Annet Negesawas born in April 1992 in igamba. a city of Ugandalocated a few kilometers from the sanctuary of the “Ripon Falls”: considered in the last century “The sources of the Nile River” and today disappeared after the construction of the dam in Jinja that perfected the reaches of Lake Victoria.
In those places of more than around 1200 meters of altitude, Annet grew up running Since she was little, she drew the attention of the locals for her athletic ability and her physical condition.
She specialized in middle-distance competitions and it didn’t take long for her to attract the attention of the authorities. world athletics. Before turning 20, exhaustive post-competition checks began.
In the second half of 2011, when he reached the semifinals of the XIII World Athletics Championships in Daegu (South Korea) did complete blood and urine tests. She was a girl and she wondered:
“Why me? I don’t see anyone else donating six bottles of blood like they’re asking me to“.
They never gave her a refund on the tests and she continued to prepare for the tests. Olympic Games the following year but, a couple of weeks before, her manager called her and informed her that it was banned. She could not attend London 2012. The results of his analysis revealed a level of male hormones higher than considered normal.
Negesa devastated by the news and full of confusion, she wanted to be accepted again. The doctors of the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) suggested that he take medication to lower testosterone and if that was not enough, perform a surgical procedure so that he could compete again. A federation official approached him discreetly and they detected him not to make a scandal.
At the end of the year, a delegate from the local federation took her to the Women’s Hospital International & Fertility Center in Kampala, where she would undergo “a simple operation”. He woke up with scars on his abdomen. She had undergone an orchiectomy (removal of the internal testicles). After a painful recovery of months, she Negesa returned to training but, as expected, she never recovered her previous physical form.. Within a couple of years, he lost his college scholarship and his manager disappeared. His life was never the same again.
The story of Annet is similar in origin to that of semenya pitcher but diametrically opposite in the end. Beaverlike Annethas a picture of hyperandrogenism: where the levels of male sex hormones are above the normative value in women.
A difference of Annet, Beaver He opposed accepting the provisions imposed by the IAAF since 2011 to chemically and surgically reduce testosterone levels. His legal dispute with World Athletics has been going on for more than five years and has not yet been settled.
The scientific and legal basis behind these regulations is based on the indisputable competitive advantage that testosterone provides to athletes in certain types of events. If they were not so, analogous drugs would not be prohibited in anti-doping controls.
However, a debate arises at this point about the beautiful interaction that finds sports justice in sport, biology, genetics and epigenetics. Can femininity in sport be classified exclusively on current and recent past testosterone values?
The scientific evidence and the empirical criteria invite us to think that the reduction of testosterone levels is little when considering the complexity of the analysis.
Alison K. Heather, in her article “Elite trans athletes: their additional percentage in relation to female physiology”, collects studies and data to continue to maintain that estrogen therapy does not reverse most of the athletic performance parameters that men have above women’s base. Therefore, trans women would continue to maintain advantageous physiological variables when thinking about the competition, such as: bone structure, strength and motor coordination, lung and cardiovascular capacity, among others.
Marisa Jensen in “How is the issue of intersex athletes in elite sports positioned in the academic literature between January 2000 and July 2022? A systematic review.” extend the analysis to athletes who at birth are neither XX nor XY in their chromosome load and propose a multidisciplinary approach to address the issue, underlining the conflict that inevitably arises between inclusion and equity in competition.
Any review that is carried out on the existing scientific literature shows that there are advantages when thinking about female competition, when including women who suffer from hyperandrogenism and trans women.
Perhaps, one of the most substantial counterpoints in the argument, between one group and the other, lies in the difference between the innateness of hyperandrogenism, compared to the voluntary decision of gender reassignment.
The legal victory of Beaver It is just one more step, in this labyrinth of questions and more questions, that sports are asking about the diversity of man and how are the inclusion criteria that define gender categories in sports competition
