‘Category: Woman’ sheds light on how female athletes are defined

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When it comes to racing two times around a track, Caster Semenya is one of the world’s all-time great runners. But the South African 800-metre specialist is even better known as the face of an ongoing gender debate that she never wanted to be involved in.

Since 2009, her career has been intermingled with scientific, ethical and legal battles over the definition of a female athlete.

Semenya is not the only one affected by World Athletics regulations that bar women whose bodies naturally produce high levels of testosterone from competing in track events from 400 metres to the mile. A new documentary by Canadian Olympian and filmmaker Phyllis Ellis brings those experiences to light. “Category: Woman” — the story of gender, race and human rights violations in international sport — makes its world premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on May 1.

Annet Negesa was 18 years old when she won a bronze medal for Uganda at the junior world championships in 2010. She qualified to run the 800 at the London Olympics in 2012, but didn’t make it there. Just weeks before those Games she was informed that her testosterone levels were too high and, as a middle-distance runner, she would need to undergo surgery to continue competing.

Negesa says in the film that she was told: “It’s just a simple thing.” That wasn’t the case at all.

She was left with serious side effects, and being outed as insufficiently female had a cascade of negative effects on her life. The runner, once named athlete of the year by the Ugandan federation, sought and was granted refugee status in Germany.

“(World Athletics) made me feel I was something less than human,” Negesa says. “I have kept quiet for too long. Not any more … Enough is enough.”

Gender verification to determine who is a “real” woman, whether in the form of the naked parades of the 1960s or more scientific approaches through testing, is a long-standing practice in sports. Ellis, who played field hockey for Canada in the 1984 Olympics, experienced it herself. It was a cheek swab then.

Her film comes at a time when an increasing number of sports at the elite level, and even in universities and high schools, are grappling with controversial cases and struggling to set eligibility rules for women’s events.

In March, the University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas became the first transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. And at the Tokyo Olympics last summer, New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard became one of the first openly transgender athletes to compete at the Games. But at those very same Olympics, women such as Semenya and Negesa, born with a condition that causes naturally high testosterone levels, were barred from middle distances on the track.

The concerns of transgender athletes and athletes born with sex variations are different, but they are both caught up in a raging debate — in sports and society at large — about how to define the female category.

“The wonderful thing that film can do is put a lot of things in one place … all of the extraordinary work (of) advocates and activists and scientists and experts and whistle-blowers and athletes and victims,” Ellis says in an interview.

On this subject, that list is heavy on Canadians — including Toronto lawyer Jim Bunting, who has represented women fighting the rules at the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, and sports advocate Bruce Kidd.

Ellis started her documentary in 2017. Some rules have changed since then, but the end result for women such as Semenya and Negesa has not.

The International Olympic Committee has moved away from testosterone levels as a determinant, and in November released a new framework for inclusion and non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations. But it also punted the work of “ensuring fairness” — and developing science-based eligibility criteria so no one has a “disproportionate competitive advantage” — to individual international sports federations.

World Athletics has not changed its rules, which many experts have said are based on flawed science and remain bizarre in focus. As Semenya put it recently on social media: “So according to World Athletics and its members I’m a male when it comes to 400m, 800m, 1500m and 1600m! Then a female in 100m, 200m, and long distance events … What kind of a fool would do that?”

World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has said the state of women’s sports is “very fragile” and that the federation’s rules governing middle-distance runners protect the integrity of competition.

“We are all women,” Semenya counters. “We are just different from each other.”

Ellis calls the whole issue a “complicated conversation,” but says the film helps to draw out “the humanity in the story.”

“What that does is open up new dialogue. And maybe it’ll contribute to that larger conversation, so we can stop this from happening and find a resolution.”

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