At 25, Olympics runner Caster Semenya has the physique of a top male athlete. Her jaw is prominent and wide. She is heavily muscled, with chiselled abs, a broad chest and a thick neck. By comparison, the women she competes against look scrawny.
Ms. Semenya is the odds-on favourite to take the gold medal at the Summer Games next week in the women's 800 metre, one of the signature events in track and field. Her masculine appearance is explained by her testosterone levels, which are far higher than an average woman's. Testosterone also helps to explain her tremendous running speed. The South African athlete has an intersex condition known as hyperandrogenism. But she identifies as a woman, and under current Olympics rules, she is allowed to compete as one.
Rio Olympics Day 4: What to watch and the latest news
In photos: Triumph, tears and the plain tenacity of Canada's Olympic athletes
Intersex and transgender athletes pose an excruciating dilemma for women's sports. A growing number of people believe that athletes shouldn't be excluded from competition simply because they don't fit the standard gender and biological binary of male and female. But other people argue that is unfair, too. Ms. Semenya, for example, competes effortlessly at a level that other female runners have sweated all their lives to achieve.
"I think Caster is a wonderful person, I have nothing against her, but I think we already have an established precedent of men's sports and women's sports," Shannon Rowbury, an American 1,500-metre champion, told a California newspaper. "Women have fought far too long to be able to even have the right to compete, and now it's being challenged by intersex and trans athletes, and I don't think that's right."
Ms. Semenya burst into public view in 2009, when she triumphed in the track and field world championships. Her performances were so dramatic that the authorities subjected her to gender tests and suspended her from competition while they tried to figure out if she was truly eligible to compete as a woman. Their ham-handedness created an international furor, and Ms. Semenya emerged as a new heroine for human rights.
In the wake of the debacle, the authorities decided they needed new, clearer criteria for biological eligibility. The trouble is, those are hard to find. The vast majority of people are unambiguously biologically male or female, but a few are not. Intersex conditions, while very rare, can also be very complicated. Ms. Semenya has internal male sex organs but no female ones. So what does that make her?
In an effort to resolve this problem, the authorities resorted to testosterone. They ruled that to compete as women, athletes with hyperandrogenism, such as Ms. Semenya, would have to artificially reduce their testosterone levels. So would trans athletes who were formerly male.
She apparently complied and her performance fell off. And lots of people thought that rule was unfair, too. Why should we force people to artificially suppress their natural gifts? In 2014, Indian runner Dutee Chand, another athlete with an intersex condition, appealed the testosterone ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and won.
It suspended the rule through the end of 2017 and told the sports authorities to come up with more proof that it was justified. (Trans athletes are still required to suppress their testosterone to a prescribed level.)
After last year's ruling, her performance soared again. Next week, she could set a world record. In this age of gender fluidity, lots of people are cheering her on – not because she's a terrific athlete (she is), or because she has had a rough time (she has), but because she validates the fashionable notion that gender is a social construct. We all exist along a continuum of male to female, the argument goes, even biologically.
The trouble is that one group's human-rights triumph can be another group's oppression. As Olympic medalist Sonia O'Sullivan wrote in the Irish Times, "It actually feels like the majority of women athletes are being held to ransom, while the legal teams get their act together and make a decision on the future for women's sport – while the athletes in question continue to compete, winning medals, setting records and walking away with a substantial amount of prize money."
Is there any way to resolve these competing rights in a way that's fair to everyone? I don't think so. Some things in this world – such as winning and losing – are still binary, whether or not we like it.