On Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that female athletes with naturally elevated levels of testosterone could not compete as women unless they made efforts to reduce the hormone in their bodies.
The ruling came in a case brought by the middle-distance runner Caster Semenya against the International Association of Athletics Federations that challenged longstanding myths about the presumed masculinity of testosterone and its role in the body. Her loss demonstrates just how entrenched those myths have become.
For a century, talk about testosterone as the “male hormone” has woven folklore into science, so that supposedly objective claims seemingly validate cultural beliefs about the structure of masculinity and the “natural” relationship between women and men.
Labeling testosterone the male sex hormone suggests that it is restricted to men and is alien to women’s bodies, and obfuscates the fact that women also produce and require testosterone as part of healthy functioning. Even the earliest hormone researchers understood that testosterone has wide-ranging effects on metabolism, liver function, bones, muscle, skin and the brain in both sexes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/opinion/testosterone-caster-semenya.html
