Female track and field athletes no longer need to have their natural testosterone levels below a certain threshold to compete in international events, the so-called "Supreme Court of sports", the Court of Arbitration for Sport, ruled Monday.
Katrina Karkazis, PhD, a Stanford senior research scholar who was closely involved with the case, got the news on Friday, while she was in a San Francisco dog park. "What a day!" she said. "I was madly refreshing my email — I thought we were going to lose... I just started screaming and crying."
Karkazis, who is an expert on ethics in sports and also gender, said she spent a year of her life working on the case.
She served as an advisor to 19-year-old sprinter Dutee Chand, who challenged the regulation that female athletes must have certain testosterone levels or undergo medical interventions to lower their testosterone to be allowed to compete against women in events governed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the international regulatory body of track and field.
The ruling suspends the IAAF's testing regimen for two years, but Karkazis expects the decision will lead to permanent changes in women's sports, including a reevalution by the International Olympic Committee.
"I'm thrilled," Karkazis said. She said she was also surprised. "I didn't think it was our time. I thought there were still too many entrenched ideas about testosterone being a 'male hormone' and it not belonging in women."
Karkazis gained international attention after penning an op-ed in The New York Times in 2012 when the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee crafted a new policy banning women with naturally high levels of testosterone from competing.
"You can't test for sex," Karkazis said. "It's impossible. There's no one trait you can look at to classify people. There are many traits and there are always exceptions."
She said that now women who have lived and competed their entire lives as women will be eligible to compete, a default policy she believes is sufficient to ensure a level playing field.
Previously: "Drastic, unnecessary and irreversible medical interventions" imposed upon some female athletes, Arguing against sex testing in athletes and Is the International Olympic Committee's policy governing sex verification fair?
Photo by William Warby
