The Chris Moeller Archives

The inanity of gender testing

The puritans appointed to police the fairness of sports often have a difficult time dealing with the realities of scientific discovery. No, I'm not talking about baseball and steroids this time. Exhibit A instead is the treatment of South African 18-year-old middle-distance runner Caster Semenya, who ran the 800 meters last month in record-breaking time at the 2009 World Championships. In the wake of her extraordinary victory, Semenya has been subjected to the public humiliation of "gender testing" by international track and field officials.

It's hard to imagine a more disgusting or humiliating scenario for Semenya to have to endure. She has been subjected to tests, possibly without her approval, conducted by a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, and a psychologist. The media-- particularly the one here in the Nifty 50, has been salivating over just such a story. "Scandal," sex, and intrigue-- it has it all. The New York Daily News began one of its stories with the line: "Tests show that controversial runner Caster Semenya is a woman... and a man!" Maybe Semenya should just let us all get a peek under there. Jesus Christ.

In track and field, a sport in which the not-that-distant past has had prominent leaders advocating separate competition for black and white women, maybe it's not that surprising that the gender issue would be raised in connection with such a successful young black athlete. Rumored test results supposedly have it that Semenya does not have a womb or ovaries, and that she has internal testes-- information that may come as much as a surprise to Semenya as it does to the rest of the world, as it wouldn't necessarily impact her outward appearance.

Is it really that much of a surprise though? In the U.S., one in 1,666 persons is born as 'unisex'-- and that is the appropriate word now, not 'hermaphrodite,' as even the Associated Press has referred and is still referring to Semenya. (Why not call her 'colored' as well?) Perhaps it's time to start thinking of sex and gender less in terms of "either/or" than as a spectrum of definition, as many scientists have advocated, more along the lines of a category such as eye-color. New discoveries are revealing all the time that sex is more fluid than ever imagined. Many people have ambiguous sex organs. Sometimes visible anatomy doesn't match up with sex chromosomes. Having a Y chromosome doesn't necessarily make you a man. If a person has "androgen sensitivity syndrome," they can be XY and have testes, but their body doesn't respond to the production of testosterone. There's a myriad of gene disorders categorized also, each with different resulting hormonal conditions.

Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory asks the question-- if having breasts, a womb, or ovaries is mandatory for being considered a woman, then what do we say to a woman who has had to endure a mastectomy in the treatment or prevention of breast cancer, or likewise, part with her hormone-producing ovaries to avoid a cancer risk? Has such a woman changed her sex? Has she now become less than a woman because she's missing one or more of her lady parts? If Semenya is determined to be insufficient (for lack of a more accurate phrase) in her femininity in the eyes of track's governing body, the International Association of Athletic Federations, then according to IAAF by-laws, she could actually continue to run competitively only if "her condition was treated." You gotta love that. Now we're seeing fit to attempt to correct an inspiring athlete's natural so-deemed imperfection.

Does Semenya have an unfair advantage in her sport because of her biological makeup? Maybe. Does Yao Ming have an unfair advantage over me in basketball because he's 7 feet, 6 inches tall? What exactly would be the guidelines for determining which of the world's top athletes has a "normal" body, and who's going to be responsible for deciding?

Women are women--and men are men, for that matter-- not because of the collection of their parts but because they have chosen to identify alternately as a woman or a man, or maybe even as both. Caster Semenya is a woman simply because she says so. The end.

posted by CM @ 8:28 PM