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The noise around Khelif and Lin has mostly been ill-informed outcry, with many repeating false claims — which have been amplified by Russian disinformation networks — that the two are men or
transgender. Semenya experienced the same vitriol. Her reaction to the degrading treatment of Khelif and Lin has been to ask how sports authorities couldn’t stop this from happening again.
“Sport is for all people and the constitution says no to discrimination. But the minute they allowed women to be disgraced, it confuses us,” Semenya said in an interview this week with the
website SportsBoom.com. She called for leadership that “safeguards, protects and respects women.” Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and
discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false claims that they are male or transgender. Semenya was born with one of a number of conditions known as differences of sex development,
or DSDs. She was assigned female at birth and has always identified as a woman. Her condition gives her an XY chromosome pattern and elevated levels of testosterone. Some sports, including
track, say that gives her and other women like her an unfair advantage and have crafted eligibility rules that exclude her on that basis. Semenya has challenged the rules, and the
correlation between testosterone and athletic advantage isn’t conclusive. Another female athlete, Indian sprinter Dutee Chand, also has waged a legal battle against the testosterone
regulations and several other runners have been affected and sidelined over the last decade in track and field, the sport that has been most affected by the issue. Male athletes are not
required to regulate their natural levels of testosterone. More masculine-presenting female athletes have long been bullied and questioned about their sex. That effect is magnified for those
whose sexes are questioned at a highly watched international event. In one of the most personal details of her struggle, Semenya said she was so angry, hurt and confused by her treatment at
the 2009 championships that she told athletics officials she would show them her vagina as proof she was a woman. It took her more than a decade to tell that story publicly when she
revealed it in an interview with HBO in 2022. With it, Semenya offered something about how she felt her gender and her identity for her entire life was being overridden by others. She has
called references to her being biologically male “deeply hurtful.” Christine Mboma, a young runner from Namibia, also has a DSD condition. She won a silver medal at the last Olympics in
Tokyo when she was also 18, the first woman from her southern African country ever to win an Olympic medal. But she returned home to more skepticism than praise after her condition became
public. The recent “Tested” podcast by public broadcasters NPR in the U.S. and CBC in Canada featured Mboma, outlining how people in Namibia started asking whether she was really a woman.
“It’s a public humiliation,” Mboma’s coach, Henk Botha, said on the podcast. “We need to understand, this is the life of somebody.” Like Semenya and Mboma, both Khelif and Lin will return
home with medals of achievement but possibly burdened by what kind of reaction and misconceptions might follow them. Khelif is 25 years old. Lin is 28. The incredibly difficult debate over
whether women with certain medical conditions have an unfair athletic advantage is relevant for sports. But Semenya said the way Khelif and Lin have been treated is “about principles of
life.”