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One can imagine a certain rhythm to the process, as police hoist kit after kit onto the metal shelves, not knowing that they hold in their hands the identity of a serial rapist. Here’s the evidence box from a deaf woman Wilkes assaulted in June 2006. There’s one from a woman he raped in May 2007. The kit from his sixth victim arrived in June 2010. Another a month later. Two more in August 2011. His 10th victim, four months after that. Not until he raped his 11th victim, in January 2012, did the sequence end, because that woman saw Eric Wilkes two days after the assault and called the police, who arrested him. Eleven years, 11 violent rapes—all while Wilkes’s identity was preserved in sealed containers that no one had bothered to open.
Semenya’s revelations are important because the IAAF claims that taking a pill to suppress testosterone levels is safe and unintrusive, and that this is a humane way to discriminate. Her experience contradicts those claims. But her honesty is also important because it reminds us all that this is not really about appeals or court filings, fairness or protecting women’s sports. It’s about rules rooted in racism, sexism, and homophobia, that aim to control women’s bodies through any means necessary.
In 2018, the IAAF announced a new rule concerning female athletes with a condition called hyperandrogenism, which results in increased testosterone production. The IAAF decided that elevated testosterone levels give them an unfair advantage in races ranging from 400 meters to one mile and instituted a new policy that mandated that female athletes with the condition take medication, such as contraceptives, to reduce their testosterone levels.
Contrôle du corps des femmes. Partout. Tout le temps.
Instagram and its parent company Facebook are constantly waging a complex battle with bad content on their platforms. But the latest chapter of that fight involves them stepping onto the slippery slope to censorship, worrying artists, people with disabilities, consensual sex workers, and those who are in various ways body- and sex-positive.
The first reported case of artificial insemination by donor occurred in 1884: Dr. William H. Pancoast, a professor in Philadelphia, took sperm from his "best looking" student to inseminate an anesthetized woman. The woman was not informed about the procedure, unlike her infertile husband.