Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling on women track athletes

Discrimination is necessary. This is what the CAS ruling has decided. To level the playing field in women’s athletics it is necessary and fair to discriminate against those women who show a natural advantage for their sport.

Now, to compete in certain athletics events – for this ruling does not cover all athletics events, just track events shorter than one mile and longer than 400m, those that Caster Semenya excels in - women like Caster Semenya are obliged to alter their natural body chemistry in order to meet guidelines arbitrarily determined by the IAAF of what a woman is.

This ruling is unfair, and dangerous even. The World Medical Association (WMA) has demanded immediate withdrawal of the regulations, on the grounds that they are contrary to international medical ethics and human rights standards, highlighting that the ruling is based on “weak evidence from a single study, which is currently being widely debated by the scientific community”. For women athletes – for the ruling only applies to women, as men with different testosterone levels do not pose a problem – to begin “artificially modifying blood constituents, biochemistry or endogenous testosterone” “might be harmful to the athlete”. The United Nations supports the WMA opinion, deeming the new regulations incompatible with international human rights.

The EGLSF upholds the values of inclusion in sport. We support the right of every one to participate and compete in sport, free from discrimination. We find this ruling to be in direct conflict to these values and particularly offensive in its policing of sex and of women’s bodies.

We stand with the many other sporting bodies that have expressed their disappointment with the CAS decision, and we support Caster Semenya in her struggle to simply compete in a sport that she is good at, as the person she is #StandwithCaster.