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.
Venus is in Aquarius, a masculine sign. Mars is in Taurus, a feminine sign (though the two are not quite in a square aspect). The Moon is in Libra, conjunct Nessus — there is a long story there, one that we need Semenya’s personal history for. But her story is very much reflective of the gender anarchy of our own times.
Writing about the testing, the medical exams and the circus atmosphere that has surrounded the runner’s dilemma, Columnist Dave Zirin at The Nation finds the whole scenario to be disgusting.
“Besides being a cruel and idiotic practice, sex testing doesn’t account for the idea that gender is at least in part socially constructed and far more fluid than the iron categories of male and female. An 18-year-old woman is being torn apart in the press for doing nothing but winning a race. If it is the goal of the media and the IAAF to destroy the life of a young, talented female athlete by outing her as potentially intersex, then they are not simply pitiless; they are socially repugnant.”
Zirin is not the only one raising questions about the morality of this process and the way in which Semenya was being treated by IAAF authorities. The bloggers at The Science of Sport in South Africa also see rampant unfairness and illogic surrounding the situation.
For starters, sports science and marketing consultant Ross Tucker wonders how the IAAF could have let this situation develop in the first place.
“The fact of the matter is that these allegations are not new. They have followed Semenya for a few years. Therefore, there was ample time to verify sex (again, a difficult process) and clear the way for her to compete… Because it was not, we are sadly seeing that Semenya will be the loser in what might well become an ugly story.”
But even more crucial, Tucker writes, is the complete lack of understanding regarding the difference between gender and sex.
“‘[P]rivate parts’ do not alone constitute male or female. This is a rudimentary distinction, but does not acknowledge a range of developmental conditions that can cause male characteristics to develop without there needing to be male reproductive organs…The fact that ASA [Athletics South Africa] believe that ‘asking her to show us her private parts’ will do the job suggests that they have little idea of the issues.”
Zirin sums up the chauvinism of the situation: “Exceptional male athletes are treated like kings, not sideshow freaks. But for women to join them on the royal dais, you must appear as if you can step seamlessly from the court or track and into the pages of soft-core porn. Freaks need not apply.”