What Qualifies a Woman to Compete as a Woman? An Ugly Fight Resumes

NYTimes

Dutee Chand of India competing in the 100 meters at the Asian championships in July. Born with a condition in which her body produces a high level of testosterone, she has waged a years-long fight to compete as a woman. Credit

For the past two years, Dutee Chand could be herself.

She could run and train and even compete in the Rio Olympics. She didn’t have to constantly remind people that, yes, of course, she is a woman and that, yes, of course, she qualifies to compete with other women despite her naturally high level of testosterone.

She didn’t have to feel pressure to change her body so it conformed to rules or contemplate quitting her sport — pressure placed on her after doctors subjected her to gender testing in 2013, humiliating her by doing so, when she was only 17.

For two years, she could just be Dutee Chand. That’s because, two years ago last month, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is the supreme court for global sports, temporarily suspended an international track and field rule that had barred her from competing as a woman.

Chand, a sprinter from India, and women like her were excluded because their bodies produced a high amount of testosterone. It was often so high it was classified as being within the male range, a situation the authorities considered an unfair advantage. The only way these women could compete, track and field officials ruled, was if they took hormone-suppressing drugs or had surgery to limit the amount of testosterone their bodies produced.

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Last month, the I.A.A.F. gave a sneak peek of what it had found in the two years since the court’s ruling, publishing a news release that included a study financed by the I.A.A.F. and the World Anti-Doping Agency. The study, a paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined the testosterone levels in 2,127 blood samples provided by athletes competing at the 2011 and 2013 world track and field championships. It concluded that some women with high testosterone levels can have a marked advantage over some women with lower levels — but only in certain events.

The event that yielded the most glaring advantage was the hammer throw, an edge the paper put at 4.53 percent. The pole vault (2.94 percent), the 400-meter hurdles (2.78 percent), the 400 (2.73 percent) and the 800 (1.78 percent) were found to have smaller, yet significant, advantages for competitors with hyperandrogenism, but all were far below the 10 to 12 percent advantage generally recognized as the performance difference between men and women.

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This issue could be made simpler, according to Dr. Myron Genel, a Yale professor emeritus and longtime consultant to the I.O.C.’s medical commission, if the governing bodies would finally listen to the advice that he and others had given them more than two decades ago.

In the 1990s, those experts suggested that athletes born with what is known as a disorder of sex development — a biological anomaly that might result in atypically high testosterone production — should compete as females if they were raised as females. It is the same advice that Genel and some of his colleagues give today.

Hyperandrogenism can be a natural genetic advantage, Genel argued, in the same way Usain Bolt’s uncommonly long stride or Michael Phelps’s flipper-size feetgive those athletes a winning edge.

“I think all elite competition at an elite level is unfair, in one form or another,” Genel said.

But will it ever be perfectly fair? Could it ever be perfectly fair? Not when so many different qualities come together to make athletes successful. And not when gender distinctions are changing so rapidly.

At its core, the sports world — rigidly separating men and women — will perpetually struggle to adapt to increasingly nuanced gender distinctions. In June, the District of Columbia became the first jurisdiction in the United States to offer an “X” gender, signifying a neutral gender, on its driver’s licenses. In March, a transgender New Zealand woman crushed her competition in her first international weight-lifting meet, and a transgender boy won a Texas state championship in girls’ wrestling.

Not every governing body is equipped to rule on these kind of eligibility questions. Not every athlete fits into this box, or that one.

To Chand, though, the issue of hyperandrogenism in sports is clear cut. She grew up as a girl. At 21, she is a proud young woman. She wants to race as one.

On Saturday, she did. But in the coming months, the Court of Arbitration for Sport will decide whether letting her continue to do so is fair.

What if it gets it wrong?

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