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The spectre of female otherness is haunting athletics

Hyperandrogenic competitors are not men, and exceptional women shouldn’t be excluded on the grounds that ‘normal’ women feel threatened by their masculine traits.

By Daniel Fletcher
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Credit: By Tab59 from Düsseldorf, Allemagne. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

When Caster Semenya eased to victory in the women's Olympic 800 metres final in Rio de Janeiro on August 20 2016, the debate on hyperandrogenism was reopened. Semenya burst onto the world scene as an 18-year-old phenomenon at the World Athletics Championships in 2009, comfortably winning the 800 metres.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0