Time to End Sex Testing of Female Athletes?
December 8, 2020
World Athletics, the governing body of track and field competition, should stop sex testing female athletes, Human Rights Watch says in a new report. The group argues that testing is based on “arbitrary definitions of femininity and racial stereotypes.” The oversight body isn’t budging. In Issues, two scholars (one an Olympian) push against sex testing. Focusing on the case of the South African champion runner Caster Semenya, now infamously banned from competition, they detail how sex testing is misguided, how it got that way, and how the process might be improved.