Track's New Gender Rules Could Exclude Some Female Athletes

The regulations are certain to cause further controversy, and perhaps bring another legal challenge to the most elemental of sports, in which competition is divided into male and female categories, while biological sex is not nearly so neat and binary. Track and field has gone through contortions on this issue for years, most visibly regarding Caster Semenya of South Africa, a dominant middle distance runner and two-time Olympic champion at 800 meters.

Female track athletes with elevated levels of testosterone, a condition known as hyperandrogenism, will be required to lower the amount of the hormone circulating in their blood for six months before being allowed to compete from the quarter-mile to the mile in major international events like the Olympics and the world championships.

The affected athletes — characterized in the regulations as “athletes with differences of sexual development” — will then have to maintain those lower levels to remain eligible for international meets.

If they do not, they will be faced with difficult choices — hormone therapy; restricting their performances to national meets; competing against men; entering events for so-called intersex athletes, if any are offered; moving to longer or shorter distances; or essentially giving up their chance to participate in the sport’s most prestigious competitions.

The regulations are meant to ensure “fair and meaningful competition within the female classification,” according to track’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, known as the IAAF.

Athletes will not be required to undergo surgery to lower their hormone levels, the IAAF said, adding that the regulations are “in no way intended as any kind of judgment on, or questioning of, the sex or the gender identity of any athlete.”

The regulations will affect female track athletes with naturally occurring testosterone levels above 5 nanomoles per liter. According to the IAAF, most women, including elite female athletes, have testosterone levels from 0.12 to 1.79 nanomoles per liter, while the normal male range is 7.7 to 29.4 nanomoles per liter.

With testosterone levels between 5 and 10 nanomoles per liter, the IAAF said, women gain a clear performance advantage derived from a 4.4 percent increase in muscle mass, a 12 percent to 26 percent increase in muscle strength and a 7.8 percent increase in hemoglobin, which transports oxygen in red blood cells.

“To the best of our knowledge, there is no other genetic or biological trait encountered in female athletics that confers such a huge performance advantage,” the IAAF said in the regulations and supporting documents obtained by The New York Times.

The regulations follow a 2017 study, commissioned by the IAAF and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, which showed that women with elevated testosterone levels gained a competitive advantage from 1.78 percent to 4.53 percent in events such as the 400 meters, the 400-meter hurdles, the 800 meters, the hammer throw and the pole vault.

Even a small edge can mean the difference between a gold, silver or bronze medal, or finishing off the podium entirely, in events decided by tenths or hundredths of a second, the IAAF said.

The regulations represent an attempt by the IAAF to reinstate rules governing female athletes with elevated testosterone levels, which were suspended in 2015 by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, a rough equivalent of the Supreme Court for international sports.

The court ruled then that the IAAF had not sufficiently quantified the performance advantage gained by athletes with raised testosterone levels. That case involved an Indian sprinter named Dutee Chand. The new regulations would not affect her events, the 100 and 200 meters.

Many factors affect performance, and the IAAF has struggled to show conclusively that elevated testosterone provided women with more of a significant competitive edge than factors like nutrition, age, height, weight, access to coaching and training facilities, and other genetic and biological variations like oxygen-carrying capacity.

Even before being officially published, the new IAAF regulations have come under criticism.

Because the hammer throw and the pole vault, which showed the highest performance advantage for women with elevated testosterone in the 2017 IAAF study, are not included in the new rules, the regulations appear to be arbitrary and political and not based on solid science, said Katrina Karkazis, a bioethicist and visiting senior fellow at the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale, who has written extensively on hyperandrogenism and athletic performance.

“Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it has,” she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

She and others have argued that the IAAF’s rules will force some women to undergo hormone therapy that could adversely affect their health; will be humiliating; will disproportionately affect women from developing nations who do not conform to Western standards of femininity; and will ultimately lead to some elite women quitting the sport.

Female athletes with elevated testosterone levels will essentially face a “choice of no choice,” Karkazis said.

Much of the debate about female athletes and hyperandrogenism has focused on Semenya, winner of the 800 meters at the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympics.

At the recent Commonwealth Games, held in Australia, where Semenya won the 800 and 1,500 meters, an Australian runner named Brittany McGowan expressed her frustration about competing against athletes with elevated testosterone, telling reporters, “It’s tough for a lot of women in the 800 meters, 400 meters and 1,500 meters at the moment to compare ourselves and be judged by our governing bodies on those times.”

But a study published in April in the Journal of Sports Sciences noted that Semenya’s average faster speed of 1.49 percent in the 800 fell far short of the 10 percent performance advantage that men generally have over women.

Paul Melia, president and chief executive of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, said in an interview from Ottawa, Ontario on Wednesday that because athletes with hyperandrogenism identify and live as females, and present physically as females, “they have a human right to participate in sport in the gender they identify with.”

Melia continued: “If the IAAF applies that policy and a woman whose naturally occurring testosterone falls outside that range, they’re going to say to her: ‘We’re not preventing you from competing. You can compete with males.’ I don’t think that’s right.”

The New York Times