Caster Semenya: So good that her sex is called into question

Anna Pulley on 08.21.09

Instead of celebrating her recent victory, track and field Gold medalist Caster Semenya is undergoing invasive and pointless testing at the prompting of the International Association of Athletics Federations. Why? To prove she's a woman.

Even worse than the humiliating accusations Semenya is receiving at the hands of the media and the IAAF are quotes like this from The New York Times:

"These kind of people should not run with us," Elisa Cusma of Italy, who finished sixth, said in a postrace interview with Italian journalists. "For me, she's not a woman. She's a man."

Mariya Savinova, a Russian who finished fifth, told Russian journalists that she did not believe Semenya would be able to pass a test. "Just look at her," Savinova said.

I'm sorry, Losers of this Race, can you please make these grapes more sour? Not to mention the pretty blatant racial profiling going on here and the fact that these "women" don't know the difference between sex (the biological make up of one's body) and gender (the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women are supposed to follow).

The Guardian also has some ridiculous accusations concerning Semenya's gender presentation:

Semenya's former school headmaster said he thought for years that the student was a boy. "She was always rough and played with the boys. She liked soccer and she wore pants to school."

Pants! Of course. How could I have overlooked the most obvious sex trait known to us? Except for "playing soccer," which comes in at a close second.

Going back to Mariya Savinova for a minute, "Just look at her" is not a valid argument for, well, pretty much anything, but it's especially irrelevant for determining one's sex.

What this ordeal firmly demonstrates is how much anxiety people feel when life doesn't fall into two clearly marked categories - male vs female, good vs evil, Kelly Clarkson fans vs Those who worship the black arts, etc.

The biological make up of humans is - surprise - not easily reduced to two sex categories. Gerald N. Callahan, author of, Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of the Two Sexes, reports that every year more than 65,000 children in the U.S. are born intersex (that is, not easily identified as either boys or girls) and that there are over a dozen variations of the X and Y chromosomes.

What's really at stake here is not whether Semenya is female, but whether she is female ENOUGH to pass our culturally rigid definitions of femaleness. And instead of honoring a remarkable young woman's achievements, the argument hinges on the the notion that she's too GOOD to possibly be a woman.

Which is an argument that is even denser than the one that says "real women don't wear pants or play soccer."