What No One Is Telling You About Caster Semenya: She Has XY
Chromosomes
Plus The Usain Bolt/Michael Phelps Comparisons Don’t Work and More
By Robert Johnson
May 2, 2019
"Let me start by saying, none of what I write below should be viewed as a
personal attack on Caster Semenya. I have the utmost respect for her.
Instead of writing up tons of praise for her, I’ll just share a tweet that one of
my employees sent out yesterday as it’s better than anything I could have
written myself.
That being said, I’m writing this column as I feel like the average person who
hasn’t been following the Caster Semenya situation closely and woke up
yesterday to see Semenya headlines in newspapers and on websites across
the globe likely has no idea what is going on. The mainstream reporting on
Semenya is very misleading, to say the least so let me share a few key facts
that you likely haven’t read anywhere else.
Semenya flexing her muscles at the Pre Classic in 2018
1) Caster Semenya Has XY Chromosomes
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that virtually every major outlet in the world
reporting the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling yesterday has failed to
mention one of the most important facts of the entire case. Caster Semenya
has XY chromosomes. It was generally accepted by people following the
case closely that Semenya was XY, but now it’s been confirmed as fact since
the CAS press release specifically says, “The DSD covered by the
Regulations are limited to athletes with ’46 XY DSD’ – i.e. conditions where
the affected individual has XY chromosomes.” If she wasn’t XY, the IAAF’s
regulations wouldn’t apply to her and she’d have no reason to challenge
them.
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(In case you forgot what you learned in junior high biology, typically females
have XX chromosomes while males are XY).
How the Associated Press, Reuters, NY Times, NPR, Washington Post, and
BBC could all leave this CRUCIAL fact out of their reporting is beyond me.
Not a single one of them mentioned it at all. It should have been in the lead
paragraph of every story so people like my mother, who sent me a confused
email after she saw an article on Semenya, can really understand what this is
all about. Instead, the closest we get to the truth was that some of the
articles talked about how Semenya has intersex “traits” or “characteristics.”
Let’s be real, if you are an XY woman, you are the very definition of what
virtually everyone would think of as intersex.
Because of the glaring XY omission, many across the globe ended up
reading opening paragraphs like this from the front page of the New York
Times:
Female track athletes with naturally elevated levels of testosterone must
decrease the hormone to participate in certain races at major competitions
like the Olympics, the highest court in international sports said Wednesday in
a landmark ruling amid the pitched debate over who can compete in
women’s events.
If I had been writing for the NY Times, I’d have added just six words and there
would have been no confusion as to what really happened.
Intersex track athletes with XY chromosomes and naturally elevated levels of
testosterone must decrease the hormone to participate in certain races
versus women at major competitions like the Olympics, the highest court in
international sports said Wednesday in a landmark ruling amid the pitched
debate over who can compete in women’s events.
The NY Times put Semenya on its front page but somehow failed to mention
Semenya is XY.
This is an incredibly complex issue, and one of the reasons for that
complexity is that the IAAF has two categories in which athletes can
compete: male and female. The problem is, human biology doesn’t always
neatly divide into male or female. Some people — intersex people — have
traits of both sexes. Semenya isn’t male, but in addition to Y chromosomes,
she is believed to have internal testes and lack a womb or ovaries —
characteristics we don’t traditionally associate with females. However, you’d
likely never know that from reading the coverage in the mainstream press on
Wednesday.
The issue is complex but nuance matters. Our own title on the homepage of
LetsRun.com about the news was originally incorrect. Originally our headline
on the homepage said, “Caster Semenya Loses CAS Case, Can Only
Compete In 800 If She Suppresses Testosterone.” A visitor pointed out that
title was inaccurate as Semenya was free to compete in the “open” or
“men’s” category without suppressing her testosterone. So we changed it to
“Caster Semenya Loses CAS Case, Can Only Compete In Women’s 800 If
She Suppresses Testosterone.”
2) The “Michael Phelps” or “Usain Bolt” Genetic Outliers Argument Isn’t A
Good One
Many people who support Semenya use the argument that elite sports are
often about genetic outliers dominating. Usain Bolt had really long legs and
Michael Phelps had really long arms, so why can’t Semenya have really high
testosterone?
That’s a bad analogy. Sports organizations don’t classify athletes by arm or
leg length, but they do classify athletes by sex. If they didn’t, women
wouldn’t have a chance to excel at the very top levels of sport as men’s world
record are consistently 10-12% better than women’s world records in sports
like track and swimming. In tennis, even a great like Serena Williams admits
she couldn’t get a game off a top male pro like Andy Murray. If sports
organizations didn’t classify by sex, there would be almost zero female
Olympians save for sports like maybe equestrian.
There is no human right to compete in a particular category of professional
sports. Sports governing bodies exclude certain types of people from certain
categories of sports all the time. In boxing, a 210-pound boxer can’t fight as
a flyweight (112 lb max) as the flyweight would have little realistic chance of
winning.
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To say that an XY human can’t compete in the women’s category of
professional sports unless they lower their testosterone below 5 nmol/L — a
figure that is still 7.5 times the value of the average woman competing at the
2011 and 2013 track and field World Championships and a figure that not a
single healthy woman born with XX chromosomes, ovaries, and producing
estrogen at puberty can reach — isn’t a huge human rights travesty. It’s a
protection of women’s sports.
3) No, Intersex People Don’t Make Up Anywhere Close To 1.7% Of The
Population (Being Intersex Isn’t Nearly As Common As Having Red Hair), But
All Three Women’s Olympic 800 Medallists From 2016 Are Believed To Be
Intersex
BBC Gender & Identity reporter Megha Mohan ended her story on Semenya
with the following two sentences. “According to a 2016 report by the UN,
between 0.5 and 1.7 percent of children are born with intersex conditions. For
the upper level that’s roughly the same born with red hair.”
Again, this is totally misleading and biased reporting.
Embed from Getty Images
Semenya (l) in HS.
The 1.7% figure comes from a book written by biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling
in 2000 called Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality. But Fausto-Sterling used a very broad definition of the word
“intersex” — one much broader than she herself used in the past. As Dr.
Leonard Sax has pointed out both on his website and in a scientific paper, if
you limit the term intersex to its traditional meaning — to refer either to
individuals who have XY chromosomes with predominantly female anatomy,
XX chromosomes with predominantly male anatomy, or ambiguous or mixed
genitalia (which is what Fausto-Sterling herself did in her 1993 essay “The
Five Sexes”), then the rate of intersex births is just .018% — less than two out
of every 10,000 people.
The crazy thing about the Semenya case is that even though intersex births
like Semenya’s are extremely rare it’s believed that all three of the medallists
in the 2016 Olympic women’s 800 – Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba
and Margaret Wambui — are intersex. Yes, all three. If that doesn’t make you
understand from a simple odds perspective that there needs to be a limit on
testosterone in women’s sports, then I don’t know what will. Of course,
common sense also tells us that most human beings that have XY
chromosomes gain a huge advantage in sports once they hit puberty, mainly
due to increased testosterone levels.
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How big of an advantage is it? Well sports scientist Ross Tucker – who
actually testified on behalf of Semenya before the Court of Arbitration for
Sport as he thought one of the IAAF’s studies used against Semenya was
flawed but also supports, in theory, limits on testosterone for women in
sports – has described the presence of the Y-chromosome as the “THE
single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have.”
I’ll conclude this column with an excerpt from what Tucker wrote on the
LetRun.com forum in 2016:
That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y-
chromosome is THE single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have.
That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for
elite sport discussion, that Y-chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on
it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of Testosterone,
is a key criteria on which to separate people into categories.
So going back to the premise that women’s sport is the PROTECTED
category, and that this protection must exist because of the insurmountable
and powerful effects of testosterone, my opinion on this is that it is fair and
correct to set an upper limit for that testosterone…
The advantage enjoyed by a Semenya is not the same as the one enjoyed by
say, Usain Bolt, or LeBron James, or Michael Phelps, because we don’t
compete in categories of fast-twitch fiber, or height, or foot size (pick your
over simplification for performance here). So Semenya has a genetic
advantage, by virtue of A) having a Y-chromosome and testes, and B) being
unable to use that T and/or one of its derivatives enough to have developed
fully male."
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