Last week’s news takes us from Patrick Swayze, a man who embodied virtues that embrace both the masculine and the feminine, to a controversy over an athlete who didn’t fit an international organization’s gender expectations. We somehow don’t think it strange that most athletic competition is strictly segregated by sex; men and women generally don’t compete against one another, unless of course the game depends on mental prowess above all else. Yet gender isn’t what it used to be.
A brief recap: 18-year-old South African Caster Semenya, the women’s world record holder in the 800 meter run, won the 2009 World Championships in Berlin this August. However, she subsequently became the focus of high-profile, and humiliating, questions about whether she was, physically, a woman.
Recently, the results of physical examinations of Semenya were leaked from within the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the agency that ordered the testing. Apparently Semenya has no ovaries or womb, but does have internal testes. The offensive term “hermaphrodite” was immediately tossed around by a gleeful tabloid press. Yet the test results have raised more questionsВ than they answered, many of them on social and philosophical issues.
Semenya’s postmodern gender is reflected in her natal chart as the Sun mixed in with the extremely rare triple conjunction of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that rocked the world in the late 80s and early 90s. That conjunction seemed to melt away structure, coming with the disappearance of the USSR and the transformation of China into a new breed of capitalist communism.