It's just been heart wrenching to follow.'įor Mofokeng, the female eligibility rules amount to the policing of Black women's bodies: a remnant of what she sees as patriarchal, colonial power. 'And right now, that burden, that pain, that harm is most keenly felt by women of the Global South. 'Sports must maintain this really, really violent binary at all costs, no matter who it hurts,' she says.

'These binaries that we have in sport don't match up to the world,' says Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and African American studies at Pennsylvania State University and co-host of the feminist podcast Burn It All Down. That includes all three women who won medals in the 800-meter race at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics: Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya. In the Tokyo Games, along with Semenya, the other runners who have said they're affected by the rules are all African: from Kenya, Burundi, Niger and Namibia. It's a visceral problem, the issues of femininity: Who owns femininity, and who gets to decide what that looks like?'Ĭonsider that the women who have publicly run afoul of the gender verification rules are all from the Global South. 'This idea, right, that some women are more woman than others. 'There is a definite history of people seeing certain women as not woman enough,' she says.

Semenya smiles before competing in the women's 200 meter during the Athletics Gauteng North Championships in Pretoria on March 13, 2020. In a tweet announcing her latest appeal, Semenya wrote, 'All we ask is to be able to run free as the strong and fearless women we are!!' This year, she launched a new appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which has not yet ruled on the case. Her subsequent appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal also failed. Ultimately, Semenya took her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which ruled against her in 2019, judging that the testosterone regulations were 'necessary, reasonable and proportionate' to ' the integrity of female athletics.' The battle over her eligibility, along with that of other athletes', has been waged ever since.

Her blistering speed and physique raised suspicions, and afterward, she was required to take a sex verification test.

She was just 18 when she blew away the field to win her first world championship in the 800 meters in Berlin. Semenya, 30, was raised female, identifies as female and is legally female. 'No freakin' way!' she told an interviewer on South African television. Under World Athletics' regulations, to compete in the restricted events, the affected DSD, or intersex, athletes are now required to lower their testosterone levels with birth control pills, hormone shots or surgery. Semenya has been in a long legal battle to 'run free'

Women race & class by angela y davis