An investigative reporter investigates nothing in lamenting Francine Niyonsaba's disqualification
Another journalist obliviously undermines their own bemoaning of the "mistreatment" of intersex athletes
I’m paying little attention to the dedicated running media’s output during the Olympics. For one thing, it’s hard to turn away from the semi-continuous athletics action taking place all week fifteen time zones into Colorado’s future. (I’m typing this right after watching Rai Benjamin run more than half a second under Karsten Warholm’s one-month-old 400-meter intermediate hurdles world record—a mark that itself erased a 29-year-old global standard—and lose the race by 0.23 to Warholm, the Norwegian whose freezing the clock at 45.94 was for me reminiscent of Michael Johnson’s similarly apocalyptic 19.32 200 meters at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. We’ll* soon be reading a lot of takes of the it’s hard to put into context just how remarkable a run this was variety on the sub-46 no sane person predicted.)
For another thing, as some readers have suggested, chasing around the Wokish butthurt-artists and their dystopian fever-dreams approximates the experience of, say, throwing drinking glasses at the animatronic band members at a Chuck E. Cheese and expecting them to launch into the Led Zeppelin song you’ve been demanding for two increasingly voluble hours. Even after your sixteenth lunging toss finally shatters the brim of the bassist’s hat, the players and their playlist ain’t changing. People have been noisily doing illogical, dishonest, and annoying things in groups in the name of righteousness for all of human history, and no amount of e-hectoring will reason a geographically distributed cadre of unethical people out of emotional positions to which resentment and self-interest have welded them. I still strongly dislike their work and personas, more than anything bad I recall about Chuck E. Cheese or Kashmir, but perhaps I can restrain myself to dealing only with their most inglorious and egregious dispatches for a minute or two.
But I have not imposed upon myself a total nonsense-blackout. Shortly after the two semifinal rounds of the women’s 5,000 meters on Friday evening Tokyo time, an article appeared in the Orange County Register dubbed “Francine Niyonsaba’s Olympic nightmare continues,” and the piece nimbly continues the general media’s horrifying coverage of Olympic-level intersex athletes.
(START OF BACKGROUND MATERIAL)
The backstory, this time with my editorializing instead of the kind you’ve grown used to elsewhere:
Niyonsaba was born with one of a number of related conditions known as 46, XY disorders of sexual development, or 46, XY, DSD for short. Worldwide data are limited, but it appears that about one in every 15,600 people classified as girls at birth turn out to possess the XY karyotype, the Y chromosome signifying male sex. These people are therefore physically male in almost every way, but this is not evident at birth, with infants usually presenting unusual but female-like external genitalia.
Until puberty, in the absence of a thorough gynecological exam—and to my knowledge, there are few good reasons to routinely perform such exams on pre-pubescent children—there is no reason to suspect that these people are, biologically, boys. And when they start developing deeper voices, muscles, and an interest in girls with the onset of puberty, like most boys worldwide, these kids, having been raised properly as girls, run into a world of hell that I can’t begin to imagine. I remember how chaotic adolescence is without any such truly unforeseeable and wrenching factors in the mix, and even in the unlikely scenario that such people find themselves surrounded by people offering the utmost in support, there is no easy way to navigate life from that stage forward.
If these people discover sports, and it turns out they have a decent level of talent for a high-school boy—say, the ability to run 800 meters in under two minutes—then it’s inevitable for some of them to land before long in world-class women’s fields. This is because a boy who is merely quite good can beat the best women in the world in any track and field event. In the 800 meters, the ability to run 1:55 is usually good enough to contend for a New Hampshire state championship (this year was unusual in the Granite State boasting a 1:53.05 kid). It’s also good enough to assure someone a chance to win an Olympic Gold medal on the women’s side.
Whatever path these people take to the top of the athletic world, it’s vital to realize that they aren’t cheating by any reasonable definition. A situation can be brazenly unfair without anyone in the mix doing anything actively diabolical, and that’s part of everyone’s frustration in adjudicating this issue once and for all: When all of the right rules are in place, intersex people are ultimately forced to suffer enormous athletic and personal setbacks in the name of fairness to the very sport that has done their young lives a great service. No one but a sadist wants to see that movie play out in real life.
But none of the foregoing changes the simple fact that intersex females like Niyonsaba are, for all practical purposes, not recognizable physiologically as females when you take a deeper, but anatomically very cursory, look. They possess no womb or ovaries, and instead have testes in their lower abdomen. Their external genitalia and their accordingly being raised from birth as girls are the only argument for an “intersex” designation. For athletic purposes, they are male. And although Wokish people will continue to yammer that we* shouldn’t trust our own eyes about various things—in this case the notion that “looks male” and “looks female” are meaningless phrases—when most people see an intersex female athlete on television for the first time and lack context, they assume they’re looking at a man. There are well-grounded reasons for this, and the various cascading effects of the chemical products of these people’s testes give them most of the traits that confer athletic superiority across the board. The only illusion that the public is being presented on this front is that these people deserve a fair shake at winning sporting events designed for girls and women.
After intersex athletes took the top three places in the women’s 800 meters at the 2016 Olympics, World Athletics fixed the upper testosterone limit for athletes in the women’s 400m, 400m IH, 800m, 1,500m, and one mile at 5 nanomoles per liter (nmol/L). (Since you asked, one mole of testosterone has a mass of about 288 grams, well over half a pound. That’s probably why biochemists prefer to deal in billionths of standard units.)
The upper limit of normal for the testosterone level of an adult female is about one-fourth the lower limit of normal for adult males; the normal male and female ranges are 0.12–1.79 nmol/L and 7.7–29.4 nmol/L respectively. Anyone who suggests that these values overlap, in the manner that male-female athletic performances themselves clearly do, is either misinformed or lying. That World Athletics should have simply issued an all-events ban to stave off future headaches was as obvious in 2019 as it is now, because the future is here, and Niyonsaba, the Burundian 800-meter silver medalist at the last Olympics whose personal best in that event is 1:55.47 from 2017, made lemonade from lemons by qualifying for both the 5,000 meters and the 10,000 meters this time as a 28-year-old, running 14:54.38 and 31:08.51 a week apart in June.
I am going to assume at this point that if your mind balks at the casual mention of testes in the abdomens of DSD 46-X,Y intersex people—making these people male people in almost every relevant way in situations that require a clear biological (not cultural) choice—then it’s for one of two reasons: You’re either literally ignorant of the fact, or you’re committed to a false narrative, well aware of intersex runners’ testes and wanting no mention of them mentioned because it chafes your brain. (You’ll see the same essential brain-chafing phenomenon in play if you try to explain in the presence of a committed Young Earth Creationist how radio-isotope dating and natural selection really work.)
No one hoped for the variables in this scenario to collide as they have, and the way the media maximally plays up the pathos in their one-sided stories about intersex runners—most of them so far about Caster Semenya—does an effective job of parlaying their difficulties as the result of the world’s limitless hostility, rather than as that world’s unenviable and much-assailed effort to achieve fairness in sport.
Niyonsaba appeared to advance to the 5,000-meter final on Friday, but was disqualified shortly after the race for running inside the first lane. That leaves Saturday’s 10,000 meters still on the Burundian’s Olympic schedule.
(END OF BACKGROUND MATERIAL)
The O.C. Register story is really bad. It’s part word salad, part obvious appeal to victimhood culture, part slapdash research, and 100 percent staunch advocacy for a position the writer, Scott M. Reid, does not understand. Reid’s bio under the story lists him as an investigative reporter whose work has led to official investigations and gotten a number of people fired. Whatever his greater body of work looks like, I hope he tried harder in producing it than he did with this mess. That said, it’s a nice change of pace to see a Wokish bleat about this topic from a middle-aged white guy instead of the usual source, a self-loathing white female jogger under 50. And a thoroughly bad story is often the best illustration of what a good one would actually look like, so there’s that.
As always with these pieces, the headline signals the absurdities to come. Francine Niyonsaba’s pre-2021 “Olympic nightmare” includes a fifth-place finish in the 800 meters in 2012 at age 19 and a silver medal in that event in 2016. No one will ever take away that medal, and I don’t see what’s traumatic about owning it.
Reid observes:
Since capturing the Olympic 800-meter silver medal for Burundi at the 2016 Games, Niyonsaba had been called a man by some of her rivals, had her medical records leaked to the media, acknowledged publicly she has Difference in Sex Development (DSD), a condition in which hormones, genes, reproductive organs can show both female and male characteristics, and been banned from competing in events from 400 meters to the mile by World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, unless she took testosterone suppressing drugs.
Apart from being difficult to follow overall, the “hormones, genes, reproductive organs can show both female and male characteristics” part is not exactly scientifically rigorous. But the takeaway is that Reid accepts that identifiable and meaningful differences between men and women exist, and that in the case of folks like Niyonsaba, nature has tossed in some maleness here and some femaleness there, a pretty much equal mixture really—except for that pesky testosterone thing “haters” never shut up about (and must therefore somehow be susceptible to media-driven delegitimization).
Also, I highly doubt that an investigative reporter, which Reid nominally is, finds himself pained by the idea of media leaks, without which real investigative reporting would be impossible. And while Niyonsaba surely finds being called a man and other gratuitous snipes deeply unpleasant, this unpleasantness doesn’t wink those testes out of existence.
Niyonsaba refused [to lower her T levels]. Instead, she was the most unlikely qualifier to the Olympic Games 5,000 meters, an event more than five times her specialty.
Was Niyonsaba in fact the most unlikely 5,000-meter qualifier? Factoring in all of the procedural obstacles, surely. But if you gave me a runner with 1:55 jets at age 23 and a build like Niyonsaba’s, and made getting that runner to 15:10 an absolute requirement, I don’t think it would be that difficult. In the case of someone whose 1:55 was predicated mainly on pure speed, it would be harder, but Niyonsaba’s best 400 meters is only 53.48.
On World Athletics points, a 1:55.47 for two laps is worth the same as 14:18.69 for twelve and a half (and 30:03.29 for 10,000 meters). But those are for the women’s tables. If you use the men’s, which should scale more accurately with Niyonsaba’s capabilities, a 1:55.47 equates to 14:38.45 and 30:57.03. Realistically, Niyonsaba may well be best suited for something between the 1,500 meters and the 5,000 meters (I say this with the 10,000 meters still to come). Regardless, getting to even one of the events Niyonsaba reached stands as an impressive combined feat of athleticism and perseverance.
(I could take aim at the “an event more than five times her specialty” construct, but that kind of gentle verbal mayhem characterizes the column in its entirety.)
Reid characterizes Niyonsaba’s effort as “a nearly 15-minute act of defiance and inspiration,” setting the stage for the shattering letdown Niyonsaba experienced upon seeing the disqualification announced on the stadium scoreboard shortly after the race concluded. Reid then launches into a review of the intersex-athlete controversy, salting his polemic with loaded language, which I’ve noted by bolding relevant words.
Through the late 2010s, many of the world’s top half-milers argued that Niyonsaba, who trains in Eugene with the Oregon Track Club, South Africa’s Caster Semenya and Margaret Wambui of Kenya had an unfair advantage because of DSD.
“It’s like we’re running two different races,” Great Britain’s Lynsey Sharp complained.
It wasn’t “many of the world’s top half-milers” who were publicly making noise about intersex athletes’ unfair advantage; it was others making noise on behalf of those women. Sharp’s outburst was an exception, one Reid fails to note drew massive blowback from Caster Semenya supporters, including death threats. This is among the reasons elite athletes themselves are loath to speak publicly about the issue.
The complaints and scrutiny only increased after the three Africans swept the Olympic 800 in Rio, Semenya taking the gold, Niyonsaba and Wambui claiming the silver and bronze medals.
Semenya was used to being a target. For much of a decade that saw her win two Olympic and three World Championships titles, she had been exposed and dissected and debated, the most intimate details of her very being belittled by critics and opponents who have mocked in her the crudest of terms.
Niyonsaba and Wambui also increasingly came under scrutiny post-Rio.
I see no value in dismissing professional female runners—people whose livelihoods depend heavily on results at global championships—questioning the presence of people with unfair advantages in their races as “complaining,” or in referring to the acquisition of vital physiological facts as “scrutiny,” a word that implies unwarranted intrusion. Do people like Reid expect the rest of the world to not only accept these developments, but accept them silently? How, moreover, did this fellow ever win an award for excellence in track and field journalism?
Reid’s observations about crudity thrown intersex athletes’ way are on the money, sadly, but just as sadly they do nothing to advance his argument that these athletes should be allowed to compete as women.
Niyonsaba acknowledged publicly in 2019 she has hyperandrogenism, a condition characterized by the production of more testosterone than women without the condition.
This is incomplete at best, grossly misleading at worst. Where did that “extra” testosterone come from, and what are some of its proven effects?
World Athletics introduced rules in 2018 requiring women with DSD to take hormone suppressing drugs for six months to be eligible to compete internationally in races between 400 meters and the mile, the three races Semenya, Niyonsaba and Wambui focused on.
Semenya, Niyonsaba and Wambui were all 800-meter specialists at the time. What are “the three races” Reid is even talking about?
The rule went into effect in May 2019 and World Athletics testing found that Semenya, Niyonsaba and Wambui all had the 46,XY karyotype and produce levels of testosterone in the male range.
This is more creative wording. Perhaps I’ve become too easily triggered, but this seems intended to convey that the trio of athletes would have happily been allowed to continue competing uncontroversially as women had it not been for overly meddlesome tests. And again: What, pray tell, was producing those levels of testosterone “in the male range”? With all the bad articles about this topic out there already, it’s possible that Reid and others jumping on the Wokish train from the mainstream-press side were using these as references.
World Athletics maintains that female athletes with DSD produce a higher than normal level of testosterone.
This follows the “many of the world’s top half-milers argued” formula. World Athletics is not making up science as this drama unfolds. A proper rendering of this sentence omits the first four words.
A 2017 IAAF-commissioned study found higher levels of testosterone in female athletes could produce a 3% improvement.
No link to any study. No details on what event(s). Only the implication that because IAAF commissioned the study, it must have been motivated by animus and was probably not worth a damn.
Female athletes with DSD should be considered “biological males,” World Athletics told CAS. Attorneys and scientists for Semenya dispute the study’s research.
Did anyone successfully dispute any of this research? Or was it just yelling, like Reid’s column?
A three-member CAS panel said the IAAF policy was “discriminatory” toward athletes with DSD, but two of the panel members nevertheless agreed with the IAAF that policy was “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” to counter advantages DSD athletes have over other female competitors.
This is meant to suggest that the verdict was in doubt, but agreeing that a policy is discriminatory is not the same as saying that it is unfairly so. Every state’s division of motor vehicles is discriminatory toward people with bad eyesight and seizure disorders.
“For sure, I didn’t choose to be born like this, what am I?” Niyonsaba said in an interview with the Olympic Channel. “I was created by God, so if someone has more questions about it, maybe they can ask God.”
This is a meaningful quote. Were I Francine Niyonsaba, I would have every reason to wonder why nature had thrown such an unfathomable curveball my way, only to see me rise to the Olympic stage and into the public eye, only to see all of it torn down and be forced to reinvent myself under increasing scrutiny—and yes, some of it is very real, even if it doesn’t force policy outcomes—hell yes, I would be asking a lot of questions of whoever or whatever put me here.
I hope it’s again clear that all of my scorn here is directed at the coverage of these athletes and not at any of the athletes themselves.
Niyonsaba defied her detractors by running 14:54.38 in France…
Friday night, she walked off the track believing she was headed back to another Olympic final, convinced she had delivered her message to World Athletics and to girls chasing their dreams across Africa and beyond.
It’s fair to say that intersex athletes have a battle on their hands, by definition, with the sport’s major governing bodies. But the idea that World Athletics and others are simply trading punches with them for nefarious purposes is unfounded. This would be obvious in a story that mentioned female world-class runners without testicles as something other than squawking villains.
Reid finally gets to the reason for the disqualification, which he is of course deeply skeptical of.
And then she turned to see another nightmare on another TV screen. The official ruling was that Niyonsaba had stepped on the inside of the track at one point, although the violation wasn’t evident to those who watched the race.
The violation must have been evident to someone watching the race—say, one or more of the race officials responsible for the disqualification. Being an investigative reporter with access to at least some of the race footage, why did Reid not look more deeply into the possibility of a wrongful DQ instead of just moaning about it and moving on to file his column?
The piece ends with a few short paragraphs evocative of the conclusion of a lazily written short story in which a woman’s sleazy groom-to-be has run away from her at the altar and she’s calling after him to come back, it’s all her fault.
All of the articles official running-media outlets have produced about intersex athletes have been inexcusably terrible. Every last one of them. Unless, that is, I missed one that was honest about where the testosterone in intersex athletes comes from, with the name of the hormone being a strong clue to those with access to a printed or online modern human anatomy reference. And now that enough counterparts to these industry pieces have appeared in online newspapers and the like to allow for judging the lot of them, it’s an easy call: The stuff in regular newspapers and especially in hyperwoke general outlets like Slate and Vox is even worse. These stories usually combine all the one-sidedness of the running-media pieces with the ignorance of the sport that invariably results from trying to learn its important aspects in a matter of hours. They also draw directly in many cases from the ramshackle output of the running-centric press, meaning they are performing the journalistic equivalent of building flimsy shacks on unstable foundations.
They’re all dismal in a variety of ways, but Reid’s was a reminder of how bluntly dismissive of basic science even an experienced reporter with no known desire to distort running is willing to be in today’s “feelings don’t just matter more than facts—they are facts!” media-culture climate.
The real question for me is so why so many female running-media representatives—people who both run competitively (or once did) and continually interact with elite female runners—are not only supportive of intersex (and transgender) athlete participation in women’s sports, but rabidly, even angrily so. For Scott Reid, this was just a rushed, throwaway nod to Wokism. But Erin Strout, Alison Wade, Lindsay Crouse, and a host of other pundits have to know that they are pushing myths; otherwise, they’d be willing to present opposing arguments and admit that the people behind those arguments aren’t luddites and bigots. It looks for all the world like an intentional effort to ruin something, and that effort appears to be motivated by the usual palette of unresolved personal conflicts and deep-rooted revenge fantasies.
Hey, I’ve diagnosed an obvious problem here. I can’t help but try to hunt down its causes.