Content area
Full Text
Correspondence to Dr Silvia Camporesi, Global Health and Social Medicine, King's College London, London WC2B 4BG, UK; [email protected]
Caster Semenya is done with track and field. At 29, her hopes for a continued career as a professional middle-distance runner are dashed. After her case against International Association for Athletics Federation (IAAF) 1 was dismissed by the Court for Arbitration of Sport (CAS) on 1 May 2019, she has switched to football later in the year.1
Semenya’s case may have come to its legal conclusion, however it has generated an aporia regarding the binary classification in athletics, which has yet to be solved.2 It is time the implications of the fair equality of opportunity (FEO) principle as a normative basis for the construction of categories in sport are taken seriously to move forward the debate on unfair advantages in sport.
Loland conditionally justifies restricting the women’s category to athletes with testosterone levels below a certain threshold, on the basis of the FEO principle, and of a distinction between stable (eg, biological sex, age, body size) and dynamic inequalities between athletes (eg, genetic predispositions).3
While I concur with Loland 3 that there might be an in-principle difference between testosterone, which has long-lasting effects on skeletal system; and genetic variations, whose outcome will be to a greater degree the interplay of genotype and phenotype, I do not think that such a distinction can be drawn, which is independent of the existing binary classification. There will always be a dynamic interplay...