Denise Balkissoon is a Toronto writer and editor-in-chief of The Ethnic Aisle. She is on Twitter @Balkissoon.
It seems to me that most spectacular athletes are freaks of nature. Let's say that something called "normal" actually exists, and that it's defined by the most average person, of average intelligence, weight, height, coordination and overarching, all-around averageness. Michael Phelps' lung capacity is not normal. Nor is the Williams sisters' musculature. Cristiano Ronaldo's ridiculous footplay (especially in combination with his annoyingly self-aware boy-band looks) is not normal, which is why Real Madrid pays him approximately twelve zillion dollars a year.
The usual response when faced with such extraordinary physicalities is to gasp and applaud and pay high-performing athletes extra money to put specific logos on their clothing. We accept that their achievements are the result of dedication and discipline, but also a mysterious force that skips over most wombs. There's one exception that particularly irks me: women whose bodies produce more so-called male hormones than the average, "normal" woman, whoever she might be.
The latest victim of this physical policing is Indian sprinter Dutee Chand. The 18-year-old is currently challenging a rule set by the International Association of Athletics Federations that bars women with naturally-occurring high testosterone levels from competition. (The most famous case is probably Caster Semenya, the South African runner whose humiliating "gender test" became public knowledge after she won a gold medal at the 2009 World Championships.) Ms. Chand was born with hyperandrogenism, or adrenal glands that produce excess androgen hormones (of which testosterone is one). The IAAF and Athletics Federation of India want Ms. Chand to alter her body with drugs or surgery before she can compete again.
This is confusing and angering. Overseers usually tie themselves in knots to publically prevent athletes from injecting extra juice, especially after the back-to-back embarrassments of Lance Armstrong's bicycling team and the Biogenesis baseball scandal. A New York Times piece from last spring notes that it's possible to differentiate between natural and doped-up testosterone, so the IAAF isn't worried about a rerun of the Russian gymnast drama of the 1980s. If athletes are supposed to be competing with their natural bodies, this testosterone-crackdown is hypocritical.
When it comes to biological sex or gender, normal doesn't exist. At least seven in 1,000 elite female track and field athletes have the same condition Ms. Chand does. Hyperandrogenism is just one of an array of biological conditions that result in bodies or endocrine systems that don't fall neatly into the categories of female or male. One study by the pioneering biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling determined that as many as one in 100 people has a body that doesn't play by the sex/gender rules. The problem isn't that this variety exists, but that the categories we try to squeeze everyone into are too narrow. At some point, they'll hopefully be blown wide open; in the meantime, excluding one small subset of natural bodies from doing what they're good at is unfair.
As The Times piece points out, victory isn't necessarily determined by high testosterone in female athletes, or low testosterone in male ones. Besides, it's a fallacy that sports are played on a level field. There are nurture advantages: richer countries have more money to spend on training than poorer ones do and female hockey players work regular jobs between Olympic games while male players keep their skills sharp in the NHL. There are also nature advantages. No one is suggesting that seven-foot-tall north Toronto brothers Sim and Tanveer Bhullar should attempt to get into the NBA while playing on their knees, yet they obviously have a genetic leg-up that many of their opponents don't.
It's not clear why Ms. Chand's specific difference is where the line should be drawn. It's definitely not clear why a teenager should have to face the risks of medically unnecessary hormones or surgery. The only obvious answer is that her body makes other people uncomfortable, and that problem is theirs, not hers.