Tag Archives: World Athletics

On 26 and 27 October 2023, the T.M.C Asser Institute in The Hague hosted the 2023 edition of the International Sports Law Journal (ISLJ) Conference. I delivered the keynote lecture on day 2 titled “Eligibility criteria to compete in the female category: Values, norms and evidence”.

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the case of South-African runner Caster Semenya, whose gold medal at the World Track & Field Championship in Berlin was revoked on suspicion of an unfair advantage derived from a “male biological make-up”.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). Another one is forthcoming at the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2024. In this talk I review the evidence, values and norms underlying the World Athletics regulations to compete in the female category for athletes with DSD.

The recording is now available here.