The International Association of Athletics Federations has denied it will tell a court to clasify female athletes with high testosterone levels like Caster Semenya as male.
World and Olympic 800m champion Semenya is challenging a proposed IAAF rule that aims to restrict the levels of testosterone in female runners.
The case will be heard next week at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas).
According to the Times report, that IAAF lawyers will say Semenya is a “biological male” as well as classifed as female.
The IAAF said it is “not classifying” any athlete with “differences of sexual development” (DSD) – of whom South African Semenya is the most notable – as male.
“To the contrary, we accept their legal sex without question, and permit them to compete in the female category,” the statement said.
“However, if a DSD athlete has testes and male levels of testosterone, they get the same increases in bone and muscle size and strength and increases in haemoglobin that a male gets when they go through puberty, which is what gives men such a performance advantage over women.
“Therefore, to preserve fair competition in the female category, it is necessary to require DSD athletes to reduce their testosterone down to female levels before they compete at international level.”
The athletics governing body intended to introduce new rules on November 1, 2018 but postponed to March 26 to wait for the legal challenge filed by Semenya and Athletics South Africa.
The rules are expected to apply to women in track events starting from 400m up to the miles and require that every athlete has to put the testosterone level below the amount prescribed “for at least six months prior to competing”.
This, therefore, means that if the rule is put in place, Castor Semenya will miss most of the 2019 outdoor season.
The 2019 World Athletics Championships begin in Doha on 27 September.
Semenya have previously, occasionally, been asked to go for gender testing by athletics chiefs but no result has ever been brought public.
When Semenya announced last year to fight the rules, she said that the rules are unfair.
“It is not fair. I just want to run naturally, the way I was born.
“I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am a woman and I am fast.”
Semenya is a South African middle distance runner who was born in January 7, 1991.
She was first suspected to be a male after she won 800 metres race at the Berlin World Athletics in 2009.
The issue was raised even higher due to her masculine physical attributes.