olympic Committee. You know that. The IOC and the IAAF stopped sex testing every female athlete

under public pressure. People were like, this isn't right. Yeah, because anybody could call in the bomb threat, and then it's, what the fuck, yeah. But as with Caster Semenya, they retain the right to test individuals that they deemed suspicious. Under what, on what grounds?

Under what pretense? Eyeballing it. And starting in 2011, I am no bait, listen, Bucket, you want Bucket? I get you Bucket. I get you Bucket for puking? I think this happened. I want to respond, and I want to like,

I want to engage with it, and that's why it's... Yes, of course. And as we said, I think, again, I always call back to this Twilight Zone episode because I really liked it, but, as we said, as one of you said during that, like, oh, if you weren't upset, like, this is an empathy test, and you're passing it,

like, you care about other people, congratulations. Yeah. They retain the right to test individuals that they deemed suspicious, and starting in 2011, they had this new policy on hyperandrogenism or high natural levels of testosterone in women. This remained in place until it was challenged by an Indian runner named Dutty Chand in 2014.

So the story of Dutty Chand goes like this, I'm not going to leave you out of the loop on Honor Girl Dutty, because we really like her. Okay, good. She is born in 1996 in an Indian village called Shaka Gopalpur, to a very poor weaving family. Her older sister is a runner who spots an aptitude in her younger sister, and by excelling at sports,

Dutty is able to get money and lodging from the state, which is great for the family, one less mouth to feed. Right, yeah. And although she loves the indoor plumbing and consistent electricity, she misses her family, obviously. Yeah. Dutty's story is similar to the ones that you've heard already. She rises to a certain point, in her case,

nearly qualifying for the Indian national team for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and then she gets pulled aside, given a mysterious test about whose purpose she has lied to, and yet again, the results are leaked to the media without her consent. Five, like, the flow chart. Ugh.

To me, the constant repetitiveness of that pattern of behavior is really suggestive. I always say, don't listen to what people say, watch what they do. You can say whatever you want about making this fair, but I've observed that many times over the exact way that you folks handle this situation, is that you push the person into a room,

you lie about them, about why they're peeing into a cup, and then when it goes a little pear-shaped, somebody mysteriously always seems to leak this shit to the media. And so to me, that looks a lot like discrimination, that looks a lot like there's somebody you want to go away. Yeah. But that's just me.

Well, when you do it, I mean, this is documented, at least documented, right? Like, yeah. And if you want to, again, I encourage you to read this article by Ruth Badauer for the New York Times, because it really goes into like, it goes into more, it has a bit more range, I think, than this episode does. I tried to focus in on Caster Semenya and, again,

track athletes and intersex folks and things like this, but the Badauer article explains a lot of stuff that I've left out. Duty says of the time, I felt naked. I'm a human being, but I felt I was an animal. I wondered how I would live with so much humiliation. Duty challenges the decision, which leads the Court of Arbitration for Sports

to suspend the testosterone rule in need of more evidence. So for a while, everyone's running, but then the IAAF comes back and says, hey, here's the study. It's called Saramandrogen Levels and Their Relation to Performance and Track and Field, colon, a bunch of other bullshit I'm not going to read off. By Stefan Berman and Pierre-Yves Garnier,

it backs up what we're saying, the IAAF. So starting in 2018, not only are we bringing back the testosterone ceiling, but we're lowering it to five nanomoles per liter. Half. Yeah. And not only that, but we're only going to apply it to the narrow range of track events

between 500 meters and 1,500 meters, a.k.a. Castor Semenya's events. Oh my God. And it's... So Castor, who's now, at this point, Castor is fresh off a gold medal Olympic performance in Rio 2016. She's now effectively banned from her sport.

The same ruling also affects the Rio 2016 Silver and Bronze medalists, who are named Francine, Neon Saba, and Margaret Wambui. Wait, so they tested with levels higher than the five ammu... ammu... mule fools, whatever they are. They were African runners with high levels

of naturally occurring testosterone. And the five nanomole thing seems to be like... It seems like they were able to find some sort of room whether it was within their natural hormone levels or whether it was through the taking of these testosterone suppression drugs, which, again, we'll discuss is not a good idea. Yeah.

They were able to run in the ten nanomole thing, but once it got brought down, no longer they are... because their bodies produced so much testosterone, and the IAAF has arbitrarily decided that this one thing is the measure of fairness in women's athletics. Anyway, this study... many people were and still are critical of it.

The Berman and Garnier study that they used to justify dropping the testosterone even lower. And one of the main reasons is that it was commissioned by the IAAF. Fuck! That is laughable. Like, try to hide it. Try to hide it.

Anyway, yes. No. So says bioethicist Katrina Caracazes, who I quoted a little bit earlier. The rationale behind the IAAF's hyperandrogenism regulation is to make it sound more scientifically justifiable and less discriminatory, but nothing in those exams has changed

from the old policy except the name. It's still very... It's still based on very rigid binary ideas about sex and gender. So before the new rules take effect, Castor rolls up to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in her dope-ass suit. And I want to take a moment aside to say,

from independent of my respect for this person, both as an athlete and as a human who has encountered significant adversity and persevered through it, I think she is suave as hell, and I don't just hand that out. I... She has always, every time you see her,

she's the... In this particular instance, she's wearing this like little... It's like a little fitted Seth Rollin suit with like three, three-quarter sleeves. It's all black. She's always got like some tight bespoke. It's...

She always looks great. Oh, shit. And that's the... To me, that's the most important quality of a person. Are they a snazzy dresser? Sincerely. No, and she is. It is...

I'm looking it up and damn. Castor... Castor Semenya can rock a suit. Sadly though, she loses this appeal, which means that she would need to take testosterone-lowering drugs in order to continue participating and running. So the World Medical Association for the Record

has advised doctors not to administer testosterone-lowering interventions, describing the regulation as, quote, contrary to international medical ethics and human rights standards. So just to be absolutely crystal clear, because I don't want to spread any kind of misinformation,

doctors might advise patients to alter their natural hormone levels for any number of reasons, whether it's transitioning genders, whether it's treating cancer or menopause. There's all kinds of reasons, right? The specific thing that is being advised against here is unethical,

is altering your natural body chemistry to fit the arbitrary standards of a sporting board. Distilled version? Don't give people medicine they don't need. It's that simple. And in its decision, Cast, the Court of Arbitration for Sports, said, quote,

the panel found that DSD, so that's differences in sexual development, regulations are discriminatory, but the majority of the panel found that on the basis of the evidence submitted by the parties, such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable, and proportionate means

of achieving the IAAF's aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics and the restricted events. Which makes no sense, right on the face of it. Yeah. Like, immediately, it doesn't take a great mind to see why that

is, it doesn't quite logically follow because... No, it's logical fallacy right there. It's a logical fallacy, because you're saying in order to make this sport as fair as it can be... We must be discriminatory. We need to implement new rules, specifically targeting a very marginalized population

that happens to sometimes do well at these events. Because I don't like the way she looks. So, it's quite a frustrating situation. Says Castor, quote, the IAAF used me in the past as a human guinea pig to experiment with how the medication they required me to take would affect my testosterone levels.

Even though the hormonal drugs made me feel constantly sick, the IAAF now wants to enforce even stricter thresholds with unknown health consequences. Which is a very important point that the standards have never been this strict before. And in Ruth Pudower's article,

she talks about like, there's all of this kind of these stories about people trying to alter their body chemistry in like really dangerous ways to kind of be able to compete in what they've trained their whole lives to do. So, why would you want to... Why is it a governing body?

Would you want to encourage that? Especially when you are discouraging and limiting doping. Like it just... You're not encouraging it. You're constantly resetting the goalposts in order to edge somebody out. But have some...

A specific person out, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or a specific group of people out. It doesn't have to just be Castor. It can be Duty-Channed. And it can be all the other people mentioned in these articles whose stories I didn't reiterate here, right?

The IAAF says, having the arguments of all parties in the public domain will help to foster greater understanding of this complex issue. Sport is one of only a few narrow sectors of society in which biology has to trump gender identity

to ensure fairness. Although the two are actually in concert here, you just don't want to hear it. Yeah, so it's... The Court of Arbitration for Sports ruling upholds the policy that only suspicious athletes need to be tested,

meaning that they're basically eyeballing it. So if somebody on the IAAF decides you don't look like their idea of a woman testing, this approach also introduces the specter of conscious or unconscious racism when you consider the fact that it's largely athletes of colour

from places like India and Africa being singled out. So Semenya appeals the decision to the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland who temporarily suspends the ban, but ultimately rejects the appeal. She trains in the 200 metres for Tokyo 2020 to evade the ban

because again, it's only on this narrow alley of events that she just so happened to compete in. As well as the 5000 metre, she's not fast enough to qualify. 5000 metres is like, that's a fucking long one. There's a real difference between 800 metres and 5000 metres. 5000, yeah, yeah.

That's like when you've trained your whole life to be the perfect 800 metre robot and all of a sudden they're like, let's do that five times over. That's not so fun. That's a completely different, you've got to train your body different for that. Yeah, for years.

Castro has publicly stated that she will not return to using testosterone inhibiting drugs. Quote. Good. I will not allow the IAAF to use me and my body again, but I am concerned that other female athletes

will feel compelled to let the IAAF drug them and test the effectiveness and negative health effects of different hormonal drugs. This cannot be allowed to happen. In 2021, Castro-Semenia submits an essay to the New York Times

vowing to continue running and pursuing justice. In it, she mentions that shortly after the Tokyo Games, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a correction to the 2017 study that had persuaded World Athletics

to ban her from competing. It said the findings about the effects that high testosterone levels in female athletes had on their performance levels were quote, exploratory and could have been misleading

by implying a causal inference. Is that the study that was funded by IAAF? As a matter of fact, it is. Strange that there's an inconsistency. Castro says that when she first learned about the correction, her first words to her lawyers were,

I told you so. She says she is challenging the Swiss Court's decision at the European Court of Human Rights, and her case will probably be heard in Strasbourg sometime in 2022. So this year. Fuck yeah, good.

So I'll conclude the show with Castro's final thoughts from this New York Times essay that she published in 2021. Quote, Despite missing Tokyo, my head remains high. I am a Black South African.

I was lucky to be born with a special talent, but without ambition, perseverance, and faith in yourself, you will get nowhere. The many setbacks I have experienced have made me stronger. Setbacks are part of what it takes to become a great athlete.

I have also had to endure insults and humiliations from a world that very publicly questioned my identity. I know about maintaining dignity and hope in the face of oppression. My goal now is to win my legal case. For me, as a woman, as a human being,

fighting a cruel injustice, victory would be sweet, as sweet as any I have achieved on the track. And so with that, I want to wish Caster Semenya best returns in regards for this upcoming case in Strasburg. And I hope if they even start to tell you something

you don't like, you just sprint away from them because they can't catch you. No one can. Nobody can catch you. You're too fast. You're like Sonic the Hedgehog. So I'm really hopeful for Caster

because like Sonic the Hedgehog, I think it's her destiny to go fast. Like I just think that I hope that hers is a destiny that is unfightable by the machinations of these various bullshit European courts that she constantly seems to need to subject herself to.

Yeah. But also just like there's something so extremely brave about bringing this case to this court. Do you know what I mean? Like she had, there's so many opportunities for her to be like, you know what,

just gonna walk away. And that would be laudable in and of itself. And her choice to always enter the race, whatever race it is, is so amazing and so, I don't know, it's so inspirational and so moving and it just,

it's such a testament to her ability to, I don't know, stand up for herself and be in the world and dominate and be the fucking winner that she is. I respect the hack out of her. I think she seems like I say, like a pretty classy person in the face of all the adversity that she's encountered.

I also want to loop back and say that Duti Chand, the Indian runner who I met earlier, who's challenge of the 10-nanimals thing precipitated the inquiry that led to the study that led to the five-nanimals thing, etc. Yeah.

I am not the authority on the subject, so maybe there are others I don't know about. But on Wikipedia, they were describing her as India's first openly queer athlete. She came out, she's in a same-sex relationship because she said she was inspired

by the decriminalization of same-sex relationships in India in 2018 and she, at some personal cost, apparently this didn't go over great in the village, but she's living in her truth in this particular way. So there's a lot of really dope people here that it is like we've both been saying the whole time,

so frustrating to watch the constant obstacles that these folks need to navigate, just to exist and be in their bodies, which are no different or better or worse than your body or my body. I mean, they're certainly faster than my body. Yes.

Their bodies are a lot faster. They're maybe a little bit quicker than my body or your body. Maybe your body, Josie, I think maybe of me and Kaster. I like to think I could take her on the first lap. Maybe she'd get me after. I don't know.

Oh, son. Off the block. Can you imagine? I would be like, she would be at the finish line before I even understood what was happening. I would be like round track and it would be over. Yeah.

To be fair, you would be running around that track with a Timoneton on your shoulders, feeding you tomatoes. That's true, feeding you tomatoes. And that might slow you down. No, I disagree. In my head, it's very like it's Mario Party rules

like where when you eat the tomato, you get a boost. You know what I mean? Oh, that's it. Yeah. You know, that's so maybe, maybe. Oh, I missed him out a ton. Bring that thing back.

Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release new episode every other Sunday. And you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing,

leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. For this week's story, I watched a video called The Problem with Sex Testing in Sports by Vox on YouTube, Vox Media. I read the FAQ provided by Interact Advocates for Intersex Youth.

I read in the BBC, Caster Semenya's Comeback Statement in Full and I also read another of her statements on maintaining dignity and hope in the face of oppression in the New York Times, December 8th, 2021. I read both Caster's Wikipedia page as well as that of Ewa Klobukowska.

I read an article called Penethical Flaws in the Caster Semenya Decision on Intersex in Sport by bioethicist Julian Savulescu, May 9th, 2019, in The Conversation. I read in The Guardian, Caster Semenya accuses IAAF using her as guinea pig experiment,

June 18th, 2019. South Africa Athletics Chief admits lying about Semenya tests in Reuters by Serena Chaudry, September 19th, 2009. I read The Humiliating Practice of Sex Testing Female Athletes by Ruth Badauer in The New York Times, June 28th, 2016.

For those of you who like to stick around until the end credits, for a little glimmer of an Easter egg, I've included a little bit of an interview that Caster did with NBC Sports after she won the 800-meter title in Denmark. The inter- our interstitial music was by Mitchell Collins.

Where the Boys Are Trailer is from The Where the Boys Are Trailer, and the song that you're currently listening to is T-Street by Brian Steele. Does it affect you personally? No, not really. I'm a believer. Like I said, there's nothing hard in this world.

If there's a difficult issue, you have to find a way to resolve it. So with me, with a great team I have, support system I have, I saw about what other people say. Those are their opinions. It does not stop me from living. I'm a human, they are human.

Nobody knows what they're doing in this world. So we are just here, we're living a temporary life. So I'm not going to waste my time, you know, focus on negativity. I'm just going to enjoy my life and then live it. You try to be in front of me, I jump you. So that's how life is. So last one, what happens for you now?

I keep training, I keep running. So it doesn't matter. If something comes in front of me, like I said, I always find a way to come, you know, jump it, you know. If the wall is built, it's like in the U.S. You build a wall, you know, for Mexico. You always find Mexican in USA. So that's what we do.

Yeah, thank you, and good luck.