Pride, Power, and Policing

As Pride Month comes to a close, I wanted to dedicate this post to some of the individuals who are currently under a disproportionate and dangerous amount of scrutiny, especially from the current U.S. administration and global governing bodies.

This is another post inspired by a research paper I wrote during probably one of my favorite classes in college, Sex, Gender, and the Law. The paper I wrote dissected a critical question: What defines a woman in law and sport?

I find myself returning again to the story of Caster Semenya, an Olympic gold medalist, a South African runner, and a woman who has been forced to fight for her right to exist in her own body. Her story and the policing of her body is not just about sports, but about who gets to be called a woman, and who gets to decide. Far from being a neutral or objective process, the legal regulation of Semenya’s body reveals how gender, race, and scientific authority are imposed through law.

But before we go further, we need to pause. Because too often, stories like Semenya’s are misrepresented. They are folded into debates about transgender athletes and erased by public confusion.

So let’s get clear about intersex, trans, and what it means to talk about gender in sport.

What is “intersex”?

Intersex is a term used to describe people born with physical sex characteristics, such as chromosomes, internal organs, or genitals that do not fit scientific sex definitions of male or female bodies.

It is biological.

Some intersex traits are visible at birth, but many are not discovered until puberty or later in life, sometimes only after invasive medical testing, as in the case of Semenya. Estimates suggest that up to 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits, roughly the same percentage of people who are born with red hair (okay interesting red head stat!).

Intersex people are often subject to medical intervention as children. These are surgeries or hormone treatments designed to “normalize” their bodies without consent. These interventions have been condemned by the United Nations as human rights violations!

How do intersex people differ from transgender people?

To clarify, intersex and transgender people are not the same. Although, they both challenge rigid binary categories of sex and gender.

Intersex people are born with variations in sex characteristics that don’t align with binary medical expectations, whereas transgender people have a gender identity that does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.

So, how does this relate to athletics?

This confusion fuels moral panic around sports, particularly around the participation of trans women and intersex women in women’s categories. People are incorrectly assuming that both groups are trying to “cheat” the system or gain an unfair advantage. The truth is that both intersex and trans athletes are disproportionately scrutinized and are asked to prove their womanhood in ways no cisgender athletes ever are.

Who is Caster Semenya?

In 2019, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld a policy by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) requiring certain women athletes to medically lower their naturally occurring testosterone levels to compete in specific track events. The policy directly targeted athletes with differences of sex development (DSDs), like Semenya, who, after undergoing invasive sex testing as a teenager, learned she was intersex.

The story behind this was that fans noticed that Semenya was taller than most of her competitors, she had muscles, and she had smaller breasts. Because of her defined muscles, small breasts, and tall figure, she is described as “masculine.” Masculinity is not fixed, defined by body parts or appearance, and is not exclusive to men. So, they reported her to higher athletic authorities to verify she was a female. How insulting!

She had gone her whole life believing she was a woman and conforming to gender binaries. She learned she had XY chromosomes, the male chromosome pattern. This results in “naturally” higher levels of testosterone.

Semenya refused to medically alter her body, even if it meant losing her chance to compete. She took the IAAF to court, asserting the policy violated her human rights. Although the CAS acknowledged the rule was discriminatory, they upheld it anyway, claiming it was “necessary” for fairness. Fairness for whom??

Now this is where my research began. I wanted to extract the ideas of policing of women’s bodies. Scholars have termed this spread of knowledge as colonial biopower. This is the control of bodies through institutionalized norms under the guise of scientific neutrality. The idea of women in sports rely on a very specific, and very Western, understanding of what it means to be a woman. By equating womanhood with a specific range of hormone levels, the IAAF effectively reduced gender to a number! It treated testosterone as the defining trait of masculinity, and thus of athletic advantage.

Is testosterone the defining characteristic of sex???

There is no scientific consensus that higher testosterone directly results in superior performance. And even if there were, we don’t regulate other natural advantages. We don’t tell tall basketball players to shrink. We don’t ask swimmers with long arms to sit out.

So why regulate this?

My point with this research was to entirely call into question scientific objectivity. Scientific authority is often portrayed as objective and apolitical, but science is neither value-free nor immune to cultural bias. Scientific research frequently reflects the assumptions and priorities of the society in which it is produced. When institutions like the IAAF and CAS invoke “science” to justify the regulation of athletes, they are not appealing to neutral facts. Scientific claims about testosterone levels were used to define womanhood for competition.

Caster Semenya wasn’t being punished for cheating. She was being punished for not fitting. For being a woman, whose body doesn’t conform to Western, binary ideas of femininity. And the institutions regulating her: courts, sports federations, and scientific bodies, are built on systems that have always defined gender in ways that exclude, erase, and pathologize people like her.

As always, this is viewed through a lens of intersectionality. This isn’t just about gender. It’s also about race, colonialism, and control. Historically, Black and Global South athletes have been disproportionately subjected to sex testing and surveillance. Western institutions have long tried to classify bodies, to label and contain what they didn’t understand or deem “normal.” Michel Foucault called this biopower: the way institutions control and discipline bodies in the name of knowledge or science.

***side note*** There is a considerable amount of research that shows that bodies adapt hormonally to environmental and historical stress, like famine, colonization, or chronic conflict. Studies of Dutch famine survivors, Indigenous Amazonian groups, and nomadic populations in Kenya reveal that testosterone levels often shift in response to long-term nutritional stress and survival demands. Something to note and that I would like to research further as we understood as adaptive responses and how these hormonal differences are weaponized by Western institutions to pathologize athletes from the Global South.

Semenya’s case shows us what happens when fairness is defined by those already in power. Forcing intersex women to alter their hormones is not fair. It is medical violence. It is exclusion. And it is a clear violation of bodily autonomy, a fundamental human right.

International bodies like the United Nations have condemned the ruling, noting it violates rights to privacy, dignity, and non-discrimination. The UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has explicitly warned that sports regulations must align with human rights, and yet athletes like Semenya are still being forced out of competition for being themselves.

This case really opened my eyes to the deeply flawed systems in place, not just in sports, but in the laws and narratives that govern our bodies.

In light of today’s political climate, especially under the Trump administration, which has openly targeted LGBTQ+ individuals and sought to roll back protections for trans and intersex people. The current discourse around “fairness” in women’s sports isn’t about fairness at all. And it’s no coincidence that this obsession with “protecting” sports is almost always focused on women’s sports. This administration continues to conflate transgender and intersex identities, weaponizing confusion to push fear. They frame trans and intersex women as threats, rather than as people, as athletes. We cannot let this narrative go unchallenged. Acknowledging the harm done to intersex, transgender, and gender-nonconforming athletes is the only way we move toward real equity in sport.

With gratitude,

Olivia