When is a Woman in Appropriate Shape to be Considered a "Proper" Athlete?

Take Youmna Ayyad, the first female Egyptian boxer to qualify for the Olympics this year, who was disqualified for being 900 grams overweight, which she acquired due to “physiological and hormonal changes.” Further details were not announced, “according to Egyptian traditions and to protect the rights of the boxer,” but internet users pointed out the sexist undertones of this statement and that she had probably gotten her period.

Ayyad’s disqualification, appropriate or not, is one of many incidents in which women are not allowed to compete for hormone-related reasons; there is a gray zone of what it takes for a woman to be in appropriate shape. Disqualification due to hormonal weight gain is only the tip of the iceberg, at the bottom of which lies the hotly debated question of which hormonal balance a woman needs to be considered a woman.

Sex verification began in the 1940s, with so-called femininity certificates which evolved into visual inspections (women being stripped of their clothes in front of a panel), physical examinations, chromosome testing, and most recently, tests for hyperandrogenism (naturally occurring high levels of testosterone) and differences of sex development (DSD). The official rationale was to prevent masquerading males and women with "unfair, male-like" physical advantage from competing in female-only events, though they never once discovered an imposter.

Selected for testosterone testing are those women who seem suspiciously masculine, i.e. too strong, too fast, too athletic. Coincidentally, it is mostly Black and brown women who are forced to undergo these tests. To understand why, we need to look even further than the beginning of the modern Olympics and ask: Where did men like Pierre de Coubertin get their understanding of a “typical” woman from?

The answer is: colonialism. The sex binary is a 19th century invention by Europeans who forced their cis-heteropatriarchy on colonized societies. They regarded Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) as sex indistinguishable and only considered white people able to display gender differences visually. The category “woman” is historically synonymous with cis white women.

According to social darwinist Herbert Spencer, white women looked different to white men, because unlike BIPOC females, they were homemakers. Assuming that women could only become women through their reproductive role as a housewife, the concept of a sportswoman is inherently unnatural, as is the concept of a Black woman. When South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya was banned from competing because of her hyperandrogenism,Pierre Weiss, general secretary of World Athletics, said that “She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”

The science delineating a “typical” female body and identifying testosterone as the primary driver of athleticism, is flawed and contested by the World Medical Association, the United Nations Human Rights Council and health, bioethics, medical and human rights experts. Just what role testosterone plays in improving athletic performance is still being debated, but we do know that testosterone levels vary widely depending on the day, time of life, social status, race, and athletic training history.

Gender verification often results in sportswomen being banned from competing for life, the exclusion of most intersex people, social stigmatisation, emotional trauma and even suicide. African athletes have repeatedly spoken out against being used as guinea pigs for restrictive drugs and surgery: some have felt compelled, and were even tricked, to undergo unnecessary surgeries such as female genital mutilation and sterilisation. Last year, Christine Mboma, the first Namibian woman to win a medal at the Olympics after she got silver at the Tokyo Games, made the difficult decision to take medication to suppress her naturally-occurring testosterone levels. This was after World Athletics released further regulations that totally barred athletes it classed as having DSD from competing in any event (earlier regulations from 2021 only barred the athletes from competing in middle distances — 400m, 800m and the mile), thus locking Mboma out of competitive running for almost two years. She told the BBC earlier this year that the entire ordeal was “not easy mentally — I’m not okay even now.” She got back in time to participate in Olympics qualifiers, but didn’t make it to Paris.

Gender testing is rooted in a history of controlling the humanity of women, and especially Black women who have been systematically masculinized and defeminized to the point that implicit bias against Black athletes has become seemingly scientific.

In the case of the Zambian football team, the players were offered hormone suppression medication that could bring their testosterone down to “acceptable” levels, but due to side effects reported by athletes who have taken them in the past, such as Semenya, they declined. It is ironic that the sporting industry, which supposedly takes a strong stance against doping, requires certain athletes to take drugs to be eligible for competition. Should Ayyad have taken medicine to stop her naturally occurring “physiological and hormonal changes?”

These regulations and human rights violations mostly affect women from countries that lack the resources and support to challenge them. In the months after World Athletics first published the new acceptable testosterone levels, Athletics Kenya, instead of contesting the ruling, simply dropped Maximila Imali and Evangeline Makena from their World Relay Roster. Being South African, Semenya is so far the only affected athlete who has been given substantial governmental backing in her case.

Normalizing a society where people are entitled to different rights because of their bodies is dangerous. After excluding the most marginalized groups, these rules will continue shrinking the category of “woman” into an exclusive club. In that kind of system, any hormonal imbalance can result in a woman being stripped of her identity for not being feminine enough. Or stripped of her right to compete, because her natural body does not comply with the required measurements.

As long as we allow the policing of some bodies, however insignificant it may seem, all of our bodies are at risk. In 2024, the rules delineating a woman athlete are different from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021; the fact that every discipline has their own rules as to who can compete in which category shows the absurdity of putting bodies into rigid categories.

On a more positive note, Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez competed at this year’s Olympics while seven months pregnant, proving once more the enormous, unquantifiable strength that lies in women’s bodies.