Category Archives: Ethics & Sports

Delighted to be heading back to ICGEB Triest in a few days for a double appointment on Friday, November 10th.

In the afternoon, at 3 pm CET I will be delivering a seminar (in English) as part of the ICGEB International Seminar Series, with title “Bioethics and Sport: Evidence, Values and Norms underlying competition for athletes” (abstract below). It will be possible to follow the seminar in hybrid mode. If you’d like to receive the zoom link please email seminars@icgeb.org in advance of the meeting.

Abstract

There is a fundamental tension intrinsic in athletics: human sex is not binary, and there are only two categories in which people can compete: men, and women. In the late 1990s, all forms of sex testing had been abandoned by the International Olympic Committee due to some high-profile false positive cases. After a brief interval, sex testing re-emerged in 2009 with the case of South-African runner Caster Semenya, whose gold medal at the World Track & Field Championship in Berlin was revoked on suspicion of an unfair advantage derived from a “male biological make-up”. Following an investigation, in May 2011,World Athletics (WA) enacted ‘Hyperandrogenism regulations’ which require that female athletes with endogenous testosterone levels above 5 nmol/Lit take androgen suppressive therapy as a condition to compete in the female category. Since the original formulation, the WA Hyperandrogenism regulations have undergone multiple iterations, the most recent one in March 2023, and have been at the centre of three high profile legal disputes, two at the Court for Arbitration of Sport also known as the “Supreme Court for Sports” (2015; 2019), and one at the European Court of Human Rights (2023). In this talk I will provide a bioethics and sport approach to the question of unfair advantage and eligibility to compete in the female category for athletes with DSD, reviewing the evidence, values and norms underlying the World Athletics regulations to compete in the female category for athletes with DSD.

#testosterone #worldathletics #fairness #values #competition #ethics #sport

In the evening at 6 pm CET I will be presenting my book (in Italian) in conversation with the absolutely fantastic Suzanne Kerbavcic, at the LOVAT bookstore (Stabile Oviesse, V.le Venti Settembre, 20, 34125 Trieste)

https://www.librerielovat.com/ev/event/silvia-camporesi/

The presentation is open to all and there’s no need to book in advance.

Hope to see many familiar faces, and meet new ones, next Friday in Triest!