The Press Box - Sticking to Sports: The Case of Caster Semenya | Damage Control

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the South African track star Caster Semenya could not compete in certain races due to her naturally occurring high levels of testosterone (1:36). We talk about what that ruling means and how it will affect the relationship between gender and competitive sports (15:23). Hosts: Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Season 8 of Game of Thrones is underway, and you can stay up to date with the ringer staff as we make our way through the final episodes of the series. On the podcast side, listen to Binge Mode Game of Thrones with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion, the watch with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, and a pre-capable series on the recapables feed where we'll make predictions on episodes to come. In addition to our Sunday night Twitter after show called Talk the Thrones, our YouTube channel has tons of other Game of Thrones-related content, which you can find at YouTube.com slash Thuron. Ringer. And for even more Thrones coverage, head over to the ringer.com. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us. And this week, what divides us and excites us and upsets us is related to sports. This week, we're going

to talk about the case of Kasser Semenya, the champion Olympic middle distance runner from South Africa. Semenya may not ever be able to run her event in the Olympics again after a controversial ruling about her right to compete in women's sports. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is the highest court in international competitive sports, called her case a complex collision of scientific, ethical, and legal conundrums. This collision is sure to cause a lot of damage, so let's talk about it. So Semenya has dominated the women's 800-meter race in international track competitions for a decade. And this may really jeopardize her era of victory because what happened was the International Association of Athletics Federations, which is also known as the IAFF, ruled that female athletes with naturally high levels of testosterone that exceed limits that this regulatory body set. These athletes must now medically lower their levels of testosterone in order to compete in any event between 400 meters and 1.4 meters and 1.5.

one mile. And if you're wondering why that is such a specific, like, parameter, it's because this was essentially, like, very targeted towards Semenya, because she has naturally very high levels of testosterone. And they believe that that has contributed to how well she's done in the sport. And the court of arbitration for sport upheld this decision recently, and it accepted the logic that regulating testosterone levels in women athletes was discriminatory but also necessary to ensure fair competition. So they recommended that Semenya take birth controls to regain eligibility. And this has obviously caused a lot of commotion because it's such a flashpoint with, you know, the issue of gender and sports. There's a lot going on here. I'm wondering,

When did you first hear about this? I want to say a week ago, and this is such a strange story because it feels like there's a very intensely politicized conversation about women's competitive running, which is not necessarily something. You know, this sort of struck me out of left field. Running is usually so boring. Oh, wow. you have damage control as official position on competitive running. Running. It sucks.

Social media is where I first heard about the story, by the way. I feel like Reddit and, you know, I feel like I've seen tweets about Castor Semenia. This definitely feels like it has very quickly become a story that is not just track obsessives, arguing about the distinctions between men's and women's competition, but also a culture war story. things become inevitably. When I was reading about this, I saw some, it seemed like this specific situation was being pulled into a broader conversation about whether trans athletes should participate in international competitions that have like a gender binary, even though Semenya herself is not trans.

And I thought that that was an interesting conflation, that this all is now jumbled together. And, yeah, I was very, very disturbed that this happened in 2019. Like, maybe it's naive of me to think that discrimination like this obvious isn't going to happen that much anymore. Yeah. In this case, it strikes me strange, too, because Castasemania is not a – like, she's been in competition for more than a decade. And she is a – I mean, she's an Olympic medalist. You know, she's a gold medalist and a silver medalist. And there has been controversy, I believe, surrounding her for a long time.

And it's interesting that that controversy because of this ruling has peaked in the way that it has now. And I think when a lot of people speak of the unfairness of this story as it relates to her ability to compete, it does have a lot to do with the fact that she's been competing in, women's competition for a long time. And for an international court to at this stage be like, to well actually her out of women's competition or to well actually her into medication to adjust her testosterone levels.

There is something about that that feels manipulative and almost disingenuous. I think it's happening now because, so the IAFF has been trying to sort of push her out of this competition for years, and the court has finally ruled in their favor. I remember this being a conversation definitely in 2016, and I'm assuming before. During the Olympics. Yeah, yeah, because she did really well.

The thing that is just strikes me as so absurd in this situation is the idea that, like, athletes, super elite athletes all start from the exact same biological position in the first place because it's just so clearly not true. It's something that people talk about all the time. There have been like five billion articles about Michael Phelps having all these biological advantages in the way that, you know, he responds to lactic acid and the way that his blood can pull oxygen and the size and shape of his feet. And he is not an anomaly. most elite athletes are anomalies in some way. They are by definition exceptional.

They're physically exceptional people. I just think it's so strange how this specific differentiation from whatever the norm is is somehow unacceptable when in every single sport, basically anyone who dominates has something about their body that, makes them special and gives them an advantage. Right. Totally. I think, though, the one thing that makes this story very tricky and that makes it such an alluring battleground for a lot of people is the distinction here, which is that, okay, you can look at Michael Phelps and say he has long legs and a deficiency of lactic acid. But he probably has a normal dick.

Right. And the difference with trying to police castorceiminus chromosomes and her subsequent output of testosterone is that, well, there are categories of sports and they're divided by gendered. You could make the argument, or people are making the argument that there's a women's category and there's a men's category, ergo, it is important for the ruling bodies of the sport to be able to say, okay, well, what does it mean for somebody to qualify for men's or women's competition in a way that doesn't really have any analogy? to the length of Michael Phelps' legs

because that's not how competitions are formally sort of like bifurcated. There is no, here's the category for somebody with legs this long, and here's the category for somebody with legs that long. But then it just gets me thinking about, I think, the inherent trickiness of the division between men and women's competition. Well, the fact that it has come, to the sex tests in 2019 is just insane. Like, this is something that's been going on for a long time.

This story and the controversy about how to categorize these sports doesn't start with Semenya. Like, there were gender verification tests in the 1930s for athletes. So there was an op-ed. by a kinesiologist named Bruce Kidd in courts that I read, decrying this decision. And he just pointed out that, you know, in the 60s, people were saying that women competing from the Soviet Union

and from different countries who didn't look like Western women and they were winning medals, maybe there should be a separate category for them, which is obviously insane. I mean, I feel like the basic thing you're trying to establish, right, is that there, has, before a century at least, always been obsessing over race and gender and like qualification and competition that gets expressed in ways that starts to sound like phrenology.

You know what I mean? It's like there's always been really fraught bordering on quasi-scientific discussion of race and gender and athletic performance. And this is, I feel like castor's a minors story. sticks us with the hard distinction between talking about biological sex in realistic terms, but also acknowledging the trouble of engaging with biological sex as a concept and neatly categorizing people. Especially I want to say, again, in a decade when we're having a lot of tough conversations about biological sex and gender and how to make sense of them. going forward.

Because again, it's like you said, Castor Semenya is not trans, and yet she and this story feel like they are so implicitly essential to conversations about trans athletes, for instance, because

you know, one of the things you'll see in conversations about women's sports on this level is a fear. It almost feels like a palpable fear that if we're not careful, then just trans women are going to invade all of the competitive women's sports and demolish all of the cisgendered women and that this will be an ironically

anti-feminist accomplishment of post-trans identity politics. Yeah. And it's almost like Cassus dominions being made out to be a Trojan horse for like that larger. Right. Which I feel is predicated on a fear that is very outlandish. First of all, there's not that many trans athletes in comparison to cis athletes. So, like, the idea that trans athletes will just dominate the field is silly. I've read commentary saying that this opened the door for men to literally disguise themselves as women.

And, like, are we really thinking that ladybugs is going to ruin sports? like for real. It just, it's one of those things where the nightmare scenarios about, you know, taking a common sense approach to deciding who gets to compete in which category instead of like a weird sex test approach are truly insane to me. Right. And I guess. The other thing that really makes it clear how strange this case is is that the science is not there.

Like it places, it's sort of, they're saying that testosterone determines how good of an athlete you are, which just is not the case. And Semenya is, you know, she is one of the world's best runners. It is true. but there have been women whose genders have never been questioned who have been more dominant in women's track. And you have to ask yourself if testosterone is that important, how did they succeed? Right, right. But I still think that, and this is like this is the tough thing for me, is that in cultural and social context, right? The way a lot of progressive discourse about gender happens is largely about self-identification, right?

And so I guess that's the question. I feel like that's the question that everyone is trying to get at by talking about castorcahomania is do we apply that to sports? Is gender a thing that we basically let you self-identify as what your gender is? And people are struggling with trying to take that as a general social idea, which I think there are people who even support that idea, that your gender is something that you identify as, and it's part of your self-determination, and you, in terms of just going through life as Justin Charity or Kate Nibbs,

you are in control of what your gender is for the record. But that that standard becomes more complicated. specifically when talking about competitive sports for reasons that have to do with like the differences that are subsequent to people having different chromosomes and different testosterone levels and stuff like that. I don't know how to make the gender distinctions in sports make sense in my head in a way that feels like it can neatly exist alongside

the ideal ways we think about gender just in terms of civil rights, right, among non-competitive human beings. I think that anyone who questions like the existence of a hard gender binary, this is a difficult case to process. And I understand, you know, if there's a lot of different rules for which hormones you can take, what you can do to change. the body you were born with in sports. Like you can't, there's, you know, they don't let you put certain substances in your, in your body. And I think that that will have an impact on trans athletes because a lot of trans athletes are, you know, taking hormones and things like that.

What makes the case of Semenya so, I think it's, it's more black and white, actually, because her natural body is producing testosterone. Right. She is competing in the correct category. They're asking her to drug herself. Right. And it's sort of ironic because they have all these rules and there have been so many controversies about, like,

not allowing athletes to alter their bodies. And now they're saying, but you have to alter your body. And it just doesn't seem right to me. Right. I'm not saying that the fact that she has, heightened testosterone levels has no impact on so many. She's probably faster because of that. I would say she's certainly faster because of that. What I'm saying is there is no meaningful

difference between that advantage and the other natural advantages that elite athletes have, like Phelps and his slipper feet and like different endurance athletes who oxygenate their blood differently, stuff like that. The difference is, because it's about gender, people are freaking out. Right. Because it is about gender, which is a thing that we are very good at freaking out about throughout human history. Like, men are also, on average, a lot taller than women, but we're not saying we don't have a height limit to determine sex with these races. Like, imagine if there was a freaking eight-foot tall lady who was fast as hell.

We wouldn't say you have to compete in the men's. Yeah, you have the height of a man. Yeah, right, right, right. That is, it's just the decision to use testosterone as a surrogate for determining who is a man and a woman seems like arbitrary and very targeted towards Semenya. Well, it does, but I also would say that it also, again, if you're, if you're coming at the story with, again, everything you learned in ninth grade biology, then it doesn't seem arbitrary. If anything, it seems like the perfect simplification. It seems like testosterone is for boys and estrogen is for girls. You know what I mean?

At that level, it actually makes a lot of sense. But at that level, you're also thinking about biological sex and gender as a literal middle schooler. You know? But I do understand why that's how people come to this argument. They say testosterone belongs in the middle school. men's category because that's what boys produce. Women have testosterone too, though. I know, I know. I'm just saying I think that that's how a lot of people approach this story. And again, it feels like traditional textbook definitions of biological sex and gender running up against emergent

understandings of biological sex and gender. I know that a lot of people who are applauding this decision believe that it's protecting women's sports. I can only say to this them, like, you're casting out a woman in sports. How is that protecting women's sports? Yeah, and right. To me, it's defending the sanctity of women's sports, defending women's sports from what exactly? That's what I'm not quite clear on. I think another reason why this has really boiled over into such a controversy. And I think the only reason why Semenya got testosterone tested in the first place is because of her gender presentation. and her sexuality.

She is a lesbian. She doesn't present as particularly feminine. And I think that that does play a role in how people are treating her as a woman. If she was wearing dresses all the time and was dating some dude, I don't even know that she would have been tested. Right. Yeah. We don't even know how many other female athletes have had a testosterone advantage. Right.

I think this happens with lots of different kinds of female athletes. Black female athletes in lots of fields are definitely even more susceptible to that, right? That sense of... That criticism. They're basically masculine. Yeah. It's sort of that way of discounting black female athletes. Yes.

Like from Serena to Casas de Mania. Yeah. I mean, if she was a white woman from America, I also questioned, like, deeply. whether this would be happening for that reason. It's just a complete cluster fuck of discrimination. I will say that when I first was reading about this story, one of the first defense of Cassus de Semenia I saw, before I even fully understood what was going on,

was people saying, this is only happening because she's black, right? They're only ascribing masculinity to her so flagrantly and in such a disrespectful and potentially disqualifying way because she's a black woman, and this happens to black women more often than it happens to white women. And I think that the people who are skeptical about Casta Semenya just sort of dismissed that observation out of hand.

That feels like another culture word dimension in all of this, is that the people rallying to Semenya's defense and pointing out the racial element of this are just sort of getting dismissed as social justice warrior identity politics types. How can you be dismissed as an identity politics type? I mean, the whole thing is about identity. Like the whole, right, this is one of those things where I think the basic absurdity about people who are annoyed by identity politics is revealed. Because the argument about her in the first place is literally about her identity.

It's literally about what do her chromosomes and her testosterone level and her presentation and her partner tell us about who Castor Semenia is and which. 800 meter category she should be competing in the men's or the women's. It's literally an identity conversation and the people who don't think that she should be competing in the women's category

they're also having an argument about identity. They're also policing identity. Yeah, I mean, in this scenario, the people who have pushed this issue to the forefront, they're the ones policing gender.

They're literally trying to be better police, like, they're trying to police women's sport. That is their basic. And again, we can argue about whether that's appropriate, about how rigorously it's even possible to do that without humiliating every athlete in every field. But that's the basic thing that's happening is that people are trying to police the identity of the athletes competing in these categories. These categories have existed for a long time.

and it's becoming more of a contentious issue as gender essentialism just in general gets talked about more. The basically frustrating thing is that humans have competed in sports for thousands of years, right? And this is true. Like, humans have competed across eras of scientific advancement. They've competed across transformations in how we even think about gender and masculinity. and femininity and how we even conceive of individual sports themselves. And yeah, there is something in the skepticism about Samania that feels like it's trying to not only police women's sports and men's sports,

but is trying to police them in a way that is like timeless and that creates distinctions that will just never change. And that's what seems kind of silly about all of this, right? It's like you've found an exceptional human being who challenges some of your basic assumptions about gender. But your basic assumptions about gender, there's nothing timeless or objective necessarily about them, right? We've understood gender in different ways through large stretches of human history. And if your rules for competition can't really accommodate for the fact that, like, you know, some people, like, I mean, you have men and you have women, and even in the cases of men and women,

you have people who are exceptional and may be hard to categorize for certain biological reasons. It just seems kind of silly to be like, well, we don't know what to do with you. You should either, like, take some medicines that can make us wrap our head around you better, or you should just not compete. That feels like a very juvenile and short-sighted response to the bigger problem, which is just like, yeah, some people are different. Like I just look at her and I think, some people are different. What the fuck do you want? Yeah.

Let her compete in the sport that she's competed in for a decade. Yes. I don't really understand what, and I don't want to say some men's opponents. I think even a lot of the people who are skeptical about her, who see themselves as trying to protect women's competition. I think the line you see a lot of people say is, look, she didn't do anything wrong. Yeah, I don't think anyone, I mean, what could she have possibly done wrong? Like, she didn't do anything except to compete in a sport that she was very good at. And dominate that sport.

Yeah. I think what people who are applauding this decision feel is that it protects the sanctity of women's sports. that women's sports is fragile and in danger of a deluge of male impostors and needs to be safeguarded from those who might destroy it. And they see Semenya as an interloper. And ironically, I do think that they are sincere in trying to protect women's sports. But I think that the outcome is that they've humiliated a great feeling. female athlete. And they've really besmirched the name of women's track and field on an

international level. It's very sad. Yeah, that's the thing that makes this whole story so uncomfortable is that as much as people will say, look, there's nothing that Simania herself did wrong. I think even in talking about people applauding the decision, this isn't a culture war or, yeah, this isn't a culture war issue where I look at those people and say, oh, what a bunch of assholes and dipshits, right? Like, this is actually an issue where it's like, I get, I get what's happening here. I get why we're arguing about this. Unlike so many other arguments that happen online, I get why we're arguing about this.

Even if I think that we're probably indulging a lot of, like, wrong-headed thinking about sex and gender. I get the intentions. I get the impulse to try and be a champion of women's sports. However, I just, I don't actually think it's an ambiguous situation. I really think that there is no reasonable argument for forcing a healthy athlete to alter their body in order to compete. And I think that the concept of using one markupon, to make a hard classification about biological sex. When the person in question, you know, Semania has already been subject to humiliating sex tests,

and she was declared a woman when there was an external test of her body, there isn't much ambiguity. Like, she's not a man. She was raised as a woman. She's been competing as a woman. The idea that she should have to. to drug herself to make herself into more of a woman in the eyes of this regulatory body. I think that's unambiguously wrong.

Yeah. Not only wrong, but it's like, it's on its face paradoxical or just like quiotic. So Semenya is possibly going to appeal this ruling. She has that right. She has stated that she is not going to take drugs to inhibit her testosterone and that she plans to compete in the future, so it seems as though that's going to happen. There's going to be another clash. And I don't know if she'll be competing again, though.

We'll have to see whether her appeal is successful. I guess she could always go and do a race that's shorter than 400 meters or over one kilometer, which is just like an example of how absurd this is. Right, right, right. I think that's the other thing, too, is that, again, there are so many uncomfortable questions at the heart of this. And I feel like there are two sides here of a coin. On the one hand, the sport could look at Castro Somania and look at other questions about gender and competition and say, well, these are all signs that, listen, maybe 20, 50 years from now, the way we break. down competition or the way that we sort of process gender in terms of athletic competition

will look different than it does today. And it'll be hard and fraught to get to a point where that happens. But maybe sports just have to reflect changes in how we think about gender. Or you could say, I don't want to think about this. This woman should just leave the sport. So I don't have to think hard. about anything and confront change, which is scary and bad. And I feel like there's a right answer to that question.

And yeah, I guess we'll see on appeal what the answer to that question is. People sometimes write into the ringer to criticize us when we venture into culture and technology coverage by telling us to stick to sports. And I'm curious to see how they respond to this segment. Yeah, we stuck to sports. Is our sportiest yet. Right. Because, I mean, we, you, Kate Nibb, me, Justin Cherry, we famously cover sports.

Yeah. And only occasionally write about culture and technology and politics. But otherwise, we definitely write about sports, which are our number one passion. Love them. We love sports. But this sort of ties back to your point that there needs to be an ongoing conversation and a dynamic conversation about the rules of competition and the way that sports function, the way that athletic competitions function,

are a reflection of society. Right. And specifically that again, gender is such a, it's such a dynamic concept that anybody who's really just betting on the idea that like these categories will endure eternally and they just aren't going to have to change and anybody who's an aberration or an exception to these categories is just going to have to go away so we don't have to think too hard about it.

Just like, no. That's not no. I get that like man and woman is like a concept as old as the Bible, but in more nuanced ways, they're just such dynamic concepts that like you can't, you can't just hope that no one challenges your conception of what it means for someone to be feminine and for someone to be masculine. Like, we rethink this shit every decade.

You know? All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibb. Thanks for listening to Damage Control. We'll be back with you in two weeks.