DeaneBarker.net

Sports, sex, and the runner Caster Semenya: Interesting article about an athlete who is a woman…sort of.  South African runner Caster Semenya was dominating her event (the 800 meters), when it was determined that while she appeared to be a woman, she was kind of…in the middle.  Certainly not a man, but not 100% a woman either.

Semenya is breathtakingly butch. Her torso is like the chest plate on a suit of armor. She has a strong jawline, and a build that slides straight from her ribs to her hips. “What I knew is that wherever we go, whenever she made her first appearance, people were somehow gossiping, saying, ‘No, no, she is not a girl,’ ” Phineas Sako said, rubbing the gray stubble on his chin. “ ‘It looks like a boy’—that’s the right words—they used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ Some even asked me as a coach, and I would confirm: it’s a girl. At times, she’d get upset. But, eventually, she was just used to such things.” Semenya became accustomed to visiting the bathroom with a member of a competing team so that they could look at her private parts and then get on with the race. “They are doubting me,” she would explain to her coaches, as she headed off the field toward the lavatory.

Parts of the story are heartbreaking, because Semeneya seems to be an innocent bystander in all of this.  She certainly believed she was a woman, but lack of a uterus and ovaries, and a pair of undescended testicles, really cast this into doubt.  She seems sadly caught up in the middle of something she barely understands and doesn’t want any part of.

While we tend to think of gender as a simple binary category – you are either male or female – this article explains that for a very small percentage of people, it’s not quite that simple.