What is fairness? What makes a man, or a woman? What is "natural," and what do we owe to that nature, anyway?
As a pre-requisite to Olympic competition in the 1960s, female Olympians used to strut nude before a panel of doctors who inspected the athletes and their genitalia to verify that they were indeed women. At Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin, two particularly masculine female American sprinting rivals, Helen Stephens and Stella "The Fella" Walsh accused one another of being men in disguise. After Stephens won gold in the 100 Meter dash, she underwent an inspection in which she stripped nude and had her external genitalia inspected. Upon inspection, she was certified as female.
Today, the methodology has changed, but degrading gender inspection is still a part of the every Olympic games, as various governing bodies force athletes to align within tidy gender identities.
Depending on how strictly the condition is defined, between 0.018% and 1.7% of children are born intersex - that is, with atypical appearance of their external genitalia, causing difficulty in sex assignment. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, in his brilliant 2002 book Middlesex, made many of us more familiar with the phenomenon through his protagonist Cal Stephanides, who was born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. Cal was misclassified at birth as a female, before developing more masculinity as life went on.
"I was born twice," Cal tells us in the novel's famous first line, "first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."
In the nation of South Africa, the intersex issue is more acute, as 1 percent of the nation's 50 million population is believed to be born intersex. One particular South African athlete, Caster Semenya, has unwillingly become the modern poster child for intersex ambiguity in international athletic competition.
| Related: South African Double Amputee Pistorius Raises Similar Questions |
The 21-year-old Semenya, who will run for South Africa at the London Olympics, drew international attention in 2009 when she won handily in the 800 Meter run at the World Championships. The competitors she bested took bitter note of her muscular physique, husky voice and masculine features.
"These kind of people should not run with us," said Italian Elisa Cusma, who took sixth place in the race. "For me, she’s not a woman. She's a man."
Semenya, a middle-distance track runner, was not stripped naked and did not have a doctor take a tongue depressor to her lady parts, but the shy teenager from a rural South African village did find her sexuality tested, investigated and wrapped up in the middle of world wide controversy that has only recently begun to die down.
The International Association of Athletics Federations said it was "obliged to investigate" after Semenya cut 25 seconds off her time in the 1600 and eight seconds in the 800, easily beating her competition. The IAAF requested a gender test, which Athletics South Africa President Leonard Chuene administered to Semenya without her knowledge. She was determined to have female genitalia, along with undescended testes that gave her testosterone levels three times higher than a typical female.
"God made me the way I am and I accept myself," Semenya said in a rare public statement. "I've been subjected to unwarranted and invasive scrutiny of the most intimate and private details of my being."
| UPDATE! Caster Semenya To Carry South African Flag At Opening Ceremony |
After the controversies over what the IAAF deemed to be Semenya's overly-ambiguous gender, this past June the Inernational Olympic Committee ruled that if a female athlete's natural testosterone level falls in the range that would be considered normal for a man, she cannot compete as a woman. And what range is that? The IOC did not specify.
If an ambiguously female athlete wants to continue competing, she must undergo hormone treatment or even surgery to reduce her testosterone.
Caster Semenya has undergone treatment to make herself more lady-like, and will compete this summer in London. No one will say what, precisely, the treatment is, but we can assume it's more intrusive than simply putting a pink bow in her hair.
Semenya's physical appearance has changed, as you can see in these photos of her from 2009 and 2012.
But Semenya's plight, and the plight of the many of intersex athletes, or women classified as overly masculine, raises a host of unanswerable questions.
Is it fair for a woman to have to compete against another woman who's body composition gives her an advantage? Is it fair to tell a woman she can't compete as a woman, after she's been told her whole life she's a girl? Isn't another any other elite athlete, such as Michael Phelps, so genetically gifted that his talent is an unfair advantage and he can win with less effort? What about the women who are naturally bad at sports? Are we being fair to them by not allowing them to alter their bodies?
And what makes a man, or a woman? Is it nature? Nurture? Testes? Genitals? Hormones? Being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost?
Should we regulate an athlete's natural body composition because he or she has an "unfair advantage"? Aren't all elite athletes "freaks" anyway? And is there even such thing as a "natural" athlete anymore, since so many of them have been surgically assembled and reassembled and engineered?
And do we even owe anything to our "natural" selves, anyway? Are we slaves of the identies we are born unto?
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Follow on Ology: Bison Messink | 2012 Olympics
Follow on Twitter: @BisonMessink | @OlogySports
[h/t My Mossy Brain]
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