This month marks 15 years since a young runner from South Africa was publicly questioned about her gender at a major sporting event. The lesson everyone should learn from this was: never again.

But the humiliation that Caster Semenya experienced was repeated for two women who competed in boxing. Olympic Games in Parismore female athletes with hurtful remarks and online insults in a controversial divide over sex, gender and identity in sport.

While Imane Khelif from Algeria and Lin Yu-ting from Taiwan could bask in the pride of Win battles for their countriesbut their gender is questioned before the whole world after the boxing association banned from the Olympic Games claimed they had failed gender verification tests last year, but provided little information about it.

Olympic officials have called the arbitrary tests “so flawed that it is impossible to get involved in this,” stressing that both boxers were assigned female at birth, identify as women and are eligible to compete in women’s competitions. The two are still bombarded with hate comments, some from prominent figures outside the sporting world.

“This has implications, massive implications,” Khelif said in Arabic in a recent interview with SNTV, a sports partner of The Associated Press. “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirits and minds. It can divide people.”

Their stories have many similarities to that of Semenya, the runner whose arrival in elite athletics at the 2009 World Championships forced the sporting world to confront a topic that is highly complex and is still largely characterized by the same misunderstandings as back then.

Semenya was only 18 when she came into the spotlight 15 years ago. She underwent a gender test and became the focus of unsavory rumors about details of her body.

She became a two-time Olympic champion in the 800-meter race, but is probably better known as the woman whose health condition led her to effectively excluded from participation in women’s athletics competitions unless she lowers her testosterone levels medically.

The noise around Khelif and Lin was largely an ill-informed outcry, with many repeated false claims – the reinforced 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 was to ask why the sports authorities could not prevent it from happening again.

“Sport is for all people and the constitution prohibits discrimination. But as soon as they allow women to be dishonored, it confuses us,” Semenya said in an interview with the website SportsBoom.com this week. She called for leadership that “protects, respects and protects women.”

Female athletes with dark skin have in the past faced disproportionate control and discrimination when it comes to gender testing and false claims that they are male or transgender.

Semenya was born with one of the following diseases: Differences in gender developmentor DSDs. She was assigned female at birth and has always identified as a woman. Her disease results in an XY chromosome pattern and elevated testosterone levels.

Some sports, including athletics, believe this gives her and other women like her an unfair advantage and have drafted rules that exclude them on this basis. Semenya has questioned the rulesand the connection between testosterone and athletic advantage is not clear.

Another athlete, The Indian sprinter Dutee Chandhas also brought a legal dispute against the testosterone regulation and several other runners are affected And athletics, the sport most affected by this problem, has been marginalized over the past decade.

Male athletes do not need to regulate their natural testosterone levels.

Female athletes who appear more masculine have long been bullied and questioned about their gender. This effect is exacerbated when the question about gender is asked at an international event with a lot of attention.

In a the most personal details Semenya said she was so angry, hurt and confused about her treatment at the 2009 championships that she told track and field 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, revealing it in a 2022 interview with HBO.

With this, Semenya was saying something about how she felt her gender and identity were overwritten by others throughout her life. She has references to her be biologically male “deeply hurtful.”

Christine Mboma, a young runner from Namibia, also suffers from DSD. At the last Olympic Games in Tokyo, she won a silver medal at the age of 18. She was the first woman from her southern African country to ever win an Olympic medal.

However, when she returned home, she was met with scepticism rather than praise after her condition became known. Mboma appeared on the recent podcast “Tested” on public broadcasters NPR in the US and CBC in Canada and described how people in Namibia began to question whether she was really a woman.

“It’s a public humiliation,” Mboma’s coach Henk Botha said in the podcast. “We have to understand that someone’s life is at stake.”

Like Semenya and Mboma, Khelif and Lin will return home with Medals for achievements but perhaps burdened by the question of what reactions and misunderstandings they might provoke. Khelif is 25 years old. Lin is 28.

The incredibly difficult debate The question of whether women with certain medical conditions have an unfair sporting advantage is relevant to sport. But Semenya said the way Khelif and Lin were treated was “a matter of life and death.”

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AP Olympiad: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games