#annet negesa

[desbianherstory]

Category: Woman (2022, dir. Phyllis Ellis). Stream here.

When 18-year-old South African runner Caster Semenya burst onto the world stage in 2009, her championship was not celebrated, but marred by doubt, her personal medical records leaked to the international media. The public scrutiny of her body, driven by racism and sexism, questioning the most fundamental right of who she is, a great champion. The International Amateur Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) then ruled that targeted female athletes must medically alter their healthy bodies in order to compete. Their naturally high androgen levels, 'deemed' a performance advantage. Category: Woman focuses on four remarkable athletes, from the Global South, forced out of competition by these regulations, the devastation to their bodies, and their lives. Equally arresting is their passion for sport is further emboldened by their conviction to stand up for their human rights. Following her award-winning film Toxic Beauty, filmmaker and Olympian Phyllis Ellis exposes an industry controlled by men putting women’s lives at risk while the policing of women’s bodies in sport remains, in a more nefarious way, under the guise of fair play.

Breaking from this blog's hiatus to post this in light of the racist bullying of Imane Khelif. I'd recommend everyone watch it (it's only 76 min) for an understanding of the issues at play - how the false, easily digestible narrative of "fairness" in fact means unfairness and racist mistreatment for these extraordinary women. Even the introduction is powerful:

"Some bodies are marked. The gender that goes unmarked as male. Women are maked in all the ways that they are different. The unmarked race is white. Some bodies that are black and brown and female have a particular kind of marking. These bodies are marked as insufficiently human. How do you castigate a category of people as insufficiently human? By throwing their gender into doubt."

Dutee Chand, India's first openly lesbian athlete is interviewed in this documentary about the racist mistreatment and scrutiny she received for these issues.

Please watch and spread!

[odinsblog]

qwhite interesting 🤔

racialized misogyny 🤝 transphobia

For female athletes of color, scrutiny around gender rules and identity is part of a long trend

Overcome with emotion, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif left the ring in tears after a resounding victory this weekend. Khelif has faced days of hateful comments and false accusations about her gender following her first fight against an Italian opponent who quit seconds into their bout.

“It’s because she’s African, because she’s Algerian,” 38-year-old Algerian fan Adel Mohammed said Saturday, when Khelif clinched an Olympic medal. “These comments are coming from white people … it’s a kind of racism.”

Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender, historians and anthropologists say. Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, who won her bout Sunday after similar abuse and questions about her gender, are the latest examples of women of color who have found themselves caught in the contentious debate around gender regulations and perceptions in sports.

More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports, said Payoshni Mitra, executive director of Humans of Sport, an advocacy organization that focuses on human rights issues for athletes. She has worked with dozens of female athletes across Asia and Africa to fight sex testing practices.

“Sport is very Eurocentric — the approach is not necessarily global,” Mitra said. “We need to accept women in all their diversity. And we are not seeing that at this point.”

Mitra and other advocates and anthropologists note that international sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.

In 2009, after her 800-meter victory in the world championships, South African runner Caster Semanya was sidelined for 11 months because of track and field rules about hormone levels. She has spent years in her legal battle against requirements for her to suppress her natural testosterone to compete.

Semenya was identified as female at birth, raised as a girl and has been legally identified as female her entire life. She has one of a number of conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSDs, which cause naturally high testosterone.

(continue reading)

For the record, no one is accusing the taller, broader WHITE woman of being a man

Says it all

[theforesteldritch]

Reading about how intersex athletes have been treated is so fucking horrible. The countless lies and human rights violations. The discrimination and how it's ruined the lives of so many people is so awful. There has been no apologies from any athletics comptetions or organizations. They have blood on their hands. Just a tw for intersexism and mental health issues and suicide in the next paragraph because it can get pretty heavy.

Annet Negesa, who was a middle distance runner. She was suddenly barred from competing due to her hormones. No one told her why. She was then told she needed to take medication to lower her testosterone, then what she was told was switched. She was lied to about a surgery that she was told was like an injection and would let her compete again. She woke up with scars and had had a gonadectomy. That violation of basic human rights and medical ethics combined with inadequate postsurgical care basically ended her career. She deserves justice. She deserves apologies from the Olympics and everyone single doctor who was involved in it, and compensation and the promise that it should never have happened and will never happen again. She. Needs. Justice.

Pratima Gaonkar needs justice. She was a rising track and field star. After forced sex verificatiom she killed herself. The way media and news treated her after her death was disgusting. She deserves and needs justice. Her family deserves justice.

Santhi Soundarajan had her medals stripped and was treated as an outcast after forced sex verification showed she had androgen insensitivity syndrome. She was treated as an outcast, her gender was mocked. She's spoken out about how much discrimination she's faced, and how badly she's been treated. She now works as a coach, but was barred from competing. She deserves justice.

Caster Semenya deserves justice. Francine Niyonsaba deserves justice. Margaret Wambui deserves justice. Barbra Banda deserves justice. Beatrice Masilingi and Christine Mboma deserve justice.

The racism and intersexism and horrible human rights violations and medical abuse these women have faced for the supposed crime of being intersex and good at a sport is horrible. They deserve justice, but the organizations that perpetuate these atrocities don't seem to care. It's so fucking horrible.

[mondfahrt]

"Life Is Not a Competition, But I'm Winning" is a documentary by women and queer people about women and queer people in sports, specifically running.

SYNOPSIS: If history is written by the victors, where does that leave those who were never allowed to be part of the game? A collective of queer athletes enters the Olympic Stadium in Athens and sets out to honour those who were excluded from standing on the winners’ podium. They meet Amanda Reiter, a trans* marathon runner who has to struggle with the prejudices of sports organisers and Annet Negesa, a 800m runner who was urged by the international sports federations to undergo hormone-altering surgery. Together they create a radical utopia far from the rigid gender rules in competitive sports.

I had the opportunity to watch this movie and it's really really good, dealing with very heavy subjects but never letting pain and suffering overtake the story the protagonists want to tell.

[ijja]

i mean Imane isn't the first woman of color whose been accused of being man because she happened to better than her white opponent and doesn't have the standard European looks. Serena Williams, Caster Semenya and many more dealt with the same issues throughout their career. White women have a long history of using their tears to vilify women of color and rob them of their achievements, the Imane situation is just reminder of how far Western media will go discrediting/ bullying a POC to protect a white person

yeah, i TOTALLY agree. Fatima Whitbread, Annet Negesa, Serena Williams, Dutee Chand... they just hate to see us win, so they invent stupid theories to victimize themselves. pathetic tbh.

[humanistisch]

Provokateur ohne moralischen Kompass

Nach nur 46 Sekunden im Ring gibt die italienische Boxerin Angela Carini den Kampf auf und sinkt unter Schmerzen und Tränen auf die Knie. Ihre Gegnerin in dieser Runde ist die algerische Boxerin Imane Khelif. Khelif wurde ein Jahr zuvor bei der Box-WM wegen erhöhter Werte des männlichen Sexualhormons Testosteron disqualifiziert. Bei der Olympiade durfte sie hingegen antreten. War dieser Kampf in Paris fair? Ist es gerecht, wenn eine Sportlerin gegen eine Gegnerin mit mutmaßlichen physiologischen Vorteilen antreten muss? Ist es – umgekehrt – gerecht, wenn eine Sportlerin wegen erhöhter Testosteronwerte, für die sie nichts kann, vom Wettkampf ausgeschlossen wird? Und ist es richtig, solche Werte überhaupt zu messen? Die Teilnahme von trans Frauen und Intersex-Frauen an sportlichen Wettkämpfen stellt die Welt des Sports vor ein moralisches Dilemma. Dass die Veranstalter hier Lösungen werden finden müssen, steht außer Frage. Sollte man etwa den Testosteronspiegel mit medizinischen Mitteln senken, wie Peter Kurz am Ende seines hpd-Artikels am 14. August 2024 vorschlägt? Das wäre ein vielleicht heftiger Eingriff in die Gesundheit und die Persönlichkeit einer Sportlerin. Wäre die Idee von Rüdiger Weida in seinem Kommentar darunter praktikabel, Sportlerinnen wie Imane Khelif oder auch Lin Yu-ting aus Taiwan in der Gewichtsklasse antreten zu lassen, in der ihre Schlagstärken normal sind? Das klingt zunächst vernünftig. Aber ich bin kein Boxer, ja nicht einmal interessiert an diesem Sport. Und ich weiß auch viel zu wenig über Chromosomen oder die Wirkung von Hormonen, um hier ein qualifiziertes Urteil abgeben zu können. Sehr berechtigt ist jedenfalls der Standpunkt von Andreas Gradert vom Humanistischen Verband Österreich (HVÖ), die Geschlechtstests im Sport seien grundsätzlich diskriminierend, weil sie auf Geschlechterstereotypen beruhten und es offenbar auch keinen wissenschaftlichen Konsens darüber gibt, dass ein höherer Testosteronspiegel Frauen einen sportlichen Vorteil verschafft. Auch haben Tests und medizinische Interventionen aufgrund von Mutmaßungen über die Anatomie von Sportlerinnen schon Leben ruiniert, wie das Beispiel der Läuferin Annet Negesa aus Uganda zeigt. Das Internationale Olympische Komitee lehnt, folgt man dem Humanisten Gradert, Geschlechtstests zu Recht ab. Tatsächlich liegen – darauf hat ein Kommentator unter dem hpd-Artikel hingewiesen – zu den beiden Boxerinnen, über ihre Chromosomen und ihre Testosteronwerte keine seriösen Informationen vor. Und das eigentlich auch völlig zu Recht. Es handelt sich nämlich um sehr persönliche, intime Informationen. Trotzdem meint Richard Dawkins – als Biologe eigentlich qualifiziert, im konkreten Fall aber ohne Belege – hier mit unbestrittener Gewissheit („XY undisputed��) die in Teilen nicht sachliche, sondern auch von Hasstiraden geprägte Debatte noch weiter anheizen zu müssen. Er twitterte: „Two men, masquerading as women, are being allowed to box against real women in the Olympics.“ Das Attribut „provokativ“, welches Kurz hier für Dawkins verwendet, ist sehr zutreffend gewählt. Die provokative Art des kämpferischen Evolutionsbiologen ist sicherlich einer der Gründe für seine Bekanntheit und den Respekt, der ihm in säkularen Kreisen immer noch entgegengebracht wird. Provokation, aber wozu? Provokation ist wirkungsvoll. Provozieren konnte auch Diogenes von Sinope. Wir finden es witzig, wie er in der überlieferten Anekdote auf die Frage Alexanders des Großen, was dieser für ihn tun könne, antwortete: „Geh mir aus der Sonne!“. Provokation war dann später auch ein wesentliches Mittel der Philosophen der Aufklärung. Und Provokation ist immer wieder Instrument des gewaltfreien Widerstands. Für Gandhi war es die Aufgabe eines Bürgerrechtlers, zu provozieren. Aber provozieren tut eben auch ein Björn Höcke. Provokation ist kein Gut für sich, zu provozieren ist keine an sich lobenswerte Tugend. Es kommt darauf an, wen man provoziert und warum man das tut. Bei Richard Dawkins scheint zunächst unklar, was ihn bewogen haben mag, eine von Gehässigkeiten, Gerüchten und Desinformationen gezeichnete Debatte noch weiter zu befeuern. Ich habe mich in letzter Zeit auch wiederholt gefragt, warum sich manche Leute darüber den Kopf zerbrechen, auf welche Toilette trans Personen gehen. Welches Erkenntnisinteresse bewegt jemanden, der über solche Fragen nachdenkt? Was geht im Kopf von jemandem vor, der sich darüber echauffiert, dass trans Frauen in Frauengefängnissen Frauen vergewaltigen würden? Ich wurde im Freundeskreis tatsächlich damit konfrontiert. Angeblich soll es in Schottland schon zu „massenhaft“ Schwangerschaften durch diese Bedrohung gekommen sein. Ich hatte es überprüft, um meinen Freund zu beruhigen. Es gibt nicht einen einzigen derartigen Vorfall. Seinen Anfang nahm die Geschichte offenbar mit dem Fall Isla Bryson; eine durchaus nachvollziehbare Befürchtung wurde zu einem bösartigen Fake aufgeblasen. Es grassieren üble Vorurteile gegenüber trans Personen, die zu widerlegen man kaum noch nachkommt. Eine Auflistung solcher Vorurteile und ihre Widerlegung findet man zum Beispiel bei Andreas Müller. Das Phänomen, um das es hier geht, ist nicht die Provokation, sondern etwas, das man Transphobie nennt, eine irrationale Angst. Wenn man also der Frage nachgeht, warum jemand wie Richard Dawkins meint, sich ohne fundierte Grundlage zu einem Boxwettkampf zu Wort melden zu müssen, dann wird man schnell feststellen, dass er sich nicht das erste Mal diesbezüglich geäußert hat. Bereits 2021 fiel er durch einen derartigen Tweet auf, was die American Humanist Association (AHA) dazu veranlasste, ihm die 1996 verliehene Auszeichnung “Humanist of the Year” wieder abzuerkennen. Dawkins würde nicht länger die Werte der Organisation repräsentieren. Seine Äußerungen implizierten nämlich, so die AHA, dass trans Menschen „fraudulent“ (betrügerisch, arglistig, verlogen) seien. Spielt Dawkins Transidentität herunter? Richard Dawkins wurde 2023 an anderer Stelle vorgeworfen, er würde Transidentität herunterspielen bzw. verleugnen. Hintergrund ist eine Episode seines Podcasts „The Poetry of Reality“, wo er mit der Autorin Helen Joyce über den „Einfluss der Gender-Ideologie auf die Gesellschaft“ sprach. Dort vertrat er unter anderem die Meinung, dass Kinder und Jugendliche entscheiden würden, trans zu sein, weil sie von Gleichaltigen und Lehrern dazu ermuntert würden. Als würden sich trans Menschen nach Lust und Laune entscheiden, ihr Geschlecht zu wechseln, weil es gerade im Trend liegt. Sicher ist es berechtigt, darauf hinzuweisen, dass die Unsicherheit bei manchen Jugendlichen in der Pubertät nicht in jedem Fall durch eine Transidentität erklärt werden kann. Das macht Transidentität aber nicht zu einer Erscheinung des Zeitgeistes. Es gibt sie schon immer. Dass es biologische Ursachen haben kann, wenn die empfundene Geschlechtszugehörigkeit nicht mit dem biologischen Geschlecht übereinstimmt, kommt dem Biologen Dawkins offenbar nicht in den Sinn. Einer meiner Freunde aus früheren Tagen, ein trans Mann, hatte mir damals erklärt, dass möglicherweise hormonelle Einflüsse während der Schwangerschaft einen Einfluss auf die Gehirnentwicklung haben. Vielleicht wissen Forscher das heute genauer. Ich bin fachlich nicht qualifiziert, dieser These näher nachzugehen. Aber ein Biologe sollte sich schon damit beschäftigen, vor allem, wenn er die Biologie als Maßstab für seine Urteile nimmt. Die Biologie als alleinigen Maßstab anzulegen, ist aber auch ein Problem. Zu schnell gerät man als Anhänger eines naturalistischen Weltbildes in Gefahr, naturwissenschaftliche Erklärungen auf soziale und kulturelle Fragestellungen anzuwenden. Wer wie Dawkins der Ansicht ist, die geschlechtliche Identität einer Person lässt sich allein auf die Größe ihrer Gameten (Keimzellen: Eizellen und Spermien) reduzieren, ignoriert das oft jahrelange Leid der Betroffenen, die ihr wahres Ich verstecken müssen, bis sie sich offen zu dem bekennen können, was sie in ihrem Innersten sind. Wo ist der moralische Kompass? Richard Dawkins ist Naturwissenschaftler und hat in seinem Fach und als säkularer Aufklärer sicherlich Verdienste vorzuweisen. Sein Buch „Der Gotteswahn“ von 2006 hatte ich damals auch gelesen. In moralischen Fragen scheint ihm aber der Kompass abhandengekommen zu sein. Man kann gerne eine religiös begründete Ethik ablehnen, weil man Atheist und Naturalist ist. Aber was kommt dann? Weil sich aus deskriptiven Aussagen über die Natur keine normativen Aussagen ableiten lassen – siehe der auf den Aufklärungsphilosophen David Hume zurückgehende Sein-Sollen-Fehlschluss – fällt es schwer, moralische Maßstäbe zu finden. Mitunter kann es dann passieren, dass ein Provokateur provoziert und sich dabei immer noch als Aufklärer sieht, obwohl er sich mittlerweile weltanschaulich in Gesellschaft mit Leuten befindet, die längst in eine obskure Menschenfeindlichkeit abgedriftet sind. Ist das ein „Rechtsaußen-Framing“, vor dem einer der Kommentatoren beim Humanistischen Pressedienst warnte? Nein. Um zur radikalen Rechten gezählt zu werden, gehört schon einiges mehr: Rassismus, Ausländerfeindlichkeit, Antipluralismus, das ganze üble Gerede von Remigration und so weiter. Das darf man Dawkins nicht anlasten. Aber wer sich so äußert, wie Transfeinde es tun, sollte sich nicht wundern, wenn er mit ihnen in einem Atemzug genannt wird. Ich empfehle dazu abschließend einen aktuellen Vortrag von Andreas Müller: „Transphobie: Analyse eines Hasses. Müller erläutert die wichtigsten Grundbegriffe zum Thema, das Ziel der Transfeinde und ihre Strategie. Die Beispiele, auf die er sich bezieht, sind Helen Joyce, J. K. Rowling und Richard Dawkins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uzjNAvkmU Transphobie ist eine Form der gruppenbezogenen Menschenfeindlichkeit. In diesem Vortrag erklärt Andreas W. Müller, M. A. die wichtigsten Grundbegriffe, das Ziel der Transfeinde und die Strategie hinter dem Hass. Read the full article

[yourdailyqueer]

Annet Negesa

Gender: Female

Sexuality: N/A

DOB: 24 April 1992

Ethnicity: African - Ugandan

Occupation: Prof athletic athlete

Note 1: Broke Ugandan national records in the 800m and the 1500m as a teenager and was a three-time national champion at the Ugandan Athletics Championships.

Note 2: Is Intersex

[queerafricans]

Intersex and African

Tatenda Ngwaru (Zimbabwe)

Santiago Mbanda Lima (Angola)

Julius Kaggwa (Uganda)

Nthabiseng Mokoena (South Africa)

Sharon-Rose Khumalo (South Africa)

Caster Semenya (South Africa)

Babalwa Mtshawu (South Africa)

Francine Niyonsaba (Burundi)

Annet Negesa (Uganda)

[katiecomma]

This article is hard to read. But I think it’s important to see the way people are treated and taken advantage of for sport. Especially for the “glory of competing in the Olympics.”

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

Nine years ago sports authorities told me to do the unthinkable: Have surgery to make my body more “feminine,” or quit running. I was a 20-year-old woman and a middle-distance runner from a poor family in rural Uganda. The national athletics federation had named me Athlete of the Year in 2011, and I was picked to represent my country at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Sport gave me a purpose in life.

In 2012, a few weeks before the team was scheduled to leave for London and the biggest competition of my life, athletics officials told me that I wouldn’t be going. My manager said it was something in my blood. I was devastated to be kicked out of my sport on the eve of the Olympics, I had only just run a personal best at a competition in the Netherlands.

I wondered: what was so wrong with me? I didn’t take drugs. I felt completely healthy. In fact, I was in my best shape and aiming to make it to the finals in London. I was happy and dreaming of a bright future in athletics.

In July 2012, on the advice of the global governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics), I travelled to France where I met some doctors who conducted intrusive tests. I was then referred me to a surgeon in Uganda. I was told that if I wanted to keep running, I needed to have a medical intervention. At the time, I thought it was going to be like a needle pulling fluid from my body.

It wasn’t until I woke up from the anesthesia, with bandages on my abdomen, that I realised something very different had happened. No matter how hard I trained, I never regained my strength. I was not told that I would need life-long hormone therapy after that surgery. My university cancelled my scholarship, and my manager stopped contacting me for competitions. I became deeply depressed and experienced joint pain. I moved home and started working as a manual labourer.

It wasn’t until 2019, when athlete rights activist Payoshni Mitra reached out to me that I learnt, in detail, about the regulations that had pushed me out of my sport.

Back in 2011 World Athletics had published regulations aimed at defining who could and could not compete in the female category. It was decided that testosterone levels in women’s bodies would be identified as the criteria for whether we were “women enough” to compete – or whether we would need to take medication or have surgery to change our natural bodies.

It was these regulations that meant I was targeted by officials. It was the blood they collected during routine doping tests at the 2011 world championships in South Korea that led them to eliminate me from competition.

In 2019 I decided to speak openly about my experiences. I was worried that the powerful white men who run World Athletics might still be ruining the lives of hard-working young African women for whom sport means a better life.

Only two years ago I learned of an article in a medical journal about four female runners, published in 2013, by doctors in France. I believe I was one of the four athletes referred to in that article. Reading it was both revealing and revolting. I was never told that I would be part of a scientific report, and the article provides a lot of detail: our ages and familial relations, information about our anatomy – descriptions of reproductive organs, genitals and pubic hair, as well as our breasts and history of menstruation.

It also states that the surgeries we underwent were medically unnecessary. And I started learning that the science World Athletics claims supports its testosterone regulations is not in fact clear. This was painful for me. My body was shamed, humiliated, surgically altered even though I didn’t need it to be, and used as an object of study simply because I am different and I wanted to run.

I have since consented for my name to be mentioned in other reports – a human rights report by the United Nations, and one by Human Rights Watch. My name appears alongside women like Caster Semenya, who I’ve idolised because she is an Olympic and world champion. The reports say that World Athletics violated our rights, and that the regulations should be revoked. These reports make me proud.

I am seen by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights as a woman, an athlete, and a person who never deserved to be treated this way. I’ve been granted asylum in Germany, and I’m on the medication I should have been given immediately following the surgery that I never needed in the first place.

I welcome the International Olympic Committee’s new policy on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination published this week. During their long consultation process, the IOC spoke to me and learnt about my experiences and suffering. I am grateful to the governing body for listening to me, along with other black and brown women like me, for upholding the principles of inclusion, non-discrimination, and most importantly the prevention of harm and right to health and bodily autonomy.

World Athletics’s current DSD regulations are harmful. My body is the site where harm was caused, and I can’t forget that. No matter how much I try, I cannot undo what happened in 2012, I cannot go back to the body I had before I was operated on. But I can try to stop other brown and black women going through what I did.

In a competition between competitive aspirations and one’s right to health and bodily autonomy, the latter should be prioritised. I feel vindicated because IOC have upheld that and have advised federations to prioritise these values. They have warned sports governing bodies not to presume advantage without evidence-based research. World Athletics have flouted these principles in my case, and I hope that we can all come together to ensure that their discriminatory DSD regulations are revoked now.

[zambianobserver]

WOMEN THAT HAVE BEEN BARRED FROM OLYMPICS FOR BEING TOO ‘MANLY’

WOMEN THAT HAVE BEEN BARRED FROM OLYMPICS FOR BEING TOO ‘MANLY’

WOMEN THAT HAVE BEEN BARRED FROM OLYMPICS FOR BEING TOO ‘MANLY’ #Olympics PHOTOS: Left to right: Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba, Uganda’s Annet Negesa, South Africa’s Caster Semenya and Margret Wambui of Kenya. Yes they are women – by medical terms – however their testosterone is way above that of their fellow women. All these women have had issues with global athletes bodies and international…

[burnitalldowndarling]

Short hair has nothing to do with it. We get this shit whether we relax our hair and grow it long or whether we keep it short. It’s because we’re Black.

There is a very long racist history of treating Black women as not-women. Because of course if you’ve built your culture and economic systems around framing women as delicate and in need of male protection (as white supremacists do), but you want to literally treat some women like mules, then the only way to square that circle is to imply that we are not truly women. We see the same framing again and again regarding Black actresses and public figures. It’s one of the reasons why so many of the cis women athletes getting forced to undergo gender testing -- see Caster Semenya, Annet Negesa, and Maximila Imali, among many others -- are Black, and it’s one of the reasons that women with perfectly normal conditions like androgen insensitivity are being excluded, even though there’s no evidence that their higher testosterone is affecting anything. And this is one of the reasons that “trans women don’t belong in sports!” has become such a thing -- because it also provides an easy way to get rid of cis women whose bodies don’t fit the narrow, sexualized ideal of white womanhood.

Trans women are women. Women of color are women. Racism, misogyny, and transphobia are issues that have always been intertwined. I really wish people would figure this out.

Random thought: I strongly disagree with the commentary that SNW Uhura is "masculinized". She's got makeup, sparkly earrings, walks with a sashay, and was a literal queen in one episode.

Some of these negative comments regarding the character have hurt people, particularly Black fans with that very hair which is the subject of much of this commentary.

[deenewsline]

Rights Group Demands End to Sex Testing of Female Track Athletes

Rights Group Demands End to Sex Testing of Female Track Athletes

The report was based on interviews last year with 13 female athletes from African and Asian countries, as well as input from lawyers, doctors, academics and medical ethicists. Annet Negesa, an intersex middle-distance runner from Uganda, told researchers that an operation to remove her internal testes was performed in 2012 without her consent. The operation, she said, left her battling headaches…

[oh-okay-kay]

oh i would love to live in a world where women like simone biles, serena williams, caster semenya, imane khelif, lin yu-ting, dutee chand, annet negesa, and others have never been accused of being men. i nearly see a pattern there.. anyways, that sounds like a lovely place!

here is a great video on the topic, specifically in regards to Black women and transphobia

there is zero excuse for joanne and fellow right wingers to call imane khelif, a woman who has identified and lived as a woman her whole life, a man. you do no favours for women

'a woman of colour is winning? women arent *that* strong. that is a man. i am pro-women'

[junker-town]

Caster Semenya and the cruel history of contested black femininity

World Athletics’ regulations targeting Caster Semenya are rooted in a long legacy of black bodies being held to white standards.

In the 10 years since Caster Semenya won the 2009 World Championships at just 18 years old, the sports world has whittled her story down to one thing: her body.

Narrow hips. Wide shoulders. Pronounced jawline. Manly.

Based on the tones of disgust used to discuss her physicality, one might think that Semeya is the only runner to ever possess a body that so greatly differed from everyone else’s in the field. It seems the sports world has forgotten the peculiarities of Ira Murchison’s stocky, 5’4 frame, which earned him both the nickname “Human Sputnik” and an Olympic gold medal in the 4x100. Or that world record-holder Usain Bolt was taller with longer legs than any of his competitors.

Unlike those men, Semenya’s body is often deemed unwanted and out of place, most notoriously by her sport’s governing body. Throughout her career, World Athletics, formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations, has insisted she undergo intrusive testing and hormone regulation, and ultimately banned her from competition after instituting rule changes that seemingly targeted her in 2019.

But Semenya is not alone. Burundian runner Francine Niyonsaba, one of Semenya’s competitors in the 800-meter run, has since revealed she is one of a growing number of female athletes, mostly from the Global South, whose hyperandrogenism puts them directly in the crosshairs of World Athletics’ regulations. Former top junior-athlete Annet Negesa, an intersex runner from Uganda, recently disclosed that she underwent invasive surgery at the behest of World Athletics doctors to ensure she could continue competing. Complications from the procedure left her damaged both mentally and physically.

Underlying this harsh, discriminatory treatment is not simply an adherence to faulty biological metrics or antiquated, binary conceptions of gender, though these aspects have undoubtedly played a role. In fact, “sex verification” practices originated in the 1950s out of the as yet unfounded suspicion that some countries were allowing men to compete disguised as women, and involved little more than asking athletes to remove their undergarments. (Some of the athletes subjected to this scrutiny, like 1932 Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh, were discovered to have genetic conditions resembling intersex characteristics.)

Semenya’s treatment is rooted in something far more disturbing. As early as the 16th century, European explorers who made their way to the African continent began remarking on the anatomical features of the populations they encountered. To the Europeans, the dark skin, strong builds, and wide lips and noses they encountered resembled those of apes, so much so that they began perpetuating the idea that Africans regularly copulated with monkeys. Over time, such beliefs took on a more gendered tone, with comparisons made between African and European women that not only promoted arbitrary markers of racial difference and inferiority, but also justified the exclusion of African women from the category of “woman” altogether.

World Athletics remains committed to a centuries-old, white supremacist notion that defines “womanhood” in terms of the white, cisgendered female body, rendering everyone else, especially women of African descent, socially unacceptable abberations.

World Athletics describes its mission as fostering “athletic excellence” and enhancing sport to “offer new and exciting prospects for athletes.” Yet it has historically done so by enabling vile attitudes towards black women and the bodies they inhabit.

In 1897, just 15 years before World Athletics was founded, British missionary Sir Albert Cook, a medical doctor by training, wrote broadly and unabashedly about his ethically dubious biopsies of women in present-day Uganda, remarking:

“Who has not been struck by the extraordinary narrowness of the Negroid hip? Viewed behind in the erect position at the level of hips the female Negroid body is narrow and round as compared with the “broad beam” of the average European woman, and when the dried pelvises of each are placed alongside each other the explanation is obvious, the Muganda’s bone looks like that of a child in size and in the fineness of its structure.... The negroid races have a shape of pelvis which is intermediate between the protomorphean races and those of the higher civilised types.... The brim, as in the apes, is long­oval in shape.”

It is difficult to overemphasize how critical Cook’s now-disproven studies were in the development of racialized ideas around femaleness and womanhood, and ultimately the dehumanization of black women’s bodies. He would become a two-time president of the British Medical Association and was knighted by way of King George V after his studies of African women’s anatomy became popular. Cook exemplified to the colonizing world the “knowledge” that could be seized upon through engagement with the African “other.”

Before Cook, Sarah Baartman, more commonly known by her derogatory nickname “The Hottentot Venus,” encompassed Western society’s fixation on black women’s bodies. Captured and enslaved in what is now South Africa (Semenya’s home country), Baartman was brought to Europe in 1810 and exhibited in circuses and public squares until her death, when scientists assessed and dissected her elongated labia. That work was promoted as more evidence that black women’s so-called deficiencies made them less “womanly” than their white counterparts.

The impact of such ideas can still be seen today within the medical community through widespread diagnoses of “labial hypertrophy,” a medical term for an elongated labia, despite the fact it is not a major (nor, for the most part, even minor) health concern. The rise of labiaplasties — a procedure that shortens and reduces the overall length and size of the labia — reifies the idea that the legitimacy of female genitalia should be defined by its distance from the physiology of the black, female body.

And while some might dismiss the relevance of these concepts today, chalking them up to a long-ago historical era of “overt” racism, they nonetheless helped Europeans institutionalize racism in areas like sports. As a result, the medical knowledge that informs society and World Athletics’ standard of womanhood is deeply rooted in racism, to the extent that black women like Semenya, Niyonsaba, and Negesa never really stood a chance.

Getty Images

AFP via Getty Images

Take sex hormones, for example. The idea that there are racial differences in testosterone and estrogen levels, particularly between black and white groups, is widely held yet highly controversial. The belief that black women are more masculine than just about every other race of women is rooted in the 17th and 18th centuries, and based on the notion that people of African descent are animalistic and aggressive. Fast forward to 1995, when popular psychologist J. Philippe Rushton argued that black people are less intelligent and more impulsive than white and Asian people, in large part due to their heightened levels of testosterone. Though Rushton’s work has been subjected to criticism over the years, his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior is in its third edition. Rushton himself was elected to the prestigious Canadian Psychological Association, and received a one-time Guggenheim fellowship. Scientists have spent the last few decades refuting Rushton’s claims, and ironically fanning the flames of racial pseudoscience.

Some studies suggest that among older women in the U.S., black women possess lower levels of estradiol, a form of the female sex hormone estrogen, than white women. On the surface, this may appear to be the source of World Athletic’s highly racialized policies. But it is important to note few studies have assessed racialized hormone disparities among women of different races, and even fewer studies with results that can actually be replicated. More common, as one might imagine, are studies that explore racial differences in sex hormones among men. Some show, contrary to popular belief, testosterone levels are quite similar between black and white men, while free estradiol levels are much higher in black men than men of other races. But even those results have been questioned by endocrinologists, biologists, and doctors due to conflicting studies in the field.

World Athletics’ relative lack of interest in variance in men’s bodies illustrates, by contrast, just how disproportionately unfair it has acted towards women. In his 1996 book Darwin’s Athletes, historian John Hoberman argues this discrepancy is due to a fixation on “black athletic aptitude” that goes back centuries. In 1851, physician Samuel Cartwright wrote that, “It is not only in the skin that a difference of color exists between the negro and the white man, but in the membranes, the muscles, the tendons, and in all the fluids and secretions.” Cartwright’s work, which Hoberman claims was read widely by slaveholders, gave (pseudo-) scientific, biological justification for maintaining racial hierarchy and slavery, even as moral opposition grew in other parts of the United States. Implicit in Cartwright’s work was the idea that black men’s physicality is acceptable only when it can be manipulated for profit.

Today, we see Cartwright’s legacy in sports. Exceptional male bodies, often characterized by great strength and size, often inspire awe, and not ire, because for the last century sports institutions have forged and refined mechanisms to make money off of them. Strong women’s bodies, however, haven’t yet been nearly as profitable, and thus have been much more easily derided.

From an interracial lens, black athletes are only considered worthy of wealth once they’ve proven their value beyond any reasonable standard. Until then, they are denied the same fame, wealth, and recognition that white competitors more easily receive. In their analysis of the rise of Kenyan athletes in the middle and long distance winners’ circle, John Bale and Joe Sang show that, when confronted with the domination of African-American sprinters from the top of the 20th century onward, white sprinters from Europe quietly retreated to the longer distances while sports writers claimed black athletes lacked the stamina and strategic acumen to succeed in those races. Further, when black athletes began performing better than whites, race officials would either give white athletes another opportunity to run, or disqualify the faster times run by their black counterparts. Such was the case when African runners Humphrey Khosi and Bennett Makgamathe bested white runners in a 1962 meet held in Mozambique, but were denied victory by officials.

Now, World Athletics has established “development centres” throughout Africa and many other parts of the Global South, hoping to recruit and cultivate the very talent it once sought to restrict from success in competition. Some argue that regional development centres are actually a way to export these athletes to the West so that they can compete for nations like Britain and France. And still, these centres cater to the cultivation of male athletes, leaving women behind even in countries with more liberal attitudes towards women’s participation in sports.

World Athletics simply sees little use in acknowledging and developing female talent, particularly black female talent in the Global South. As exemplifiers of a particular strain of racialized thinking, those women, to them, are not “real women.” And when World Athletics refuses to elevate the athletic prowess of a black woman, within a body that defies centuries of white supremacist, colonial, gender-essentialist myths, it chooses, instead, to humiliate her on every level.

In this era of sports and protest, perhaps a movement of solidarity from other runners could rise up, forcing World Athletics to reevaluate its stance. But track and field is still an intense, cutthroat competition. Many contestants instead see a chance to fill a void atop the podium, or worse, proliferate their own racism without fear of backlash. British middle-distance runner Jemma Simpson described racing with Semenya as “literally running against a man.” Australian Madeleine Pape recently defended Semenya, and expressed regret at having joined “the chorus of voices condemning her performance as ‘unfair’.” Black female athletes from sub-Saharan Africa occupy a position of heightened marginality; the chances of them receiving widespread support were miniscule from the jump. Ironically as some of the world’s fastest runners, they haven’t been able to garner the momentum needed to create a different outcome.

And yet, these women shouldn’t need to advocate for themselves. As society continues to confront the racial legacies of social institutions in other ways, sports organizations like World Athletics have a clear opportunity to address the harm done as a result of the implementation of racist, sexist ideas. No more hiding behind biased science, doctors, and metrics. Semenya, Niyonsaba, Negesa, and other African female athletes with hyperandrogenism need not alter or manipulate themselves to fit ideals of womanhood that were constructed explicitly around their exclusion. Their bodies are simply not the problem.

They never were.