Running Like a Girl: Athletics Performance of Women Whose Eligibility is Subject to World Athletics DSD Regulations

This paper compares four running events (100m, 200m, 400m, 800m) in terms of (a) official in-competition career-best performances of nine women with natural variations in their sex characteristics known to fall under the World Athletics Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification – Athletes with Differences of Sex Development (DSD) with (b) the distribution of all performances in those four events in the Paris 2024 Olympics for both men and women. The analysis shows that, despite not having suppressed their testosterone as required to compete under the regulations, none of these women perform like men and all their career-best performances are well within the range of women’s performances. Evidence of in-competition performances of women whose eligibility is subject to the World Athletics DSD regulations does not support the claim that regulation of these women is necessary to counter their “insuperable” performance advantages over other women.