The Court of Arbitration for Sport issued its long awaited ruling in the case of the South African woman runner, Caster Semenya.
The Court ruled that she can only participate in track events if she agrees to take medicines that would reduce her high naturally-occurring levels of testosterone. Semenya has rejected this option. Madeleine Pape, one of our CES Dissertation Fellows in the 2018-2019, is a former Australian Olympian who competed against Semenya in 2009. Pape’s dissertation research has led her to believe that the Court ruling is deeply mistaken and based on problematic science.
Pape has recently been interviewed on NPR and on the PBS News Hour. She explains her position in a piece in The Guardian where she urges the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to move instead to a policy that includes women with high natural testosterone. For an academic article, see Madeleine Pape, “The Fairest of Them All: Gender-Determining Institutions and the Science of Sex Testing.” Pp. 177-200 in Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal, editors, Gender Panic, Gender Policy, vol. 24 (2017) in Advances in Gender Research.