Same Tricks, New Name: The IAAF’s New 2018 Testosterone Regulation Policy for Female Athletes

On April 26, 2018, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) released its updated version of its policy on athletes with hyperandrogenism, in a discriminatory attempt to define the term female through specified levels of testosterone, and to thereby provide asolution to the problem of athletes who fell outside of their socially constructed gender binary. The IAAF’s attempts to uphold this outdated binary system is a reflection of normalized scientific discourse which creates accepted, supposedly normal, behaviors and bodies at the expense of and resulting in the oppression of those who challenge these dominant regimes of knowledge (Foucault, 1978). Certainly, the prioritization of scientific knowledge is nothing new for the intersex community, given the history of irreversible genital surgery on newborns and young children with genitalia that is incongruent with current sex standards to make them fit societal gender ideals (Davis, 2015; Karkazis, 2008). In this paper, I trouble the IAAF’s supposed solution to intersex athletes through a Foucauldian understanding of biopower and science-based constructions of knowledge and truths, with particular attention to the perpetuation of health disparities within the intersex community. More specifically, I examine the site and role of female athletes’ bodies, such as Caster Semenya, whose rights to equitable and just treatment were cast aside in order to uphold artificially constructed and societally accepted ideas of male and female. I use Semenya’s narrative, coupled with the scientific discourse in the IAAF’s decision, to explore the subsequent, but unsurprisingly repetitive, reproduction of the hierarchical power relations between governing sports bodies and athletes, especially female athletes.