Today, Explained - Track and Female

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

The track and field world is trying to figure out what it means to be female. South African Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya’s future is caught in the balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here's the woman, the eyes of the world are on, 25 year old Kasta Semenya of South Africa, the 2009 world champion, silver in London four years ago, can she go one better in Rio? Off they go, Semenya making a statement of intent in the first few meters Casa Semenya has a condition known as hyperandrogenism which means that she has excessive levels of male hormones she looks very very comfortable as she has done all season the South African government has brought in scientists and physicians to argue Semenya should not be required to lower her natural level of testosterone. And this could be Semenya's day.

The battle between Kasta Semenya and the IAAF has reached a crucial stage. She's normally got a devastating kick when she goes, and goes she does. She's left the others in her wake, and Caster Semenya is going to do what most people thought she would do in the 800 and she runs away and wins it brilliantly. It isn't every day that the whole world is up in arms about track and field, but yesterday we got one of those days and today and probably even tomorrow because right now there's a track and field story that's about so much more than winning a race. This married the ethics of sport, the eligibility of what it is to take part in sports and also what

it means to be a woman. Mega Mohan has been reporting on a South African runner named Kastor Semenya for the BBC. Kastor Semenya was born in a very rural community on the edges of South Africa. She was born a woman and she was raised a woman. She doesn't come from money. She calls herself a bush girl. You know, always in the bushes. To be honest, I grew up more with boys, so I never liked to play around with girls because I always thought girls were too soft. And she was really, really good at athletics. They always treated me more like, OK, this one is crazy, so let her do what she likes. We spoke to her coach, who she calls her dad, yesterday. And he said that he knew that she had this prowess, this gift for running from a very, very young age.

And Semenya of South Africa. In the yellow and the green shorts. Striding out and taking the lead. She kind of came into the public sphere in 2009 when she won a field event. 1.55.46. Well, that smashes the world list by almost two seconds. From that, there was lots of questions on whether she was transgender, so whether she was, in fact, masking as a man. And she was subjected to a sex verification

test. And from that, this conversation has begun, which is, is she eligible to take part in a sport where she is so much the outlier? And there's so much about this conversation, Sean, which is that we don't know about, because not a lot of it is even revealed about what happened in 2009. But we know that she, and I have it from sources, that she was subjected to quite a draconian, invasive form of testing, which, to be honest, is what the Olympic Committee used to do, which is essentially like strip people naked and anatomically examine them, not even chromosomally or through blood.

These are the rumors that we've heard. Why right out of the gate is Caster Semenya being treated differently, maybe even stripped down and anatomically examined? So because she wins by such a large margin in the sphere of what she runs, which is from 800 meters to 5,000 meters. But in that middle distance, she is what we call a dominant force. And because of that, there were questions then about whether she was a man pretending to be a woman. And that was when, you know, this chorus of questions from other Olympic teams came into the fore and she was made to undergo this sex verification.

All right, well, it may be the biggest running controversy ever in the world of track and field is South African runner Kastor Semenya, a woman, a man, or something caught in between? Will she be allowed to race again? And so pretty quickly, the controversy shifts from transgender to intersex. Now we know her to be intersex. She's never said it herself, but we have it from a number of sources that that's what she is. So intersex, it can manifest itself in many different ways. It's biological, anatomical, chromosomal, hormonal, and there's 40 different variations, minimum 40 different variations that we know of. So that's when your body and your physiology exists outside the binary of what we imagine traditionally a man and a woman to be. So for example, you can be chromosomally a woman, XX, and you could also have testes. Or you can have internal testes. There's lots and lots of

different variations of how intersex conditions show. Or you might never know. It's thought that Casta Semenya didn't know that she was intersex until she was made to go through the sex verification in 2009. So we don't actually even know the number of how many people there are in the world who have intersex traits. But the UN estimates that it's somewhere between 0.5% and 1.7%. And on the upper level on 1.7%, that's the same number of people that have red hair. So that's not a small number. For Castasomenia, she is biologically born a woman. So she is intersex and biologically born a woman. However, the type of intersex conditions she's thought to have, she produces an abnormal, actually abnormal is not the right word. And it's really important in this conversation for people like myself who

report on this to keep correcting themselves. So it's an atypically high level of testosterone, which is far outside what typical women would have within her field, which is the problem that the IAAF and CAS, which is the Court of Arbitration of Sports, had with her in the first place. So for Kastra Semenya, is it her testosterone levels that make her intersex? We don't know what type of intersex condition she has. There's only ever been theories that she's never confirmed herself. But we do know that the traits of intersex that she has does give her abnormally or atypically high levels of testosterone. But to be clear here, this isn't her manipulating her testosterone levels. Not at all. This is the natural amount of testosterone that her body produces.

Absolutely. Everybody on all sides makes it absolutely clear that there is no question about any manipulation going on here. There's no question of doping. There's no question of cheating. This is a woman who wants to be able to embrace the body and the physiology that she has as it naturally is. She wants to run as she naturally is. But what has been said sort of unfairly in the press about her, I say, and that's my opinion, not the BBC's opinion, is that she has a bullet chest, is what some commentators have said about her. They've talked about the broadness of her shoulders in a way and compared it side by side to female athletes from countries like Russia.

So they use descriptions of her which one would say would traditionally be used to describe men. And this isn't just talk, this is action. How does the controversy over castrosomenia become a legal battle? In 2011, there had been a ruling that was enforced saying that female athletes needed to have under 10 nanomoles of testosterone per litre of blood. And that was when, between 2011 and 2015, Kastas and Menya didn't win many races.

So it was very much thought then, even though never confirmed, that she was taking testosterone suppressant medication at that time. However, another case came in of this Indian sprinter called Duti Chand, who successfully took on Cass and the IAAF, saying that she was being penalized for short distance running. And she won that. And from then, they stopped having this regulation. And from 2015, Caster Semenya came back onto the scene and started winning races again. So in April 2018, they reintroduced a barometer, which is five nanomoles, which is even less than what they did in 2011. And because of that, she decided to take on the IAAF, which is the athletics body

at the Court of Arbitration. So that had happened. And it's taken three judges just over two months to come to this decision. And it wasn't a unanimous decision. It was two against one. The sports world's highest court ruled yesterday that Semenya must take medication to reduce her unusually high testosterone level if she wants to compete. The court called its decision on the South African runner acceptable discrimination. The decision is that they have upheld the ban, which means that any athlete who tests over 5 nanomoles per liter of testosterone in their bloodstream will need to take testosterone

suppressant medication if they are running between 400 meters and one mile. It's very, very specific and, according to South Africans, very targeted against Castor. Castor has spoken out about these types of regulations before. So I just want to be me, you know, be who I am. You know, I was born like this, so I don't want any changes. So I cannot stop because of people saying, oh, she looks like a man. What has she said about this decision yesterday that could basically end her career?

She released a statement, a very, very blistering opening line saying that I'm glad that they've acknowledged that they're targeting me specifically. I'm glad that they've acknowledged that they're targeting me specifically. I'm paraphrasing, of course. But she has said she thinks that it's been demonstrated in quite an obvious way with the decision that was made. Her actual phrase was, this will only make me stronger. She's got the support of South Africa behind her. The sports minister released a statement saying, you are our golden girl, and you've given hope and united a whole nation, as well as kind of giving hope to the rural girl.

That was a very sort of poignant message from the South African sport minister. So she's got the backing of the country behind her. Even with the backing of your entire country, this must feel so alienating to have the most important governing body in your sport, a body that governs the entire world, telling you that your body is wrong. So it's interesting, actually, because I tweeted a video yesterday that someone sent me, and they DMed it to me just saying, look at the hypocrisy. And it was an NBC video, which is basically, when you look at it, it's almost like a propaganda film for Michael Phelps.

Michael Phelps stands 6'4", with an enormous wingspan of 6'7", creating the elongated stroke that has broken 22 world records. It's like, look at this mega man. His size 14 feet might as well be flippers. Dinner plate size hands grab water like a pair of paddles. And the flex of double jointed elbows and knees adds an exaggerated range of motion. This makes him dominant in swimming. Whereas the question when it comes to Casta Semenya is almost like, look at this aberration.

We can't let her compete. And one of the big talking point in South Africa, particularly, but also in countries like Kenya and Nigeria, is that this is specifically happening to black women. We've seen this happen to the Williams sisters too. So race does play a part in this. And the question here is about what we want to put a woman into a box as in 2019. Are we accepting that a woman is Kim Kardashian and no other sort of variations of that? Or can we also say that a woman is Martina Navratilova? Or can we also say that a woman is RuPaul? I mean, these are kind of big questions that we're beginning to explore.

After the break, the very complicated practice of testing testosterone. I don't have cable anymore because I'm a millennial and we killed cable, but I remember sitting there as a kid after a show I wanted to watch ended on Fox and then cops would come on and watching poor people getting arrested on TV as if it was a football game and feeling like, this doesn't feel right. If you felt the same way, there's a podcast for you. It's called Running From Cops. It's from the creators of Missing Richard Simmons and Surviving Y2K. They were thinking about the show Cops and how it's the longest running reality TV show in history

and how it defined the genre and how it's still on today, new episodes and reruns. It's on like 15, sometimes 20 times in a single day. And they were like, how much has this show shaped our criminal justice system and the public opinion of the police? The team watched 800 episodes of Cops to research the podcast. They did tons of interviews. And now there's a show running from Cops to research the podcast. They did tons of interviews. And now there's a show

running from Cops. Episodes one and two are out now. They are in the podcast app that you're using to listen to this if you're using one of those apps. Check it out. Katrina Karkazis, you literally wrote the book on testosterone. It's called Testosterone, an Unauthorized Biography. Why is this hormone the source of so much discord in women's sports? Really quickly, I didn't write it by myself. I wrote it with a colleague that I've worked with a lot named Rebecca Jordan Young at Barnard College. So a lot of this thinking is our combined thinking.

Shout outs to Rebecca. Shout outs, huge shout outs to Rebecca. Love your work. The core issue here is how people think about testosterone and how people think about not only what it does for athleticism, but whether or not it belongs in women and what its relationship is to sort of women's bodies. And, you know, on the one hand, there's this idea that it makes women sick. On the other hand, there's this idea that it's jet fuel for these amazing performances. And both of these ideas are coexisting at the same time. Do men get checked for estrogen in sports?

No. And not only do they not get checked for estrogen, they don't get tested for testosterone either. So what's the justification for policing women's testosterone levels? I think that's a really great question. Like it's sort of the key issue here. Why do we care? And one of the interesting things that I've tried to think about is why do so many people assume that these regulations are fair and necessary when they've not actually delved into some of the science around testosterone generally and testosterone and athleticism. So one of the things that I think testosterone does is that it carries the weight for a lot of folk wisdom about what it does without any need for evidence. It actually almost makes claims or requests for evidence seem a little bit absurd, right?

Don't we all know that it, you know, is a male sex hormone and it does all things masculine and does everything for sort of the manliest men? But it turns out to be a far more complicated hormone than its sort of current cultural identity. Testosterone is a really dynamic hormone and it changes during time of day, time of month, time of year, time of life. It even changes, it raises in response to positive feedback from a coach. So it's not the kind of thing where you measure it and it sort of sticks there and then you can assume that you know what it's doing all of the time. It's fluctuating all of the time and that dynamism is part of what makes it amazing. But it's also why you can't draw these easy correlations or causal relationships between the hormone and athletic performance. But there is science that says that testosterone affects strength, right? Sure. And, you know, one of the things I would never want to be construed as saying

is that testosterone doesn't matter for athleticism. It absolutely does, right? For any particular athlete who both has testosterone and whose tissues can respond, that's absolutely important for their performance. But what you can't do is rank athletes by their testosterone levels and then somehow think you know something about what will happen for their performance in terms of that. And you can't assume that the people with the highest levels

will always do better than the people with the lower levels. Even the IAAF's own evidence showed that at times it was people in the lower T groups that performed better in certain events than people in the higher T groups. When exactly does the highest level of sports start testing for testosterone in women? Well, the interesting thing is they didn't test for it specifically. For a long time, I think it's important to know that in women's elite sport, there has been something called sex testing or gender verification.

And this has really been from the time that women entered elite sport almost 100 years ago. And the idea was that men might masquerade as women, might try to compete as women. And in order to restrict that or stop that from happening, that you needed some criterion by which you could determine women's eligibility. And that's varied over time. But that might be whether or not a woman was deemed appropriately feminine and there were certificates of femininity. And then for a while, it didn't last for very long, but there were actually physical exams of women.

Then there were chromosomal tests and yet other tests, but it was never testosterone alone. When sports governing bodies stopped mandatory testing of all women, they kept this ad hoc testing, which is how Castor Semenya was investigated. There were actually some women athletes who proposed testosterone, and it was rejected for the exact same reasons that people have critiqued it today. Men's and women's levels overlap, and it is not a key enough determinant of athleticism to use this as a criterion by which to exclude women from the category. How does testosterone testing work for female athletes now in 2019?

In our latest iteration, the shift to testosterone happened in 2011 for the IAAF and in 2012 for the IOC. But there have always been doping tests. And one of the ways that they find out if women have high natural testosterone is through the regular doping screens that athletes go through. And so you might say, wait a second, I thought you said this isn't about doping. And that's true. It's not about doping. But when you do a doping test and you have a high testosterone level, there are subsequent tests that can distinguish whether or not that's natural or doping. Here's the interesting thing about how men and women are treated differently in sport regarding testosterone. If you are a man and you have a high testosterone level,

and then they do the secondary analysis and find out it's natural, your case is closed. If you're a woman and you come back and have a high natural testosterone level, that's just the beginning of the investigation for you. Because from there, they go on to do many other investigations, not only to try to figure out why it is you have high T, but to try to assess how responsive your tissues are to testosterone. And why do they care about that? They care about it because they think that's a proxy for understanding how much bang for your buck you might be getting from testosterone. Bringing this back to Caster Semenya, someone who has naturally higher than average testosterone levels, the IAAF, this governing body put

in charge of making sure people aren't altering their natural states, wants her to reduce her testosterone levels. That's exactly what they want. Which is kind of ironic because they want her to alter her natural state. It's absolutely ironic. There's even a stranger twist to this. There has been at least one athlete who underwent surgery to reduce her testosterone level, had almost no testosterone, and then was granted a therapeutic use exemption to take testosterone. In other words, to dope.

And that was legal? Yes. This is why it's important to understand that testosterone is not just a sex hormone, that it's related to some of the most basic functions of the body. So that's happening as well. If you completely get rid of your testosterone levels, you actually have to supplement with hormones for the rest of your life in order to avoid things like osteoporosis. I wonder how much more complicated and painful this is going to get as the lines and boundaries that existed for so long around gender and sex continue to blur. Well, maybe this isn't just about testosterone, right? Maybe this is sort of about gender norms in sport. When we think about

it, all women athletes are operating under expectations that they should be feminine and feminine in very particular ways. Women who don't conform very often come under scrutiny. And it might be how you dress. It might be your gait, it might simply just be excelling at a really high level, because there's a way in which sport is still a masculine domain. And so you can be strong, but not too strong, fast, but not too fast. Katrina Karkeis is a senior fellow at the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale. She also reps Brooklyn College Testosterone, an unauthorized biography. The book she wrote with Rebecca Jordan Young comes out in October. I'm Sean Rammestrom. This is Today Explained.