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It’s 15 years ago this month that a teenage runner from South Africa was publicly scrutinized over her sex at a major sports event. The lesson everyone was meant to take from that was: never again.
Yet, the humiliation Caster Semenya faced has been repeated for two women competing in boxing at the Paris Olympics, exposing more female athletes to hurtful remarks and online abuse in a contentious divide over sex, gender and identity in sports.
While Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan could be basking in the pride of winning fights for their countries, they are instead having their sex questioned in front of the world after the Olympics-banned boxing federation claimed they failed sex verification tests last year but has given little information about them.
Olympic officials have called the arbitrary testing “so flawed that it’s impossible to engage with it” and stressed that both boxers were assigned female at birth, identify as women and are eligible to compete in women’s competitions. The two have still been bombarded with hateful remarks, sometimes from prominent people outside of the sports world.
“This has effects, massive effects,” Khelif said in Arabic in a recent interview with SNTV, a sports partner of The Associated Press. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.”
Their stories bear many resemblances to that of Semenya, the runner whose arrival in elite track and field at the 2009 world championships forced the sports world to confront an issue that is highly complex and also still largely characterized by the same misconceptions as back then.
Semenya was just 18 when she was thrust into the spotlight 15 years ago. She was subjected to sex verification tests and became the focus of unsavory rumors over the details of her body.
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She went on to become a two-time Olympic champion in the 800-meter race but is likely better known as the woman whose medical condition has meant she is effectively banned from competing in female track competitions unless she medically reduces her testosterone levels.
The noise around Khelif and Lin has mostly been ill-informed outcry, with many repeating false claims — which have been amplified by Russian disinformation networks — that the two are men or transgender. Semenya experienced the same vitriol. Her reaction to the degrading treatment of Khelif and Lin has been to ask how sports authorities couldn’t stop this from happening again.
“Sport is for all people and the constitution says no to discrimination. But the minute they allowed women to be disgraced, it confuses us,” Semenya said in an interview this week with the website SportsBoom.com. She called for leadership that “safeguards, protects and respects women.”
Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false claims that they are male or transgender.
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Semenya was born with one of a number of conditions known as differences of sex development, or DSDs. She was assigned female at birth and has always identified as a woman. Her condition gives her an XY chromosome pattern and elevated levels of testosterone.
Some sports, including track, say that gives her and other women like her an unfair advantage and have crafted eligibility rules that exclude her on that basis. Semenya has challenged the rules, and the correlation between testosterone and athletic advantage isn’t conclusive.
Another female athlete, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, also has waged a legal battle against the testosterone regulations and several other runners have been affected and sidelined over the last decade in track and field, the sport that has been most affected by the issue.
Male athletes are not required to regulate their natural levels of testosterone.
More masculine-presenting female athletes have long been bullied and questioned about their sex. That effect is magnified for those whose sexes are questioned at a highly watched international event.
In one of the most personal details of her struggle, Semenya said she was so angry, hurt and confused by her treatment at the 2009 championships that she told athletics officials she would show them her vagina as proof she was a woman. It took her more than a decade to tell that story publicly when she revealed it in an interview with HBO in 2022.
With it, Semenya offered something about how she felt her gender and her identity for her entire life was being overridden by others. She has called references to her being biologically male “deeply hurtful.”
Christine Mboma, a young runner from Namibia, also has a DSD condition. She won a silver medal at the last Olympics in Tokyo when she was also 18, the first woman from her southern African country ever to win an Olympic medal.
But she returned home to more skepticism than praise after her condition became public. The recent “Tested” podcast by public broadcasters NPR in the U.S. and CBC in Canada featured Mboma, outlining how people in Namibia started asking whether she was really a woman.
“It’s a public humiliation,” Mboma’s coach, Henk Botha, said on the podcast. “We need to understand, this is the life of somebody.”
Like Semenya and Mboma, both Khelif and Lin will return home with medals of achievement but possibly burdened by what kind of reaction and misconceptions might follow them. Khelif is 25 years old. Lin is 28.
The incredibly difficult debate over whether women with certain medical conditions have an unfair athletic advantage is relevant for sports. But Semenya said the way Khelif and Lin have been treated is “about principles of life.”
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