#katrina karkazis women sports regulations
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https://twitter.com/BarbraBanda11/status/1543707237184675844
Barbra Banda, a rising star in women's soccer and the captain of Zambia's national team, was ruled ineligible for this summer's Africa Cup of Nations by "gender verification" tests, according to Zambian soccer authorities and multiple reports.
Banda, a 22-year-old forward, scored two hat tricks at last summer's Olympics and has excelled for her Chinese club, Shanghai Shengli. But she was mysteriously "unavailable" for Zambia's women's AFCON opener on Sunday due to what Zambia's soccer federation (FAZ) called "medical reasons."
Reports soon emerged that pre-tournament tests had revealed natural testosterone levels that exceeded limits set by governing bodies. Andrew Kamanga, the FAZ president, said in a statement Wednesday that the rules are those of the African soccer confederation, CAF, and in line with regulations developed by FIFA, the sport's global governing body.
CAF has distanced itself from Banda's absence, and did not respond to Yahoo Sports' request for comment. But Kamanga told BBC Sport Africa: "All the players had to undergo gender verification, a CAF requirement, and unfortunately she did not meet the criteria set by CAF."
An official CAF document requires team physicians to attest that players have "been examined ... to verify their gender," and that the players "do not show any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics and are therefore presumed to be of female gender."
In 2011, FIFA outlined similar "gender verification" regulations that required soccer federations to "actively investigat[e] any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics" — which are physical traits typically associated with one sex but not directly involved in reproduction. Entire women's national teams have been required to confirm, via team doctors and personal medical documents, that they are women. If necessary, the regulations state, a medical officer can call for "a physical examination performed by an independent expert."
Rights advocates and scientists have criticized the requirements, calling them invasive and discriminatory — and devised primarily by Western men, based on traditional Western gender classifications, but applied across global populations.
"These policies and procedures violate the athlete’s privacy, and the tests themselves violate bodily autonomy," Katrina Karkazis, an Amherst professor who has studied sexuality and testosterone, told Yahoo Sports.
They also completely exclude certain athletes like Banda, who, as a woman, likely would not be allowed to compete in men's soccer either. "For FIFA men's competitions, only men are eligible to play," FIFA's regulations state.
Those regulations — although currently under review, according to FIFA — have not been walked back. And CAF's are similar, if not stricter, according to Zambian officials.
Last fall, the International Olympic Committee updated its guidance to discourage "invasive physical examinations" and "policies that require women to modify their hormone levels to compete." Those, the IOC said, are "disrespectful" and "potentially harmful," and "can have serious adverse impacts on their health."
IOC officials said they'd heard directly from athletes who explained that old regulations, which mandated testosterone suppression, "generated severe harm to their health." In one high-profile case, South African runner Caster Semenya recently told HBO that testosterone suppression drugs "made me sick, made me gain weight," gave her panic attacks, and made her worry about heart attacks.
"It's like stabbing yourself with a knife every day," Semenya said. If she wanted to compete, she "had no choice" but to take the drugs. She instead gave them up and, by extension, gave up her Olympic dreams.
According to Zambian officials, Banda and other players faced a similar choice. FAZ spokesman Sydney Mungala told ESPN that, in the aftermath of Banda's breakout performance at the Olympics, she was told that her testosterone levels were above CAF's threshold, and was offered medication to lower them. "Our medics engaged the players and they weren't willing to go through with it," Mungala said, citing the potential side effects.
BBC Sport Africa reported that Banda had taken medication, but still did not meet testosterone requirements.
Banda's hormone levels have not affected her participation in professional leagues. She played for DUX Logroño in Spain as a teen, then moved to Shanghai. She is now reportedly the subject of interest from Real Madrid, among other top European clubs, and could make a move this summer.
"The players being denied an opportunity to showcase their skills on African soil have been free to play at FIFA- and International Olympic Committee-organized competitions that deploy a less stringent standard,” Kamanga, the FAZ president, said in his statement.
But Banda will not appear at the African continental championship for her national team. Nor will three lesser-known teammates who, according to reports, have also been deemed ineligible by the "gender verification" process. Their "opportunity," Mungala told ESPN, "has been lost."
Banda has not commented publicly on the situation. While sidelined, she has been telling her teammates: "I am with you all the way."
FIFA spokespeople did not immediately respond to questions about the governing body's rules. FIFA has said it is "currently reviewing its gender eligibility regulations," and consulting medical, legal, scientific, performance and human rights experts, but it has not commented on Banda's case.
https://sports.yahoo.com/barbra-banda-gender-verification-fifa-caf-zambia-afcon-150329380.html
#rmsoccer
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How sexism and transphobia stop cis women from competing in sports
This is madness. Two of the world’s three fastest women’s 400m sprinters have been banned from the Olympics because of high testosterone levels.
When are people going to understand that all people are different and that it is this variation that makes life, including sports, a rich and meaningful experience?
Sports will never be completely “fair” in the sense that all are competing on completely equal terms. To achieve that they would all have to be of equal height and weight, having the same muscle mass and the same stamina, at which point all sports events would become boring as heaven.
NBC reports:
Two of the world’s three fastest women’s 400m sprinters this year were ruled ineligible to run the event at the Olympics due to a rule capping testosterone levels in women’s events from the 400m through the mile, according to their National Olympic Committee.
Namibians Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi, both 18, “have a natural high testosterone level” after undergoing medical tests for athletes with differences of sexual development, according to the Namibia Olympic Committee.
“According to the rules of World Athletics, this means that they are not eligible to participate in events from 400m to 1600m,” according to the committee. ...
It’s the same rule that affected all three Rio Olympic 800m medalists — Caster Semenya of South Africa, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya — and Niger’s Aminatou Seyni, who was the world’s third-fastest 400m runner in 2019 before moving to the 200m for that year’s world championships.
Some would probably say that this is not about transphobia, but about testosterone-levels only. But it cannot be a coincidence that these policies are implemented at the same time that activists try to ban transgender women (most of whom have lower levels of T) from sports. They use the exact same arguments and the goal is the same: To ensure that all women, cis or trans, live up to the ideals of the gender police.
Jaimie Schultz writes in Sports in Society:
“Since the 1930s, sports administrators have insisted on various mechanisms to assess ‘femaleness’ for the purpose of competition in women’s sport. Most recently, the criterion has turned to testosterone. Specifically, if a woman naturally produces testosterone that registers in what sport authorities consider an ‘unnatural’ range, she must suppress that testosterone to compete in women’s events. The testosterone threshold will undoubtedly expand to include cis, intersex, and trans sportswomen, despite their respective and significant differences.
Taken together, these types of regulations are confusing and contradictory, quite possibly sexist, and most assuredly ‘wicked’, as Rittel and Webber formulated with regard to ‘wicked problems’. A historical analysis of the regulations for ‘femaleness’ in sport, contextualized with other testosterone-related policies, reveals the impossibility of sex determination, the faulty assertion that testosterone is a ‘male hormone’, and the prioritization of sporting rights over human rights.”
It is time to stop policing the bodies of women, whether they are cis or trans. This is what the unholy alliance between “gender critical feminists” and the traditionalist patriarchs leads to. Note also that most of these women are Black. Racism, misogyny and transphobia go hand in hand.
For more info:
Science Daily: “Testosterone limits for female athletes based on 'flawed' research”
Severine Lamon: “Do naturally high testosterone levels equal stronger female athletic performance? Not necessarily”
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Katrina Karkazis in Scientific American: “Myths about Testosterone”
Jaimie Schultz: “Good enough? The ‘wicked’ use of testosterone for defining femaleness in women’s sport”
Top photo of Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi (Instagram @christine.mboma and @beatrice_masilingi)
#racism#transphobia#sports#testosterone#transgender#trans#black athletes#terf#gender critical#sexism#feminism
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It’s a sad fact that gender policing of women athletes is as much a part of Olympic tradition as the torch-lighting ceremony. “Sex tests” have a long and ignoble history in Olympic sport; sports governing bodies have used everything from physical examinations to chromosomal testing to determine women’s eligibility. Testosterone levels are their screen du jour. At the 2016 Rio Games, two women runners—Dutee Chand of India and Caster Semenya of South Africa—are experiencing baseless scrutiny because they have hyperandrogenism, which means they have higher than typical testosterone levels for women. While the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) argue that this gives the athletes an unfair advantage, there’s no evidence showing that women with higher natural testosterone levels have a significant competitive advantage over women with lower levels. Instead, the specious questioning of the athletes has more to do with old-school conceptions of gender and the rigid orthodoxy of Olympic sport.
To untangle the political thicket of so-called sex testing, who better to turn to than Katrina Karkazis? Karkazis is a senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. Her research on “sex testing” policies, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, has appeared in Science and The BMJ, and she’s written essays for outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian. She also served as an expert witness in Chand’s case. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is at work on a new book with Rebecca Jordan-Young, T: The Unauthorized Biography (Harvard University Press), that explores the many scientific and social identities of testosterone in high stakes domains like sport.
Hyperandrogenism is a medical term describing women who have higher than typical testosterone levels. These women are not doping or cheating; this has never been a point of contention. Nevertheless, in 2011 and 2012, the IAAF and the IOC introduced regulations under the false assumption that women with naturally high testosterone have an “unfair advantage” over women with lower levels. Policymakers set a ceiling for women’s natural testosterone —or “T”—requiring them to lower their testosterone via drugs or surgery or else quit sport. These interventions carry side effects that can be debilitating to an athlete, so complying also means giving up one’s career. It’s a choice of no choice.
IAAF medical experts revealed—unethically—that they performed medically unnecessary surgery on four young women from “rural or mountainous regions of developing countries” to lower their T so that they could remain eligible. Alarmingly, they also performed clitoral reduction surgery. Others quit rather than undergo these invasive interventions.
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Illogically, even taken at face value, the study’s findings don’t support the new regulation. Here’s why: testosterone was said to make a significant difference in five events. Women athletes were separated into three groups based on testosterone level, and the performances of the highest and lowest tertiles were compared. The biggest differences were in hammer throw (4.53%) and pole vault (2.94%). Smaller differences were shown for three running events—400m, 400m hurdles, and 800m (2.73%, 2.78% and 1.78%, respectively). Which events are included in the regulation? Not those with the greatest relation to testosterone, but the ones with the weakest. The 1500m, for which there was no effect, was also lumped in.
And in this calculated selection, the contours of IAAF politics are revealed. This is a regulation to exclude women from middle-distance running events, the events in which women from the global south have excelled for decades. An IAAF official’s 2012 remarks revealed the geographic focus of his concerns:“[A]thletics is a whole world sport, it’s not purely the Caucasian sports. We have a lot of people coming from Africa, Asia and we have a lot of these [intersex] cases coming from these countries.”
The treatment of Caster Semenya shows athletics' bias against women of colour | Katrina Karkazis | Opinion | The Guardian
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This Intersex Runner Had Surgery to Compete. It Has Not Gone Well.
Annet Negesa had just finished training in Kampala, Uganda, in June 2012 when she received a call from a doctor from track and field’s world governing body. He told her that she would no longer be competing in the London Olympics because her testosterone levels were too high for competition.
“I went back into the house and started crying,” she recalled.
Negesa was 20 at the time and one of the top athletes in her country, a promising middle-distance runner who had set a national record for 800 meters earlier in the year at a meet in Hengelo, the Netherlands. She was a three-time national champion and took home a gold medal at the 2011 All-Africa Games. The Uganda Athletics Federation named her athlete of the year.
World Athletics, formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations, or I.A.A.F., track and field’s world governing body, did not catch Negesa using performance-enhancing drugs. Rather, she is an intersex athlete.
She identifies as female and was born with external female genitalia but also with internal male genitalia that produce levels of testosterone that men do. According to sports officials, that gave her an unfair advantage over most women in some events.
What makes Negesa different from so many other intersex athletes is that she tried to alter her body with surgery so she could continue to compete. Negesa claims that a doctor for World Athletics recommended the surgery. The federation denies this.
For seven years, Negesa, 27, refused to speak about what happened. But time did little to assuage her grievances.
“Now I see my body as different, very, very different,” she said. “I don’t know how to talk about it.”
The years since the surgery have been a struggle. Negesa has battled persistent headaches and achy joints. Her postoperative care, she said, has not included the kind of hormone treatment that might have helped her body adjust to the change.
“What happened to Annet is dangerous, and happened because she wanted to compete,” said Payoshni Mitra, a researcher and activist on gender and sports who has lectured on the topic of intersex athletes.
For the past decade, Mitra has stood alongside numerous intersex athletes, including Caster Semenya, the South African middle-distance champion, and Dutee Chand, the Indian sprinter. Negesa’s case, however, was one of the most difficult ones for Mitra to reconcile because Negesa opted to have surgery.
For years, World Athletics has struggled to create rules that maintain a level playing field for the overwhelming majority of women with only female genitalia without impinging on the human rights of intersex people, who account for roughly one in every 2,000 births. A study this year found that female athletes with male testosterone levels are overrepresented in women’s middle-distance races.
World Athletics, in a decade of research, found that nearly seven in every 1,000 elite female athletes are intersex athletes with levels of testosterone within the male range. Some endocrinologists have concluded it remains unclear whether high testosterone gives athletes a competitive edge, but many scientists believe it does.
After years of litigation, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in May upheld World Athletics’ testosterone restrictions for female athletes in races with distances from 400 meters to the mile. The court ruled by a 2-to-1 vote that the restrictions were indeed discriminatory but also a “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” means of achieving the World Athletics goal of preserving a level playing field in women’s track events.
Most women, including elite female athletes, have natural testosterone levels of 0.12 to 1.79 nanomoles per liter, World Athletics said, while the typical male range after puberty is much higher, at 7.7 to 29.4 nanomoles per liter.
Intersex athletes who want to participate in middle-distance women’s track events must take hormone-suppressing drugs and reduce testosterone levels below five nanomoles per liter for six months before competing, then maintain those lowered levels.
But Negesa, the eldest of nine siblings raised in a village in Jinja, Uganda, southeast of the Nile, had a much more invasive intervention after she learned in 2012 that she could not compete.
She said a World Athletics physician, Dr. Stéphane Bermon, told her she needed to undergo medical treatment and was given surgery as her first option: a gonadectomy to remove her internal testes.
“I love my sport so much, that’s why I decided to go for the surgery,” she said in a recent video interview from Germany, where she now lives.
After Negesa appeared in a documentary on German television’s ARD network in October, World Athletics issued a statement denying that it participated in or recommended a specific treatment to Negesa.
“Dr. Bermon has never met the athlete in question and was not at either the consultation in Nice nor the surgery she speaks of in Uganda,” the statement said. Through a World Athletics spokesman, Dr. Bermon declined to comment.
Negesa said she traveled alone to Nice for medical tests soon after learning she could not compete. She recalled having her body measurements taken by two doctors who spoke in French. Negesa speaks Swahili and English.
“It was so weird,” she recalled. “I was shy.”
She returned to Kampala for treatment, and paid $900 for the procedure.
On the morning of her surgery in Kampala, she had little knowledge of what she was about to undergo. Doctors had told her that it was a simple surgery and that she would return to competition in a few weeks.
“I woke up in the morning feeling cuts on my body,” she said. “I felt so scared. I didn’t know that I was going to be cut open.”
She hasn’t returned to the sport and has suffered from depression and joint pain since the operation.
Negesa’s medical records from the Women’s Hospital International & Fertility Centre in Kampala were reviewed by The New York Times and confirm that World Athletics, then known as the I.A.A.F., recommended a thorough medical examination, citing the high levels of testosterone in her body. The report states that after her testing in Nice she had a gonadectomy in Kampala. The document states that her surgeon in Kampala, Dr. Edward Tamale Sali, did not start her on hormone therapy because he was awaiting further discussion with Dr. Bermon.
Dr. Tamale Sali declined to comment.
In 2013, Dr. Bermon, now director of the World Athletics’ health and science department, published a report citing four unidentified athletes from developing countries who were referred to hospitals in France for naturally high testosterone levels.
“I think I was the first one,” Negesa said of the four athletes cited in the study. She said Dr. Bermon was the World Athletics official who first called her in 2012.
After Negesa’s appearance in the German documentary in September, 25 French athletes wrote to World Athletics, the International Olympic Committee and the minister of sports and health calling for an investigation.
The French minister of sports and minister of health opened a joint investigation in October.
In its statement, World Athletics said it does not advise athletes on preferred treatments and did not do so in this case. The global federation “has never forced any athlete affected by its regulations to undergo surgery, nor paid for any of their treatment.”
In March, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned World Athletics’ attempt to regulate female athletes’ testosterone levels. And in May the World Medical Association advised physicians around the world to abstain from implementing the new regulations.
“They are assigned female at birth and have grown up to have a female gender identity, so there’s no question that they belong in that category,” said Katrina Karkazis, a fellow at Yale University’s Global Health Justice Partnership.
Negesa said that returning home, where L.G.B.T. individuals are openly condemned, would lead to imprisonment or death.
She filed for asylum in Berlin in September, and was granted it this month.
She runs every day, with the hope of one day returning to international competition. Her next step, though, is litigation. “I need to take them to court,” she said of World Athletics, “for violating my human rights.”
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New Advocate Essay: Bullying Intersex Women Athletes with High T
Well, they changed my original title - “Bullying By Any Other Name: What’s Really Behind Regulations for Women with High Testosterone” - to, “Stop Freaking Out About Female Intersex Athletes”, but otherwise I’m thrilled to have this essay run in the Advocate! (Read here: http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/09/18/op-ed-stop-freaking-out-about-female-intersex-athletes).
It elaborates on the issue in all the ways I didn’t have time to during my Aljazeera interview two weeks ago, particularly how examining intersex women’s actual performance records, as well as how sporting policies work, reveals that it's prejudice, not “fairness”, truly informing and enabling the current regulations.
I’m also thrilled they included a link to the petition to Let Dutee Run. Indian athlete Dutee Chand, the latest victim of these discriminatory regulations, has refused to alter her body in order to compete, and needs our support fighting the ruling against her. Please sign and share: https://www.change.org/p/let-dutee-run-don-t-ban-women-athletes-for-high-natural-testosterone
Enjoy!
#advocate intersex athletes#women athletes high testosterone#stop freaking out about intersex#katrina karkazis women sports regulations#dutee chand#payoshni mitra#NYU Sports & Policy Program intersex
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Don’t let sports competitions be shaped by misguided “T Talk”
The myth of testosterone is now not only used ti stop transgender women from competing in sports. It is also used to attack intersex women.
In this article Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis documents that the current attacks against female athletes is based on misunderstandings and a misguided understanding of fairness in sports. You cannot reduce athletic abilities to the amount of T in their blood.
The new rule of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is unscientific, unethical and discriminatory, Jordan-Young and Krkazis argue:
In three of 11 running events [in the research used by IAAF], the lowest T group did better, and the strongest association across all events was the negativeassociation between T and performance in the 100 meters, where lower T athletes ran 5.4 percent faster than the highest T athletes. In none of the events where high T athletes performed better was the gap greater than 2.9 percent.
One independent group requested and obtained a subset of the IAAF data, concluding: “The results of [the IAAF’s first study] are clearly unreliable, and those of [the second study] are of unknown validity,” making it “impossible” to discern the real relationship, if any, between T and performance. Clearly, though, neither this study nor the broader sports science literature support the IAAF’s claim that targeted athletes “have the same advantages over [other] women as men do over women.”
The IAAF seems to be targeting trans and intersex women, leaving other women with high testosterone levels out of the policy:
Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the most common reason that women have naturally high T levels, and congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) were recently explicitly excluded from the 2019 regulations even when their levels exceed the threshold, though the IAAF has argued that women with PCOS and CAH derive “advantage” from high T.
Likewise, recent IAAF statements highlight sex-atypical chromosomes and gonads, which functions as a dog whistle to suggest that the targeted women athletes are not “really” women.
This is not about fairness. This is about bigotry and the need to force women into a narrow view of normalcy. Indeed, Stéphane Bermon, the director of the IAAF Health and Science Department, has presented an “ideal female phenotype” at scientific conferences, namely La Maja Desnuda by Francisco Goya (which I cannot include here because of tumblr’s ridiculous female presenting nipple policy). But believe me, this ideal is not based on science.
You can read the whole article here.
Photo of Caster Semenya. Getty Images
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