The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled 15-2 in partial favor of queer cisgender Olympic gold medalist runner Caster Semenya in her appeal against the Swiss Court of Arbitration for Sport’s (CAS) 2019 decision upholding a World Athletics’ policy banning her from competing in women’s events unless she took medication or received surgery to reduce her naturally high testosterone levels.
While the ECHR said the Swiss court’s ruling lacked “rigorous judicial review” and awarded her 80,000 euros ($94,000) from Switzerland for “costs and expenses,” the ECHR didn’t rule on whether World Athletics’ policy is discriminatory. Semenya’s case — which she has been fighting for over seven years and which effectively ended her running career — will now return to the Swiss federal court in the western city of Lausanne.
Related
Runner Caster Semenya rejects “intersex” label & forced medical interventions
“That identity doesn’t fit me; it doesn’t fit my soul.”
“Today, my patience in this journey has been rewarded with a result that will pave the way for all athletes’ human rights to be protected,” she said in a statement following the ECHR’s ruling. She also celebrated her partial victory in an Instagram photo showing herself standing in the ECHR.
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In 2019, the CAS issued a 2-1 ruling that World Athletics’ policy banning Semenya was “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” to maintain fairness in women’s track events, the Associated Press reported.
World Athletics, the body that regulates international track and field competitions (formerly known as the IAAF), issued a rule in 2019 requiring participants in the women’s 400-meter, 800-meter, and 1500-meter races to have a low level of testosterone in their bodies and to undergo six months of hormone therapy if their natural testosterone levels are high.
Semenya’s high testosterone levels are the result of her having XY chromosomes, rather than the typically female XX pairing, and undescended gonads that she didn’t know she had until 2009, she said.
“In order to continue racing as a woman, I was told, I needed to have surgery to remove them,” she said. “[But] I was healthy, I loved my body, and it had made me a champion. Why must I go and mutilate it to conform to someone else’s rules?”
Instead, she opted to take medication to artificially lower her body’s natural testosterone levels in order to meet World Athletics’ requirements for female athletes. She said she began to feel sick almost as soon as she started taking the medication.
A 2020 Human Rights Watch report found that female athletes from Africa and Asia have disproportionately been subjected to “sex testing,” “gender verification,” or “femininity testing.” Meanwhile, Semenya has rejected the “intersex” label to describe her bodily condition.
“[I’ve] been called a hermaphrodite. I had to walk back out into the world with this thing hanging around my neck. I wasn’t oblivious to the stares and whispers from other runners,” she writes. “I wasn’t going to take on an identity that did not fit my soul because some doctors had taken my blood and images of my organs. I was not a hermaphrodite or anything other than a woman.”
Semenya is now 34 years old and has been coaching women’s track.
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