I am delighted to have been invited to deliver a talk within the ‘Science & Society’ series at KU Leuven’s Institute for Genetics & Society (LIGAS).
Date & Time: 9 December 2026 (Wednesday) from 12:00 to 13:00
Location: Auditorium O&N4, Gasthuisberg Campus, Leuven
Access: Free to attend, no registration needed – just show up!
I will be talking on one of the most debated questions in sport today: how sporting bodies have decided who is eligible to compete in the women’s category, and what science has been asked to do in that process.
Short abstract:
Who is allowed to compete in the women’s category, and who gets to decide? For more than two decades, international sports federations have struggled with this question. The resulting eligibility rules have repeatedly shifted between different biological markers, from chromosomes and hormone levels to genetic testing. In this talk, Silvia Camporesi traces how these regulations have developed from 1999 to the present, and asks on which scientific and ethical grounds each policy was built. She looks at the role biomedical evidence has played in these decisions, at the tension between fairness in competition and the rights and well-being of individual athletes, and at what this history reveals about how science is used when institutions draw boundaries.
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