Big Win for Female Runner Born With High Testosterone

"I was humiliated for something that I can’t be blamed for." Humiliated, but no longer penalized, at least for now. Sprinter Dutee Chand, 19, will not be barred from competition following today's interim ruling by a sports appeals court, which found there wasn't sufficient evidence to conclude athletes with her medical condition have a "significant performance advantage." That condition: hyperandrogenism, which results in unusually high levels of testosterone. In Chand's case, her level was beyond what the International Association of Athletics Federations set in 2011 as the limit for female athletes; she was last year prohibited from running against women and appealed. Chand had declined to suppress her levels via drugs or surgery; at least four other female Olympians have had surgery to remove internal testes, reports the New York Times.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland suspended the IAAF's regulations on the matter, and gave the IAAF until July 24, 2017, to come up with scientific proof that there is a "quantitative relationship between enhanced testosterone levels and improved athletic performance in hyperandrogenic athletes," per the Times and the AP. If the IAAF can't, its hyperandrogenism rules will be void. The Times surfaces these lines from the ruling, which speak to what it sees as a case that "demonstrates further that biological gender is part of a spectrum": "Although athletics events are divided into discrete male and female categories, sex in humans is not simply binary. As it was put during the hearing: 'nature is not neat.'" (More Dutee Chand stories.)