Last week South African track and field runner Caster Semenya won the gold medal for the 800-meter race at the track and field world championships.Some reacted to Semenya's victory as expected: singing, dancing, and horn-blowing from fellow South-Africans as she arrived in Johannesburg following the race. Others met her with disbelief and disgust. "Just look at her," Russian Mariya Savinova, the fifth placer told journalists in Berlin. "For me, she's not a woman. She's a man," Italian and sixth-place loser Elisa Cusma Piccione said.
They spit towards Semenya as some abnormal "being" with alien speed. I wish their acrid banter was rooted in the bitterness of defeat, but Semenya's competitors seem convinced that her abilities are anything but innate and the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) agrees.
Besides, Semenya won the African Juniors Championship last July and cut seven seconds from her fastest 2008 time. More chew for a suspicious IAAF that then speculated she used performance enhancing drugs. But to the IAAF, a mix up of gender seems to be the most plausible answer. Her muscular thighs, strong facial features, and jaggedly landscaped facial hair make her seem more like a male than a female athlete, or so as gender norms dictate. The IAAF believes she was raised as a woman, but is physiologically a man.
So at the IAAF's request, Seyemanya must undergo chromosome testing, organ analysis, X-rays, scans and a number of other probes as a part of an official gynecological investigation.
The Root senior writer Kai Wright believes that whatever the International Association of Athletics Federation's "shameless doctors conclude, the verdict about Semenya is already in—she's a monster. What remains is to determine what type of monster we're gawking at. A hermaphrodite? An intersexual? A genetic boy whose parents raised him as a girl? Or just a mannish woman, after all?"
Semenya may in fact be intersex, which doesn't race will with track and field officials and Western culture that default to gender normatives. Both Semenya's mother and South African President Leonard Chuene are outraged at the IAAF actions. "You denounce my child as a boy when she's a girl? If you did that to my child, I'd shoot you," Chuene told the IAAF.
Semenya will be stripped of her title if findings from the gynecological investigation claim that she is male. But even with these results, critics remain skeptical not of Semenya, but of the IAAF's actions.
Wright writes: "The tests are, of course, rigged—because witch hunts always produce witches. That's the point. Which is the real tragedy of the IAAF's attack on Caster Semenya."
Suggested Reading:
Semenya's Race and Sex Struggle
What Is An Intersexual?
Frequently Asked Questions About Intersex People
Image © Stu Forster/Getty
The point is that she has an unfair advantage running against women if she is more a man. This doesn’t mean anything about her value off the track.
If “she” doesn’t have any of the internal organs of a woman and simply lacks a penis then “she” is not a “she” because she doesn’t have to deal with the disadvantages of being a woman but gets all of the advantages of being a man (having a more efficient body for athletics).
If “she” is allowed, by idiots such as yourself, to compete without the disadvantages of a woman, we will have nothing but “her” type running and winning in all athletic sports.
There will no longer even be a point to having a separate class for women and thus no actual women that have all of the developed organs that basically make them women will even have a sheltered place to compete like they once had.
If you don’t want different classes based on sex, then fine. It is unfair to men to even have separate classes based on sex. But if you want different classes based on sex you have to deal with people who are male on the inside and outside mostly but happen to lack a penis.
This whole thing is outrageous! Gender tests because others have to be sore losers?
When have separate events anyway, women can easily beat men; to those who don’t think it’s possible- please get your head out of your ass and into the year 2009 . . .
It is unfortunate that you didn’t quote the athletes in the race that supported her. It is MOST unfortunate that Athletics South Africa didn’t take care if this issue before the Championships and conduct the proper exams as requested. Instead, this young woman has been paraded around for political gain.
Everyone is making this a personal issue … it’s not … maybe Semenya has been treated bedly in all this and was raised and identifies as a woman and perhaps she honestly didn’t know she had elevated testosterone levels (please don’t use the AIS excuse unless your CAIS which Semenya clearly isn’t then PAIS can get an advantage from testosterone)…BUT in sport the deciding factor has to be whether you have an unfair advantage … if not then men and women should compete together or performance enhancing drugs should be allowed … The real victims here are the women athletes who have to compete against intersex competitors … The IAAF must take back the medal and recognition and award it to the woman who won the 800m if this is not done then you can say goodbye to womens sport as sporting bodies all over the world will target intersex competitors to develop and women will not even get close to being competitive. …. It is well recognised that Intersex competitors can have HUGE advantages over women athletes and the IAAF must introduce new rules to curb this advantage. …. I wonder if Semenya would feel disadvantaged competeing against athletes with naturally higher testosterone levels …MEN !
I agree with Jason and Evan.
Essentially, women are competing in a “handicap” class in most sports. The underlying reason is that men get a different hormone boost that women don’t: hence men are a somewhat bigger and usually develop a bit more muscles. For this reason, women can’t compete with men in physical sports – the world records show that very clear, Jossi! (This is not to say that women are inferior to men physically; they are simply smaller. Female gymnasts pick rings around the competition with men as long as agility, not physical strength, is the issue.)
Anyway, there will always be those who don’t fit into the mold of men/women – the intersexuals. And in that case, the important thing is to decide whether they have gotten the male hormone boost. If so, it is simply not fair to let females compete against them, for “real” females will lose and lose again. Semenya belongs to this category of intersexuals – she may not even have ovaries.
Nothing of this casts the least slur on her character – though the South African trainers, who have even consulted East German expertise, and that is not a good sign, may well have been acting treacherously. Her identity as a woman is her own to claim – but if she wants to compete with other women, she must prove that she does not have unfair advantages. It is wellknown that outer appearances of the sexual organs is only a secondary sign of a person’s “hormonal” sex.