Semenya reacts to controversy about Olympians' gender, echoing her own

Paris (CNN) — For two-time Olympic track and field champion Caster Semenya, Paris 2024’s boxing was unusually poignant.

Watching Algerian fighter Imane Khelif weather a firestorm of abuse over allegations about her gender, she couldn’t help think back to the similar trials she suffered from her teenage years in sport.

“Is there anyone out there who’s, you know, besides them? While I was alone, I had to figure it out myself,” the South African told CNN. “It’s quite emotional.”

Paris 2024 has been a story with a happy ending for Khelif.

She took light welterweight gold on Friday night, besting her Chinese opponent in a dominant performance. It was a redemption of sorts. But her Olympics have been marred by allegations over her gender, citing a 2023 decision by a now-discredited boxing regulator to bar her from a women’s tournament.

“As people, we tend to forget that we cannot control nature,” said Semenya, who missed out on a chance at a third Olympic gold over 2019 rules enforcing testosterone levels in women athletes. Semenya had the regulations overturned last year in the European Court of Human Rights.

She said that because athletes train so much, their performance can’t be pinned just on their natural-born differences

But the world hasn’t moved on from the discrimination that Semenya battled through, with Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting banned by the now-discredited International Boxing Association in 2023.

In contrast, the Olympics’ governing body, the IOC, has stood resolutely behind the boxers, qualifying their participation based on their gender in their passports, a sharp reversal from the regime Semenya faced.

Khelif was, “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport,” with IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said.

The South African applauded the change but called for greater IOC influence across sports to ensure individual federations can’t discriminate against athletes.

The IOC should be “making sure that all athletes that take part in Olympics are well protected,” Semenya said.

“There should not be any other organization that will come in and segregate people, come in, discriminate people, come in, dehumanize people,” she added.

“Psychologically, I will say it does demoralize someone,” she said of the allegations she endured, “you feel dehumanized.”

It’s not just the athletes affected by questions over their gender or suitability to compete, Semenya said. During the games, Khelif’s father weighed into the unevidenced allegations, publicly presenting his daughter’s birth certificate and photos of her as young girl.

“It breaks someone’s heart as a parent,” Semenya – now a mother of two - said.

“Someone who doesn’t know even anything about them, come question them, you know, violate them, you know, in public,” she said, adding that her parents were wounded by her treatment.

“They had to, you know, pretend as it they are fine,” she said, “Psychologically, it destroys them.”

Ahead of her Olympic win, Semenya had a simple piece of advice for Khelif.

“Focus on what you can do best,” she said. “Focus on things that you can control. You know you’re an athlete. You know you’re a woman and you know you’re strong. You can handle this.”

“This talk is just a storm that will always pass.”

Semenya is hyperandrogenous – meaning she has naturally high levels of testosterone – which had landed her at the heart of controversy among athletics regulators over whether she has an unfair advantage.

After her fight on Friday, Khelif pushed back against the allegations.

“I am fully qualified to take part in this competition. I am a woman like any other woman. I was born a woman. I lived a woman. I competed as a woman,” she said. “There’s no doubt about there. They are enemies of success. This is what I call them. These are the enemies of success and of course, that gives my success a special taste because of these attacks.”

Semenya – who won 800m Olympic gold in both the 2012 and 2016 games – has been locked in a decade-long fight with World Athletics over testosterone regulation.

After losing two appeals with World Athletics (WA), previously known as the IAAF, regarding 2019 rules regulating levels of the hormone in female athletes, last summer she won an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights to end the limits.

She was unable to defend her crown at the Tokyo Olympics due to the rules, which would have forced her to take testosterone-reducing medication.

Variations in people’s reproductive anatomy, chromosome patterns or other traits that may not align with typical binary definitions of female or male are what is defined as differences in sex development (DSD).

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