Why You Can’t Discuss Lia Thomas Without Talking About Caster Semenya

• Lia Thomas made history as the first transgender woman to win an NCAA national title.
• Her win has sparked a debate about the role of testosterone levels in women’s sports and who gets to dictate those policies.
• African female athletes, like Caster Semenya, have fought similar accusations over the years.

On March 17, Lia Thomas made history as the first transgender woman to win an NCAA national title in any sport.

Her win reignited a debate that has loomed over women’s sports over the past decade: what is the role of testosterone in determining whether a player is qualified to compete? What defines a woman and who gets to create that definition?

Thomas has undergone intense scrutiny and accusations that she has an unfair advantage over her competitors because she spent a large portion of her life biologically male. World Athletics President Sebastian Coe reportedly defended the organization’s testosterone regulations, saying that the future of female sports is “fragile.”

African female athletes, including Caster Semenya, have faced the same accusations for years.

 

Brett Davis-USA TODAY Sports

After her reign as one of the top athletes in the world, winning gold medals at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, middle-distance runner Caster Semenya was barred from competing in any future games.

In 2018, World Athletics — the international governing body responsible for the rules and regulations of sports such as track and field — created a “protected” women’s category, which disqualified Semenya from competing.

The rule also impacted 45 other female athletes across three events, many of whom were from African countries.

“It’s disgusting what is happening,” Nana Brantuo, a Black Studies Scholar at the University of Maryland, told Insider.

Former World Athletics Council member Steve Cornelius told Insider he did not believe this rule would exist if the athletes affected were European women.

“If these athletes were blonde and Scandinavian, or Russian and they looked like supermodels, would we be having this debate? We’re having this debate because they don’t like the appearance of these athletes,” Cornelius said.

The “protected” women’s category was created to exclude athletes who are considered DSD, which refers to differences in sexual development.

After learning about the new policy, Cornelius stepped down from  World Athletics in 2018.

He isn’t the only one questioning the legitimacy of the category.

Brantuo called the “protected” category one of the most explicit forms of anti-Blackness she has ever seen, and said it speaks to the dehumanization and discrimination Black women athletes such as Simone Biles and Serena Williams face internationally.

 

Alexander Hassenstein/Getty

Semenya continues to fight.

According to World Athletics, a DSD athlete is a legally female or intersex athlete that has either an XY chromosome, testes, circulating testosterone in the male-specified range of7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L rather than the lower female-specified range of 0.06 to 1.68 nmol/L, or they are androgen sensitive.

Over the past few years, Semenya has become the most prominent face of the DSD gender athlete category, but the rule has impacted other talented African female athletes, as well.

Semenya said she tried using the recommended hormonal drugs to reduce her natural testosterone levels in order to compete, but the medication made her “constantly sick.”

In a press release, she wrote, “No other woman should be forced to go through this in order to have the same right that all women have — to do what we love and run the way we were born.”

The belief that testosterone is an athletic miracle potion is not supported by science, Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Amherst and author of “Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, told Insider earlier this year.

“I don’t see why you’d subject someone to medical treatment for non-medical reasons just because you don’t like the fact that she fits into a category that you’ve created,” Cornelius said.

Anti-Blackness goes beyond one Black athlete’s success.

Supporters of the protected category have argued the criteria is necessary because there are scientific and hormonal differences between male and females. They say the rules have nothing to do with anti-Blackness.

However, doctors have stated that testosterone doesn’t impact an athlete’s performance.

In 2021, The Telegraph reported that the evidence gathered by two World Athletics scientists that claimed to show increases in performance from females with high testosterone levels was found to be misleading.

“To be explicit, there is no confirmatory evidence for causality in the observed relationships reported,” Stephane Bermon, the current director of World Athletics’ health and science department, said after the findings were made public. “We acknowledge that our 2017 study was exploratory.”

 

Patrick Smith/Getty Images

Black athletes are over-tested, villainized, and dehumanized routinely, Brantuo said, so even if they are able to compete, they are still dealing with other forms of systemic anti-Blackness.

In February, 15-year-old Russian phenom Kamila Valieva failed her drug test at the Winter Olympics in Beijing but was still able to compete, drawing criticism.

Just seven months earlier, prior to the Tokyo Summer Games, American track star Sha’Carri Richardson failed a drug test and Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare failed a doping test.

Both Black athletes were not allowed to compete in the Olympic games.

Brantuo said the banning of Semenya, Richardson, and Okagbare is tightly linked to the villainization Black female athletes face internationally.

Whether it’s Serena Williams facing internet conspiracies that she was born a man, or Simone Biles receiving lower scores after performing moves that few other female gymnasts have been able to successfully execute, Black female athletes have fought countless forms of misogyny and racism worldwide.

“The idea that us saying that [these policies] only impacts one group of specific people makes it any less anti-Black is very wrong,” Brantuo said.

A former member of World Athletics said the organization still has a “colonial view.”

Over the last few years, Semenya has taken the fight against World Athletic’s head on. Her lawsuits were tried at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful.

A representative at World Athletics told Insider in an email that they stand by the “protected” women’s category because their criteria has been dictated by medical experts. They referenced the challenging of the rule during Semenya’s legal battle in 2019 with the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Its executive summary reads:

“A necessary, reasonable and proportionate means of achieving the legitimate objective of ensuring fair competition in female athletics in certain events and protecting the “protected class” of female athletes in those events.”

However, Cornelius said World Athletics has tried to “regulate” women’s competition since 2010. The first athlete to challenge the criteria was Indian runner Dutee Chand. She has hyperandrogenism — a condition that places her natural testosterone levels outside the specified female range — and, in 2014, won her lawsuit in court.

As a South African, Cornelius’ decision to step down from the World Athletics’ body in 2018 was a matter of fairness, he tells Insider. As a member of the Disciplinary Tribunal, he said he couldn’t enforce the “protected” women’s category criteria on Semenya or any other woman because he said the World Athletics suffers from the vestiges of colonialism.

World Athletics was born during the height of global colonialism in 1912. Moreover, most people who decided the protected criteria a few years ago were white European men.

“That colonial view is still there,” Cornelius said. “It’s still pretty much Europe dictating to the world in most sports. They tolerate the US and others simply because of the power they have in sport. You can’t really ignore the US or Australia.”

 

AP Photo/Petr David Josek

Black female athletes from African nations will continue to be targets, advocates say.

Semenya and Athletic South Africa, the sports international governing body for South Africa, escalated the matter to the European Court of Justice.

As for now, the “protected” women’s category only applies to three events — the 800m, 400m, and 1500m — because the World Athletic body stated that’s when the higher testosterone levels create the largest advantage.

However, people on both sides of the debate suspect that with Namibia’s Christine Mboma’s second-place finish in the women’s 200m at the 2020 Olympics, the “protected” criteria will spread to other women’s events.

Because of Mboma’s high testosterone count, she is not able to compete in the 800m, 400m, and 1500m events.

“For African women, there is a particular pathologizing that is just ages old that we know to be based in othering Black women,” Brantuo said. “It’s undeniable whether from Ghana, Jamaica or South Africa there are different circumstances that many of these athletes face and are subjected to throughout international sporting events that just don’t match up to their white peers.”