A recent ruling from the Swiss Supreme Court is a major victory for women’s athletes, defending biological standards for competition and preserving the integrity of women’s track and field on the global stage.
The Swiss Supreme Court denied the appeal of South African runner Caster Semenya, which means that Semenya will not be able to run the women’s 800 meters in the Tokyo Olympics. Semenya is intersex due to the 46 XY disorder of sexual development, which results in sexually ambiguous genitalia. Semenya is genetically male but was raised and identifies as a female. Semenya was fighting restrictions put in place by World Athletics, the international governing body of track and field.
This case is not as clear-cut as those of transgender athletes who typically make the news, but the ruling here is correct. World Athletics implemented regulations in 2018 requiring intersex athletes with XY chromosomes to lower their level of testosterone to compete in women’s track events between 400 and 1600 meters. Semenya won gold in the women’s 800 meters at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games.
World Athletics’s rules were upheld by the Court for Arbitration in Sport, which the Swiss Supreme Court confirmed had “the right to uphold the conditions of participation issued for female athletes with the genetic variant 46 XY DSD in order to guarantee fair competition for certain running disciplines in female athletics.”
It is expected that the International Olympic Committee will adopt the same set of regulations after the Tokyo Olympics to apply to transgender competitors. According to World Athletics, the lowest testosterone level found in biological men is still four times higher than the highest level found in women.
It’s a small victory for female athletes: Even if the IOC were to adopt those regulations, it would not account for the fact that biological men who had undergone male puberty will still have biological advantages over women regardless of their active testosterone levels. But it’s still a victory, one that at least makes the playing ground fair for women running in the Tokyo Olympics and beyond.
While progressive activists in the United States are looking to destroy women’s sports, with help from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Bostock case, global sports organizations are still moving to protecting the integrity of their women’s events. For once, we in the U.S. should be following the world’s example.
