Over at the Daily Mail, there’s a surprisingly comprehensive article on the debate over Caster Semenya’s gender:
At first thought, it seems strange that the South African runner Caster Semenya needs to take a sex test to determine whether she is indeed a woman — or a man, as rumours suggest.
One would imagine that sex is something fairly clear-cut: that you are either one or the other.
It seems even stranger to discover that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) says that the tests are ‘extremely complex’, and that the results will not be known for days, even weeks.
Again, this seems to run contrary to common sense. Surely, one would think, determining one’s sex is as simple as removing one’s underwear and taking a look.
In fact, it can be rather more complicated than that. It is not generally appreciated that gender in humans — and many other species, too — is not just a binary affair, a simple case of being male or female.
While the vast majority of people are clearly either a man or a woman, many others are somewhere between the two — often with tragic consequences.
Indeed, while people have been making jokes for decades about burly, allegedly female shot putters and javelin throwers, who turn out — after often humiliating and invasive ‘investigations’ — really to be men, the fact is that such cases do not always involve intentional deception, and can result from true biological ambiguity.
H/T to Ghost of a Flea, who says “Ban all sports or award points for freakishness”.
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