The Olympics is the gold standard for athletic excellence, and Caster Semenya, the gold medalist track champion for South Africa, is one of its top stars. However, the double Olympic 800-meter champion appears to have lost her legal battle against regulations requiring women with high testosterone to take medication to compete internationally between 400-meter and a mile.

Semenya’s biology has been under scrutiny for a decade, ever since she burst on the scene at the 2009 World Track and Field Championships and was subjected to sex tests following her victory. The issue of whether a rare biological trait was causing an unfair advantage for Semenya and a small subset of women quickly morphed into a battle about privacy and human rights, and Semenya became its symbol.

Semenya was almost unstoppable until World Athletics implemented a new policy for differences of sex development (DSD) athletes, including Semenya, that compelled them to reduce their testosterone levels to less than five nmol/L if they wanted to compete in elite events between 400 meters and a mile.

The lead world organization on sports is telling these women that if they want to compete in events they have competed in for years now, they will be unable to compete unless they physically alter their bodies to get rid of something that is perfectly natural for women to have.

Semenya was offered a terrible choice in order to keep competing: take a testosterone-regulating medication that dampens her body’s natural hormones, or stick to events like the 200-meter dash, which are exempt from hormone requirements. Rather than change her hormonal profile, Semenya has already said she will not compete in the 800-meter race if that is the requirement.

It now looks impossible for Semenya, the London 2012 and Rio 2016 gold medalist, to defend her title for the 800-meter in Tokyo.

The World Athletics rules were contested in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), based in Switzerland, by Semenya and the South African Athletics Association. However, the court determined the rules were “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” for maintaining fairness in women’s track. 

“I am very disappointed by this ruling, but refuse to let World Athletics drug me or stop me from being who I am,” Semenya said. “Excluding female athletes or endangering our health solely because of our natural abilities puts World Athletics on the wrong side of history. I will continue to fight for the human rights of female athletes, both on the track and off the track, until we can all run free the way we were born.”

World Athletics argued the policy was justified because more than 99 percent of females have around 0.12-1.79 nmol/L of testosterone in their bodies — while DSDs are closer to the male range. CAS has upheld that policy, saying it was fair because DSD athletes, including Semenya, had a significant advantage in size, strength and power from puberty onward because of their elevated testosterone levels.

Basically, World Athletics and CAS have decided that even with a normal nonaltered female-at-birth body, DSD athletes like Semenya cannot and should not compete.

Everyone has testosterone, but it is involved in many factors that may confer athletic benefit including increased muscle size and strength, along with the ability for the blood to deliver oxygen to those working muscles. This is why elite male athletes are generally faster and stronger than females and also why males don’t compete against females in most sports. 

Semenya has high levels of testosterone so she will undoubtedly have at least some associated metabolic benefits, but all of them are still natural.

“How much benefit testosterone gives female athletes is difficult to define as women cannot convert testosterone into its more potent form and do not possess the same numbers of testosterone receptors (to carry out its actions) as men,” said Daniel Kelly with The Conversation. “The World Athletics level of 5nmol/L is still high for female levels, which normally range from 0.1 – 1.8nmol/L. Judging the actual benefit of testosterone and where to draw these lines would require a lot more research and investigation.”

However, there is an argument World Athletics and CAS does have the right idea with their ruling. This idea is seated in the protection of women’s athletics and the possibility that all women should have a choice for the podium.

“The gender studies folks have spent the last 20 years deconstructing sex and all of a sudden they’re facing an institution with an entirely opposite story,” said Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a law professor at Duke and an elite 800-meter runner in the 1980s who served as an expert witness for the track and field’s world governing body. “We have to ask, ‘Is respecting gender identity more important or is seeing female bodies on the podium more important?’”

Coleman also said in sports, “distinguishing people on the basis of their biology actually matters a lot.”

“It matters because if we failed to do it, we will lose the capacity to isolate the best females on the planet,” Coleman added. “We would never see a female body on the podium.”

However, Semenya hasn’t artificially altered her testosterone levels and while her condition is rare and gives her a large advantage as a track athlete, they are naturally occurring — so is it not discrimination to make her change her body to compete? Does this take the phrase “all men are equal” to the extreme and try to make everyone the same, even by artificial measures? And where does this stop? 

Many genetic physical attributes can contribute to athletic performance such as height, muscle composition and aerobic capacity.

In fact, Michael Phelps, another world renowned athlete, has many natural attributes that give him the perfect swimmer’s body, however you do not see him called out or shunned away from his sport because he has flipper-like feet.

We need to let women compete with their natural bodies, no matter the natural edge, because sports is not all about the training and practice, it is also about the athlete’s natural body.

Training and practice do play a role in the ability of an athlete, because without either, the “naturally gifted” athletes like Phelps and Semenya would not be anywhere near the athletes they are now.

World Athletics needs to go back on their ruling and just let women who aren’t taking testosterone, but are born with it naturally compete in sports. They already have been for years, let’s stop controlling their bodies and just let them be.