When Bigots Claim One Thing to Exclude Trans Athletes, and the Opposite to Exclude Intersex Athletes

This is Caster Semeya. Caster was assigned female at birth, without controversy, and raised as a girl. She always loved athletics. She found her calling as a runner, and trained hard, day after day, for years. In 2009, at age 18, she won gold in the World Championships 800 meter race. She was elated. But a competitor claimed to the officials that she did not believe Caster was really a woman. Caster was subjected to “sex verification” by an endocrinologist, a gynecologist, an internal medicine expert, an “expert on gender” and a psychologist. And it was found that she has an intersex status. In fact, the media found out before she did.

Caster has had to live her life under a gender-policing spotlight ever since. She’s been forced to take drugs to suppress her body’s naturally-high levels of testosterone, and had constant social media attention paid to how she dresses, the fact that she is a lesbian, and debates over whether the muscularity of her Black, athletic body reveals her admirable hard work and dedication to her sport, or some intolerable natural advantage.

Lately, transphobic “feminists”, otherwise known as the TERFs, have really been piling on Caster Semenya, in ways that reveal deep hypocrisy. Consider:

TERFs: There are only two sexes, you’re assigned one at birth, and that is your real eternal sex.

Also TERFs: I don’t care if Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth, he’s a man.

TERFs: Being raised as a girl socializes you to be a woman. Being raised as a boy socializes you to be a man. That determines your personality for all eternity and cannot be changed.

Also TERFs: You can tell just by looking at Caster that any attempt to raise him as a girl failed. Caster’s father says that as a child, Caster hated wearing dresses and liked to play sports with the boys.

TERFs: Trans boys are just girls who are tomboys with transgenderist parents! Their parents hate gender transgression and want to convert their inconvenient toyboy daughters into gender-conforming sons! Feminists must stand up for butch girls and save them!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya walks like a man, dresses like a man, makes muscles like a man, and therefore is a man.

TERFs: When someone says a child or teen is a trans boy, the truth is that the youth is a lesbian, and their parents reject that and are forcing conversion therapy on their lesbian daughters to try to make them appear heterosexual by convincing the poor girls that they are really straight boys! We must stand up for lesbians!

Also TERFs: Caster Semenya married a woman, and the partner wore the white dress while Caster wore pants! Therefore Caster is a man.

TERFs: Prescribing medication to suppress someone’s sex hormones is pointless, as it doesn’t change who you really are. Also, it’s experimental, goes against nature, and is an intolerable thing to suggest to anyone.

Also TERFs: It is absolutely vital that Semenya be made to take testosterone suppressants, and be tested before every race.

TERFs: Taking testosterone or estrogen can’t change your sex. You are the sex you were assigned at birth.

Also TERFs: It’s irrelevant that Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth. Caster’s body was flooded with testosterone at puberty, making him male.

TERFs: Transgenderism is based on enforcing gender stereotypes. It equates being a woman with looking pretty and delicate and wearing makeup and being submissive. That’s evil misogyny!

Also TERFs: I can tell who is really a woman by looking at them, and that’s not a real woman. Caster’s too muscular, never wears makeup, is aggressive, and looks like a man. It’s not misogyny if *I* do the gender-policing.

There’s so much hypocrisy in all of this. And lest we forget, in Caster Semeya’s case, a whole lot of racism as well. The competitors who have challenged Caster’s right to compete have all been white women, crying white-women tears for the cameras. The TERFs who’ve been serving as talking heads in media interviews? Also a bunch of white women. There’s one who seems to find every Twitter conversation on the topic and post photos contrasting women athletes she claims are “really men” due to presumed intersex status—every one of them Black or brown—with women she says have been cheated of their rightful medals—all white.

(This makes me recall the weird racist claims made by a certain fringe about Michelle Obama—that she was really a trans woman or intersex, because she was too strong, and seemed to the racist detractors to have overly-broad shoulders.)

In the end, what we see are that trans-exclusive “feminists” are largely white women who believe they have ownership of the category of woman by right. And they seem to have no problem with deploying one set of arguments to exclude trans women, and totally opposite arguments to exclude intersex women. It’s sad and it’s ugly.

Yet Caster Semenya continues to rise up to compete, enduring intrusive media questions about her genitals, endless discussions of her dress and demeanor, and years of being forced to take testosterone-suppressant drugs against her will in a way that no person competing in men’s sports, no matter how high his natural testosterone levels, has ever been forced to do. Sometimes she’s allowed to compete and sometimes barred from competition, depending on rules that keep being changed for how typical a woman’s body must be in order for her to qualify for the Olympics.

Remember this: virtually every person competing in the Olympics has an atypical body. These athletes may be endowed with atypical levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge lungs, or extraordinarily long legs. We don’t police these biological differences, or require that to compete in the Olympics, you must have an average body. We don't randomly pick citizens of each nation to compete in international sporting events--we get to see average people running for the bus all the time. We don't find this exciting, and it's the very atypicality of elite athletes' bodies that enthralls us. It's only this very specific type of atypicality--being a woman with hormonal or genital or chromosomal variance--that has been policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.

And it’s all based on magical thinking about what testosterone does. Ten percent of cisgender women have PCOS, which makes them produce high levels of testosterone, but doesn’t magically make them athletic. And actually, when studied, it turns out that 17% of elite male athletes have testosterone levels below the bottom of the "male range." These men are not disqualified as "cheating by being intersex." They aren't regulated at all, probably because it's presumed that their low testosterone must be a disadvantage. Yet these men with low testosterone are not lesser athletes; they are just as extraordinary in their performance as the men with typical testosterone levels. This illustrates how there's no direct relationship between the amount of testosterone a person produces and their athletic abilities.

I myself am an intersex man, who has been taking testosterone for many years. My athletic abilities? Well, they’re better than those of a potato. But they are poor. What sort of feminist would argue that I should not be allowed to compete against women Olympians, because I have an innate male advantage over them and would win? That’s magical thinking, of a sort that posits a binary of male superiority and female inferiority. And it’s ridiculous.

The last thing a feminist should be doing is gender-policing women, telling them if they get too strong and muscular, they are no longer women. That refusing to wear dresses makes them men. That marrying a woman discredits them.

That’s not feminism, friends.

What If We Treated White Femme Celebrities Like Caster Semenya?

South African track star Caster Semenya has been barred from competing in her races in the Olympics because her body naturally produces higher levels of testosterone than is considered typical for women. Oh, but this is not discrimination, says the International Association of Athletics Federations, because she is welcome to compete in the men's races instead!

I've written at length before about why policing women's naturally-produced testosterone levels and banning them for being intersex is both morally wrong and nonsensical. Testosterone is not a magic elixir of male superiority--that's a ridiculous myth. And even if we imagined that it were, all Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. Swimmer Michael Phelps, world recordholder of 28 Olympic medals, has been the subject of lots of reporting celebrating him as a "mutant." (He is double-jointed, with very unusual body proportions, huge lungs, and muscles that only produce half the amount of lactic acid when exercising than normal.)

But let's not go over all that again. I want to address another issue: that the women being singled out, tested, and excluded for having high testosterone are vastly disproportionately women of color from the global south who are perceived as "too masculine." And often, it is feminine white women competitors who have demanded that they be tested. "Experts" relied upon in Semeya's case have used explicitly racist imagery in their presentations of her as posing some sort of threat to "normal" feminine white women competitors.

It seems pretty glaring that the reason Caster Semenya is being policed so intensely is that she is a queer black woman who is strong and muscular, and not interesting in performing femininity with long hair or nails for the comfort of certain others. And by "certain others," I mean all those policing bodily binary sex and gender expectations: misogynists who deem athleticism in women to be unattractive, and bigots like homophobes, transphobes, and those who deem intersex bodies horrifying.

So let's think about the outcome in a different context. Instead of strong brown athletes, let's look at women who are white feminine celebrities. Let's imagine that before we let them take women's roles in movies or television shows, we tested their natural levels of testosterone.

All of the women I've shown here would fail, because they all have high testosterone caused by PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Each of them has spoken to the media about it. Emma Thompson has talked about her struggles with infertility related to PCOS; Sasha Pieterse has explained that PCOS caused her to gain weight; Daisy Ridley has shared with fans that she battles PCOS-related acne; and Jillian Michaels has talked about her path to adoption after years of attempting to conceive despite her PCOS.

Each of these celebrities has a natural testosterone level outside the norm for women. Why then do we not classify them as having "hyperandogenism," as we do women excluded from athletic competitions? Why, because they are paragons of white femininity in the public eye! Daisy Ridley did acquire a misogynist hate-following from men who were angry at her Star Wars character Rey. But they were angry because they didn't want a "girl" to be the hero Jedi, they wanted a masculine white man. Jillian Michaels might have gotten a backlash because she has a strong, muscular body--something we associate with high testosterone. But she performs the role of the feminine personal trainer, and spent years policing the bodies of fat people on The Biggest Loser, so she got a pass. Sasha Pieterse was widely mocked and trolled in social media about her body--but this was fat-shaming, not policing femininity. Like many people with higher levels of testosterone, she found out that what this made her was fat, not "buffed," and her curvy body never triggered the stereotypes that high testosterone must make you butch.

So, these celebrities with atypical hormones have not faced the testosterone police yet--but imagine if they did. Imagine if some group started challenging women celebrities, claiming that some were bad role models, or taking acting roles away from "real" women, because they had "male" levels of testosterone, which gave them an unfair advantage. Those making this claim could back it up with a wide array of empirical evidence: actors who are men are given more speaking parts in movies; they are paid more; directors are much more likely to be men. They could claim men have a natural advantage due to testosterone giving them more assertiveness and "drive," making them by nature more compelling actors, more competent directors, and naturally running the entertainment industry.

Yes, that would seem obviously bizarre and nonsensical. But people used to make just this argument; it's simply no longer accepted. We no longer buy the old scientific studies, controversial but widely believed in their day, that it is their high testosterone that causes men to dominate politics, business, academia and the arts.

So imagine that each of these celebrities were treated like Caster Semenya, or Duttee Chand, or Maximila Imali, or Evangeline Makena, and had the same experience as these strong brown athletes. They would be excluded due to naturally high levels of testosterone, shamed, and presented as "cheaters." They would be framed as not really women, despite having been assigned female at birth, raised as girls, and identifying as women today. And they would be highly unlikely to feel comforted by being told they were free to try out for men's roles.

If you think it would be nuts to tell Victoria Bechkam or Emma Thompson that they are not really women because they have high T, then you should think the same about Caster Semenya.

Intersex Athletes of the Times

The NY Times Magazine is running a story on the binary sex policing of intersex athletes. Well, I should say, intersex woman athletes--nobody is testing to find out if men who are competing in international sporting competitions have intersex traits. Because what is really at stake here is ideology, not fact. And that ideology is that sex is binary when it is really a spectrum, and that the line being drawn between women and men is dividing lesser people from greater ones. Intersex men, framed not as "real men" but as lesser, are seen as pathetic. But intersex women are portrayed as unduly powerful, and a threat.

It's time for me to write another post on intersex athletes, as Dutee Chand's case is in the news. Because this issue keeps coming up. Because we, intersex people, continue to be out there, and contemporary Western society continues to frame us as violating the order of things, instead of a part of the natural order.

It's strange, the way we in the contemporary West collapse all the variety in human bodies into a sex binary. We're used to a trick of mind that allows us to say and believe "men are taller than women," while encountering plenty of women who are taller than plenty of men. Height, you see, is a spectrum, but the sexed-height-difference we speak of references just average heights. We ignore the spectrum and speak of the average difference when distinguishing women and men. Now, there are adult men who are under three feet tall, and there are men over eight feet tall. That's a five-foot range of difference. The difference in average height between women and men in the U.S. is five inches--a tiny amount in comparison. And this is true of all physical sex characteristics, including not just height or lung capacity or average hand size, but genital configuration and levels of sex hormones. The characteristics run along a spectrum, but we speak of them as a binary: "men's hands are bigger than women's" and "men have higher testosterone than women." The range of differences within a socially-imposed binary sex category is huge, while the average difference between those categorized as men and women is small. And the overlap between women and men is wide.

People of all sexes typically produce testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, and our bodies rely on all of them--though you might not know this by the way we say all the time that "men have testosterone and women have estrogen." You might imagine doctors and scientists would think less magically than laypeople when it comes to the idea that "T is for boys and E is for girls." After all, they should be aware of facts like estrogen being needed not just for ovulation in women, but also for spermatogenesis in men. But no. Doctors and scientists consulting with the Olympics have been speaking of testosterone in very magical ways. They have decided upon a "normal female range" of testosterone, and banned women who naturally produce more from competing.

Consider these facts:

1. Men competing in elite international sporting competitions do not have limits placed on how much testosterone they naturally produce. Women who produce higher-than-typical amounts of testosterone are treated as "cheating," men who do are not.

2. Actually, when studied, it turns out that 17% of elite male athletes have testosterone levels below the bottom of the "male range." These men are not disqualified as "cheating by being intersex." They aren't regulated at all, probably because it's presumed that their low testosterone must be a disadvantage. Yet these men with low testosterone are not lesser athletes; they are just as extraordinary in their performance as the men with typical testosterone levels. This illustrates how there's no direct relationship between the amount of testosterone a person produces and their athletic abilities.

3. Bodies vary widely in how sensitive they are to testosterone. Some intersex women have "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome." These are individuals with XY chromosomes who are born with female-typical genitalia due to their body's inability to respond to testosterone. They have internal testes where most women have ovaries, and these produce testosterone at puberty, but their bodies can't use it, so they develop breasts like other typical girls do, not beards. And focus on this fact: their bodies are insensitive to testosterone. The idea that they have some sort of athletic advantage due to having higher testosterone than typical girls is ridiculous--because they can't respond to testosterone.

4. People do not compete in athletic competitions using their genitals. Yet as the Times article discusses, girls with large clitorises are being told to submit to surgery to remove the "excess tissue" if they want to compete in the Olympics. When similar surgeries are performed on girls with average-sized clitorises for social reasons, this is deemed the outrage of female genital mutilation by the international community. Why is it acceptable to impose this on intersex girls? And what could be more magical thinking than saying that how your genitals look determines how fast you can run? By this logic, the longer the penis, the faster a man can run.

5. All Olympic athletes have atypical bodies. As one Olympian says in the article, they're all "freaks of nature." They may be endowed naturally with atypical levels of fast-twitch muscle, or unusually flexible joints, or huge hands, or extraordinarily long legs. We do not police these biological differences, or require that to compete in the Olympics, you must have an average body. We don't randomly pick citizens of each nation to compete in international sporting events--we get to see average people running for the bus all the time. We don't find this exciting, and it's the very atypicality of elite athletes' bodies that enthralls us. It's only this very specific type of atypicality--being a woman with hormonal or genital or chromosomal variance--that has been policed. And it's policed intensively, intrusively, punitively.

6.  The "science" being used today to exclude intersex women athletes is as amazingly full of biases and magical beliefs and unsupported assertions as it was many decades ago. Consider this: scientists testifying as to the supposed necessity of continuing to police intersex bodies recently claimed that a woman competing in Olympic track and field events is 140 times more likely to have a Y chromosome than the rest of the population. This is ludicrous, because we have no idea how many women in the general population have Y chromosomes. We don't test the general population for this--only women competing in elite athletic events. Right now, all over the world, there are millions of intersex people who have no idea of their intersex status--it's not like you can see your chromosomes. 

7. This reminds me of the magical thinking that went into the "supermale" theory in the 1950s and 60s. Scientists discovered that some men had XYY chromosomes, and decided that if one Y chromosome makes you a man, two must make you hypermasculine. So they went around testing the chromosomes of men who were imprisoned or institutionalized, and lo! they found out that a significant number had XYY chromosomes. There was a media frenzy about the powerful, predatory XYY superman. Only. . . nobody had done a comparison study. It turns out that when you test men who are not imprisoned or institutionalized, the same number have XYY chromosomes. Men with XYY chromosomes don't produce more testosterone than XY men. They aren't stronger, or more aggressive, or hairier. You're much more likely to be a sweet, tubby old history teacher than a serial killer if you are an XYY man.

What all of this makes clear is that scientists and doctors are just as immersed in our culture as anyone else. And our culture has been deeply invested in an ideology that sex is a binary--and that by virtue of being a male, a person is stronger, faster, more dominant, more assertive. It may be 2016, but our society continues to view women athletes as suspect, because they are strong, fast, and highly competitive. What is really at stake is patriarchy, and its positioning of men as superior to women. Powerful, nonconforming women still get pushback in the form of sex and gender policing, through street harassment, or poor work evaluations, or medical surveillance. And so we continue to scrutinize the bodies of women athletes, and to punish those whose bodies are deemed "too male" in certain ways. While we acknowledge that height is a spectrum, we insist that hormone levels require a no-gender's-land between acceptably female and acceptably male. And really, it would make no less sense to tell every woman athlete that women cannot be taller than 5'9", and that taller women must have their leg bones reduced until their height is in the female range or be banned from competition.

Sex and gender policing always pretend to be protecting "real women" from "fake ones" who would somehow hurt them. But in fact, they boil down to preserving the power that has been given to people categorized as male, by insisting that "real women" are vulnerable, small, submissive, weak.

Sex is a spectrum. Bodies don't cheat. If we really, truly, actually believed that testosterone levels determined ability, then we would test athletes of all genders and assign them to competition classes by testosterone levels. (The outcome of such a practice would immediately falsify the ridiculous premise.) If we really, truly believed that the size of the phalloclitoris corresponds to athletic ability, then we'd have the competition classes "small clitoris, medium clitoris, large clitoris, intermediate phalloclitoris, small penis, medium penis, large penis." That would be ludicrous, but would at least have the upside of being equally humiliating to men as it has been for all the women who have been forced to face genital inspections to get their "gender certificates" over the years.

Since sex is a spectrum, the division of it into a binary will always be arbitrary. We've been trying to hide the fact that sex is a spectrum, but it's time to grow up. And that means we have two choices. If we really think that bodily characteristics must define competition groups, then stop dividing athletes into men's and women's sports, and create competition classes based on leg length, or lung capacity, or body mass, or flexibility, or whatever is most central to a given sport. Or, if we insist on continuing to separate sports into binary gender categories, then stop policing the bodily characteristics of athletes. People who identify and live as women should compete as such, and the same for those who identify and live as men. People with nonbinary gender identities would have to just flip a coin or something, which would be cruel to them, but at least we would have stopped forcing people to submit to genital surgery they didn't want in order to run.

Dutee Chand was assigned female at birth and has always lived and identified as a woman. She has overcome amazing barriers to reach her level of competition, growing up in extreme poverty and running barefoot with no way to afford even a pair of sneakers. She is only 5 feet tall, and competing against women gifted by genetics and nutrition with much longer legs. To say she has an unfair advantage against her competitors because her higher-than-average testosterone level for a woman trumps all the advantages they have over her is ridiculous. Let Dutee run.

(P.S.--Whenever I post on this topic, inevitably I get an outcry from people who believe that simply letting people compete in their lived genders would mean that cis women would be pushed out of sports, which would be overrun with "men pretending to be women." This is the hysteria that has always driven sex policing in sporting competitions. It completely ignores reality. Cis men do not want to live their lives as women. Trans women face huge amounts of social stigma and violence that nobody wants to experience, and that negatively impact their ability to train or compete. And no one is proposing that a person who has lived their whole lives as a man can announce they identify as a woman and run in the women's marathon the next week, then say "oops, changed my mind" after they have a medal in hand. The rules for international sporting competitions in fact actively address this, by saying that in order to compete in women's athletics, a trans woman must have legally gender transitioned (a slow process), and continue to live as a woman for a least four years before any records or medals she wins are permanently awarded. So please, just let go of the myth that the humiliation and exclusion of intersex and trans women is necessary to protect innocent and deserving women from some ominous threat.)

Interphobia--Not Cured by Hiding Us Away

This terribly disrespectful cartoon depresses me.

It's from a blog entry entitled "10 reason why Caster Semenya is a man. . . she set to run in June anyway," posted this April by a guy named Anthony. Here's a link, if you really want to see.

When Caster Semenya's name first became an international headline, I wrote a blog post about her situation, and I'm not going to revisit the specifics of her case now. Read the older post here if you wish. What I want to address now is the problem of bias against intersex people, which, following the conventions of the terms homophobia and transphobia, I'm terming interphobia. The cartoon of Caster Semenya standing to urinate from a presumed male phallus is an example of interphobic humor.

Caster Semenya's case has served as a lightening rod for interphobia.

If you wander the world of internet humor, you'll find plenty of other examples like the post by Anthony I discuss here. Internet mockery of Caster Semenya draws its vitriol from a variety of sources--you'll find it laced with sexist insecurities about women with athletic prowess, transphobia from authors who presume that Semenya is an MTF trans person, racism in the form of assertions that if she were a "real woman" she'd have straightened her hair--there's a whole banquet of bias being served up. But there are specific elements of interphobia that lie front and center. There's a lot of prurient har-har speculation about her intersex genitalia, framing Semenya as someone whose genitals are on freakshow display. And there's castigation of Semenya for identifying with her sex of rearing.

What the cartoon I've shared from Anthony's blog post illustrates is rage at Semenya for identifying as female, iconically represented by which bathroom she uses. Thus Caster Semenya is shown both in a vulnerable position, at the toilet, and as smirking at the viewers as if daring them to do anything about the fact that she knows she is not a "real woman," illustrated by her standing to urinate. The text of Anthony's blog post is a list of body parts that he claims prove Semenya is "really a man," including even the shape of nostrils (!), but focusing most obsessively on the flatness of her breasts. "NO breast...naada, not even 1% breast, not even fat man breast...," he declares, and, making fun of a photo of Semenya in a dress, he says "they dress up the person into a woman....but they failed to give it a cleavage or breast."

It.

What Anthony concludes is that Caster Semenya is a man and should be running in men's races. He declares her a cheat by virtue of her intersex status, the sex she was assigned at birth wrong, and her gender identity as a woman unacceptable. Basically, Anthony wants to force Semenya to undergo gender transition against her will.

And Caster Semenya followed the rules.

There are rules we live under in our contemporary Western societies that I and many, many other intersex advocates have criticized. The rule that the spectrum of physical sex characteristics we are born with must be forced into dyadic sex assignments, often accompanied by unconsented-to infant genital surgery. The rule that we are supposed to grow up to identify with our sex of assignment. These rules, we are told, are for our own safety.

Doctors tell the families of genitally variant babies that without surgical sex assignment we will be treated as freaks, but surgery will protect us from pariah status. Some of us face traumatic "gender therapy" as children in an attempt to cause us to identify with the sex we were assigned, and again, our families are told this is for the best because it will protect us from ostracism. Our families are told to keep our status a secret. We're told to keep silent, fit in. Our intersex status will thus be erased, and we'll be safe.

Well, Caster Semenya was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl, and identifies as a woman. Her intersex status wasn't known to anyone at all--it wasn't even diagnosed until she was forced to undergo "gender verification testing" when some sore-losing competitors demanded it.

What this proves is that having one's intersex status secret is no protection at all.

We may pass as our assigned sexes--but at any time we may run into a circumstance under which our intersex status is revealed. We get in a car accident. We find ourselves with an ex with a grudge. We're thrust into the limelight, perhaps by winning a race. And we're outed--and thrust into the path of vicious interphobia. We face ER staff who take cell phone photos of our genitalia to send to their friends while we're unconscious, exes telling all of our Facebook circle that we're freaks, and random bloggers mocking us and declaring that we should be forced to gender transition.

The "solution" that doctors pose to the fact that intersex happens--to hide us all in the closet--does nothing to stop interphobia. In fact, it encourages it by making us vulnerable, isolating us from support, keeping us ashamed. The real solution is to fight interphobia directly. We need to come out, accept ourselves, and demand that others do the same.

Caster Semenya - An Intersex Perspective

Controversy and a lot of prurient interest exploded into the news this week when South African Caster Semenya outran her competition in the 800m world championships by a more than two second lead, only to be accused of cheating by being intersex. As an intersex person following this story, I've felt . . . well, largely appalled by what spews from the mouths of competitors, sport officials, news commentators, bloggers, and eyebrow waggling, head-shaking people on the street. It's hard not to feel depressed encountering innumerable snarky statements such as this one: "South African runner Caster Semenya (hehehe...she has semen in her name...hehehe) won the gold in the women's 800-meter at the World Championships in Berlin last night, but officials may snatch (peen, I mean, pun intended) away her victory if it turns out she's really a dude." (That one can be found here, if you're really inclined to read it.) So I wanted to share my perspective on this story. I do apologize to Caster for joining the pile of people giving her no privacy, but as the media are overflowing with details of her life already, I at least wanted to step in to defend her.

The basic outline of Caster's situation, as best as I can understand it through news reporting which is mediocre at its best, is that she was born intersex, assigned female sans surgery based on her predominant genital appearance, and raised as a girl. However, like lots of us whose genitals are visibly intermediate, she grew up knowing she was not a typical female, which liberated her from gender conventions. She was a classic tomboy, refusing to wear dresses and competing with boys in sports. From what I can gather from the news, Caster did not, however, question her female sex assignment, only gender role limitations. An excellent athlete, chances are that she was defined by her physical abilities, as are many tomboy athlete girls with typical female anatomy. When she began to compete in major sporting events, her status as a woman was questioned, and Athletics South Africa "cleared her," declaring her female. Now that she has proven her remarkable running ability on an international stage, her international competitors want her disqualified for "cheating" by not "really" being a woman. The International Association of Athletics Federations has stepped in and is investigating her status, in what most news sources are oddly calling "gender testing." Generally, the news media assume that they will be able to issue a definitive answer on what her "true" (dyadic) sex is.

The main thing that saddens me about this story is the emotional tone of the commentaries. Other athletes, people on the street, and low media blogs are full of sneers and winks and nosewrinkled disgust. The major media bring in scientists and voice patronizing sympathy for how humiliating this must be for Caster, meanwhile capitalizing on the prurient interest in the story to gather viewer attention. Underneath it all is a widespread impulse to yank down Caster's pants and let everyone have a good look. It's a freakshow, with an intersex person the object of millions of prying eyes.

Some basic themes that will be familiar to anyone intersex arise over and over in the news coverage. There's ignorance of the very existence of intersex people, evinced in frequent speculation by laypeople that Caster must have had a sex change or engaged in doping. There's confusion of physical sex with gender identity, with detractors, including some of Caster's competitors, referring to her with male pronouns and speaking disparagingly of her butch appearance. There's racist scientific hubris, with Western sports scientists asserting that they can determine Caster's "true" dyadic sex after doing an exhaustive investigation of her chromosomes, hormone levels, anatomy, gonadal tissue, and psychology, while speaking derisively of the ASA's investigation as being unsophisticated. And most of all, there's the overwhelming belief in the myth of dyadic sex. Caster must be female or male; intersex cannot exist as a sex category.

One depressing sideline of this insistence that Caster must have a definitive dyadic sex is the regularity with which the term "pseudohermaphrodite" is raised by detractors. I've posted on how this term emerged in Western medical science to try to define away the existence of intersexuality ( see here.) Basically, in trying to erase the challenge intersex people place to the medical ideology of sex dyadism, doctors in the 20th century decided to call all intersex individuals who did not have ovotestes as their gonads "pseudohermaphrodites," no matter what their anatomy or experience. Somebody can be raised female, with average-looking genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts, living a typical valorized heterosexual life, femme as can be (housewife, reader of romance novels, cookie-baker), yet all unaware, have internal testes and androgen insensitivity syndrome. If she goes to a doctor for treatment of infertility, suddenly she'll find herself labeled a "male pseudohermaphrodite." The medical term defines her as "really a man," not even intersex, let alone a woman. Anyone with testes is "really a man" according to this scheme of classification--which reveals the sex politics and semantics in supposedly "objective" science.

Those same politics emerge from the mouths of Caster's detractors. She is a "pseudohermaphrodite," they claim--not a woman, not even intersex, but a man trying to cheat honest female competitors.

Here's an irony for you. According to Western medical practice, the majority of infants discovered to be intersex are assigned female. This is done for surgical convenience (it being considered easier to remove an "inappropriate" penis than create an "appropriate" one), and due to a covert assumption about gender psychology, that women can deal better with gender ambiguity than can men. So we're assigned female, told we are "really women," subjected to mutilating infant surgery, expected to identify as female, not intersex, told to keep our medical history, if we know it, a secret, and sent out to live dyadic female lives. Many of us carefully live by the rules. But it turns out that if we do as we are told, we are still subject to being outed, discredited, mocked, and returned unceremoniously to the status of intersex oddity, as Caster's life illustrates--accused of breaking the rules.

What Caster's situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth--sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads--they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.

Given that sex is a spectrum, and that some of us live near its center, being obviously intersex, society needs to deal with us in better ways than by denying our existence, hiding us medically, and then reasserting our existence to disqualify us from participating in sports. And let us acknowledge that this disqualification is based on the insulting assumption that "real women" are categorically inferior to "real men."

Really, what Caster's case makes us consider is the strange fact that athletics are divided along dyadic sex lines. Sensibly, if one is looking at any particular sport, advantages exist according to physical distinctions--tall, long-legged people do better as hurdlers, for example. But millions of female-assigned people are taller and have longer legs than a typical male-assigned person, so why is gender and not leg-length used to create categories of competitors? There are significant differences in average height by race/ethnicity--would you therefore suggest that we divide people by race for sports competition? That would be no less arbitrary than dividing competitors by gender, though today it would be much more controversial. A much more sensible approach would be to create competitor classes by relevant physical category--as weightlifters are divided into weight classes. Then the question of "true" dyadic sex would be as irrelevant as the question of "true race" for athletic competitors.

My heart goes out to Caster Semenya, an intersex sibling caught in an impossible position--required to live in a dyadic gender, and then accused of wrongdoing because the assignment suits poorly.