Vol. 24 No. 251 (2019)

For these times a striking debate crosses the world of sports and therefore the world culture. The IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) has decided to define the category Women according to a hormonal test. In this way, the South African runner Caster Semenya - double Olympic champion (2012, 2016) and triple world champion (2009, 2011, 2017) of the 800 meters - and other athletes, should make risky interventions on their bodies to participate. This biological excess, it's argue, calls into question the egalitarian character of competition, even when it is not produced artificially.
Simone de Beauvoir said that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Part of that cultural construction is carried out in the context and the decision to practice the sport that each one likes, without having to pay the price of the invasion of privacy, well-being and the impairment of social and professional possibilities.
Faced with the claims of athletes and leaders of the countries they represent, the CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) must decide these days where the rules of sport will be oriented, recurrently affirmed in the "sacred nature of a legal and open competition ", a euphemism that hides a practice of exclusion that explicitly violates all international agreements on human rights.
Tulio Guterman, Director - April 2019