I’m a little late on this, but I wanted to say a few words about the unfortunate case of Caster Semenya who has been forced to undergo a gender test after winning the women’s 800m at the current Athletics World Championships.
Despite what most people think, gender is by no means easy to determine. There is no question about Ms. Semenya’s external anatomy. Take her clothes off and almost everyone would identify her as female. Her birth certificate says she is a girl, and she was raised as a girl by her family. Nor is there any suggestion that she has been taking performance-enhancing drugs. Nevertheless, her right to race as a woman has been challenged. Why?
Well, there are a huge number of different medical conditions lumped under the general heading of “intersex”. Some of these are very common (see this Intersex Society of North America web page for some data). And, as this Science of Sport blog post explains, it isn’t a question of whether Ms. Semenya is obviously female, it is a question as to whether she is entirely female.
Except it isn’t. Athletics, like many sports, has developed a policy for dealing with post-operative transsexuals. They recognize that after gender reassignment surgery and a couple of years of hormone treatment your average male-to-female transsexual no longer has the biological advantages of a male and can be allowed to compete as a female.
The same courtesy is apparently not extended to intersex people, even though they may have lived in the same gender all of their lives.
And ultimately it may not be an issue of medicine at all. Monica Roberts points out that the “you’re really a man” charge has been leveled at large numbers of black sportspeople, even when the charge is patently absurd such as with the Williams sisters. The reason appears to be that women of non-white ethnicities don’t always conform easily to Western standards of beauty.
Therein lines the problem for women in sport: if you do well, and people don’t think that you are pretty, then you’ll be accused of being “really a man”. And because of the way that such cases are treated, you’ll be assumed guilty until proven innocent, even though the nature of the tests that can prove you innocent are controversial.
This is not the first case of this type. A couple of years ago an Indian athlete, Santhi Soundarajan, was stripped of a medal in the Asian games after allegedly failing a “gender test”. As far as I can make out, the results of that test have never been made public, and most explanations I have seen suggest that Ms. Soundarajan’s condition was perfectly legal under the IAAF rules. Nevertheless Ms. Soundarajan was hounded out of athletics and later attempted suicide. The good news is that she has since turned to coaching, at which she is apparently very successful.
Update: Here’s Germaine Greer making a complete idiot of herself in the notoriously transphobic Guardian. Someone might have checked current sporting regulations before publishing that piece, but I guess the Grauniad was too keen to get on with its favorite sport of Tranny-bashing to worry about facts.
I’d wish for legislation but I’ve learned to be careful what I wish for, based on the legislation that gets made…
*sigh*
Val:
Wishing for legislation is a common mistake. Sometimes it can help, but far more often the legislation either gets perverted by lobbyists before it is passed, or it gets used as an excuse for authoritarian behavior it was never intended for after it was passed. The history of legislation on trans issues in the UK is a salutary example. Ultimately you can legislate to require people to think in a particular way.
She runs like a man and she looks like a man… chances are she is a he.
That last post was actually a spammer. I’ve edited it to remove the link to the financial services he was advertising, but left the post least I be accused of deleting contrary views (no matter how ignorant and stupid they might be).
Most people believe that there are men, there are women, and there’s a vast gaping void between them.
Trans people challenge that assumption, but, from the perspective of many who don’t understand (willfully or otherwise), it’s perceived as a choice.
Intersex people, though, force us to realize there isn’t a gaping void at all but instead a continuum, and that scares a lot of people.
Rick decided not to use equality in framing his essay about why Prop 8 was wrong: like it or not, that’s not persuasive for many supporters of the ban on gay marriage.
Instead, he decided to take the middle path I didn’t really see other people talking about: the problems of marriage of the intersexed, because those are natural and they create problems in defining who may marry whom. Such marriages could be banned, even post-mortem, by judicial whim.
I’m still waiting for the test case where a life-long marriage the family objected to tries to get overturned on the grounds of one of the parties being intersexed. It’s only a matter of time if prop 8 stays in effect much longer. (For irony value, I’d prefer it happened to someone who opposed gay marriage on religious grounds and contributed to passing of prop 8.)
Also, some of the prior key moments in sports and the problem of sex determination are covered in his essay.
Oh, and: if any of your readers know of a form of intersexed that’s not covered in that essay, we’d love to hear about it.
I assume you’re familiar with Raphael Carter’s RAQ from 1998.
Gary:
Actually I wasn’t, though Carter is the author of one of my all-time favorite novels.
The RAQ is a little out of date these days – fashions in political terminology change rapidly – but it is still good stuff.
Gary, yes, lovely piece. I hadn’t read it in quite a few years.
I recall a chat with a visibly boggled pal, then working in IT, whose employer had been devising some application or other for a health service provider.
The question of gender had come up in the preliminary discussion.
No problem, said slightly bemused senior chap, putting male/female designation on each record is quite simple.
Er, no, health service bod began –
Second in command leaps in, hoping to retrieve lost ground – of course, you’d want straight male, straight female, gay male , gay female, male-to-female, female-to-male?
Actually, said health service bod, we have 27* gender designations.
*if memory serves, that’s the number – I’m open to correction.
“Actually I wasn’t, though Carter is the author of one of my all-time favorite novels.”
Yes, The Fortunate Fall was great; I never was a particular collector of autographs — aside from a handful of the greats, when I was a kid — Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac A., HE — but when an acquaintance or friend would inscribe one, that was always lovely, and among the horde of books and fanzines and photos and everything I lost in 1991 and then another disaster a few years later, I miss my copy of TFF; great book. (Also of Emma Bull’s Bone Dance.) Wish Carter would do more.
I realize the RAQ is a bit dated, but I figure it’s useful to remind people of it, since so few people remain aware of it. Or of intersexuality, or such issues in general. Most folks still just classify everyone in binary terms.