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Queer Athletes Struggle To Make Space for Themselves in a Straight Playing Field

Queer Athletes Struggle To Make Space for Themselves in a Straight Playing Field

Indian sprinter Dutee Chand (centre). Photo: PTI


  • The IOC released new guidelines in November 2021 designed to make sports more inclusive for non-binary, trans and intersex individuals.
  • This was the IOC’s response to a debate triggered when Caster Semenya was banned from some events at the 2020 Olympics, and her gender identity came under scrutiny.
  • Forcing successful female athletes whose gender expressions don’t abide by ‘gender binary’ societal norms to prove their ‘womanhood’ has become a well-documented trend.
  • The biology behind such testosterone-based arguments is ill-understood, which means it can be weaponised to erase trans and intersex individuals from mainstream sports.

The sporting world is predominantly heteronormative, with queer individuals often pushed to the fringes. Perhaps to challenge this, in November 2021, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) laid down a new framework on ‘fairness, inclusion and non-discrimination’ in which it said it encourages “everyone, regardless of their gender identity, expression, and/or sex variations to participate in sport safely and without prejudice”.

Breaking away from its earlier 2015 guidelines, now the IOC has established that:

According to this framework:

  • Athletes can participate in a gender category they identify with
  • Athletes can’t be pressurised to undergo “medically unnecessary procedures”, such as gender reaffirmation surgery or hormone therapy, to meet eligibility criteria
  • “Invasive physical examinations” can’t be used to determine a sportsperson’s gender identity, and
  • Athletes won’t be discriminated against on the grounds of “perceived unfair competitive advantage” because of their gender expression.

The 10-point new guideline is a move in the correct direction, to make sports more inclusive and less daunting for non-binary, trans and intersex individuals.

“This new IOC framework is groundbreaking in the way that it reflects what we know to be true – that athletes like me and my peers participate in sports without any inherent advantage, and that our humanity deserves to be respected,” Quinn, the first non-binary, trans Canadian soccer player and Olympic medalist, told NBC News as they welcomed the new framework.

Progressive though it is, LGBTQIA+ advocates are sceptical about the framework’s implementation because it is non-binding.

The framework was the IOC’s response to a fierce debate triggered when Mokgadi Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic gold medalist from South Africa, was banned from participating in the 400 m to one mile event at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Caster’s sex and gender has come under the unkind scrutiny of her competitors, mediapersons, sporting agencies like the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), and the public at large since 2009, when she won gold medal at an 800 m World Championship event in Berlin.

Caster was considered to be faster than any other woman, but that prompted some to cast aspersions about her gender identity. A recent campaign, called #IStandWithCaster, revealed that Caster was born with a medical condition called hyperandrogenism: her testosterone levels are higher than other cis-women. The IAAF categorised her as a female athlete with differences of sexual development, and mandated Caster and other sportswomen like her to take birth control pills, hormone-blocking injections and/or or gender reaffirmation surgery and regulate their testosterone levels – all to meet the eligibility criteria for participation in certain events.

A series of legal battles later, none of which ruled in Caster’s favour, she refused to reduce her testosterone levels and was subsequently shown the door ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In a September 2020 interview, Caster said:

“Why would I take drugs? I am a pure athlete, I don’t cheat. They should focus on doping [instead of] us. I make my own decisions, so I am not gonna change because of any man.”

Also read: Do India’s Medical Textbooks Have Homophobic Language?

Caster Semenya at an athletics meet in Paris, June 2018. Photo: Yann Caradec/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

The biology behind this testosterone-based argument is poorly understood, which also means it’s often weaponised to erase trans and intersex individuals from mainstream sports.

That a higher testosterone level results in greater athletic abilities is naïve and reductionist. Testosterone, the male sex hormone, isn’t the only biological factor that contributes to macroscopic outcomes such as athletic ability. Other such factors include metabolism-related hormones, such as insulin, thyroxine, growth hormone and glucagon; the anatomy of the brain, the level of expression of certain genes; even environmental factors such as sleeping pattern, diet and socio-economic background.

Overall, athletic ability has too many biological roots, not to mention their complex interplay. Put another way, scientists can’t trace a certain skill-based activity to the level of one particular molecule in the body, and correlate the two. To say that someone with more testosterone will be more agile and athletic is akin to saying someone with more dopamine will be a better musician.

Biological variations exist between individuals – irrespective of their sex and gender identities – but the art of any competitive event, including sports, is to overcome these differences, and not to exclude demographics that are already marginalised and under-represented in sports. Height confers a well-known advantage in a sport like basketball, yet tall and short people play it together without any objections about their fellow players’ biological traits.

“Testosterone helps you build lean muscle mass, boosts your generalised strength, and is a driver of red blood cell count. The more red blood cells you have, the more oxygen you can carry to your muscles, increasing your aerobic capacity. This is the only reason why we tend to conclude that testosterone boosts our athletic ability,” Dr Anindya Kar, the chief medical officer at the Advanced Neuropsychiatry Institute, Kolkata, told The Wire Science. “But there are no significant studies that endorse performance in terms of the amount of testosterone. The athletes competing at various professional levels are simply performing with hard work, discipline and, at times, luck.”

The IOC’s new 2021 framework replaced one it had published in 2015. The 2015 framework and the IAAF’s 2018 guidelines, which mandated testosterone levels to be a determining factor for participation of trans and intersex sports persons, were the products of such testosterone-based arguments. These rules demeaned the gender expression of queer individuals and reduced their expertise to mere hormone levels.

Caster wasn’t the only athlete to be affected by these queerphobic guidelines. Jamaican-American trans athlete CeCe Telfer wasn’t allowed to participate in the women’s 400 m Olympics event in 2020. Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, two Nigerian athletes, were excluded from the 400 m to 1,000 m events at the same event.

Also read: How Indian STEM Can Be a Healthier, Safer Space for Queer-Trans People

Clockwise from top left: Santhi Soundarajan, Christine Mboma, CeCe Telfer and Beatrice Masilingi. Source: YouTube

The story of Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian athlete, is filled with more disrespect. She was subjected to an invasive test, apparently to determine her biological sex, and stripped off her 2006 Asian Games medal when she alleged failed it. Similarly, in 2014, the director of the Athletics Federation of India forced Dutee Chand to take the test under the pretext of a doping check, after she won gold medals for India at the Asian Junior Athletic Championship.

Forcing successful female athletes whose gender expressions don’t abide by ‘gender binary’ societal norms to such humiliating tests and so prove their ‘womanhood’ has sadly become a well-documented trend.

“Genital-dependent gender identity is usually laid down in medical certificates by doctors who may not have the necessary language to identify anyone who lies beyond the binary boxes,” said Dr Anuttama Banerjee, a consultant psychologist from Kolkata. “This entire medical dependence needs to be reformed by sensitising doctors about the entire paradigm of gender identity.”

The same sporting agencies have also turned a blind eye to biological factors that have advantaged cis-gendered, white, male sportspersons, such as Michael Phelps. Phelps’s wingspan is three inches longer than his height, and this anomaly allows him to propel himself more efficiently than other cis-males. He is also genetic predisposed to producing less lactic acid than the typical cis-male body, which reduces his recovery time.

Yet people have celebrated Phelps for his achievements and overlooked his advantages, instead of forcing him to undergo demeaning tests to prove his manhood. Are we treating Phelps wrong? No. It’s that we have let misogyny, trans and intersex phobia and racism keep us from extending the same privileges to Caster Semenya, Cece Telfer, Santhi Soundarajan and Dutee Chand.

This must stop – and even if we need more time to update our sensibilities, we must defer to the 2021 IOC framework and let all people who wish to compete compete.

Som Banerjee (they/them), are a microbiologist, science communicator, theatre enthusiast and freelance journalist. As a trans voice in STEM, they are vocal about queer issues and rights. 
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