The latest case of gender policing in sport has come to light with South African World Junior gold medalist runner Caster Semenya’s accomplishments, if not her medal, being stripped from her based on perceptions of her gender and an unfair advantage.
The young Caster had achieved astounding success in leaps and bounds, which left many eyebrows raised and fingers pointing that her masculine presentation deserved investigation for evidence of gender fakery. “That’s no woman! It’s a man competing in women’s races!”
After all, women in sport must take extra precaution to ensure their womanliness if they are to be accepted as athletes. Women’s athletic bodies, and, women’s bodies in general are sites of scrutiny and measurement to standards of femininity that reinforce and repress natural expressions of gender such as Caster’s. And, perish the thought that Black female athletes (and non-athletes alike) have been subjected to white standards of femaleness and femininity and, therefore, racism.
Now we have a young gifted athlete who has done nothing but accomplish feats her peers could not, and the world stage has called her gender and her sex into question. The result is that any female athlete must subject herself to medical rape and inspection in order to prove that she is, in fact, female by traditionally conceived notions and socially appropriate norms. But this whole debacle raises important questions, despite the traumatic and degradingly inappropriate leakage of Caster’s personal and very private information.
Where is the place in competition for those who do not neatly fit gender or sex expectations? Where is Caster’s place on the world stage? What is the solution of all of this probing, examining, and humiliating? If it is true that Caster, or someone like her is intersex, where would such an athlete compete? People claim that she has an unfair advantage but the fact is, she is naturally gifted. Cases such as this make clear that gender and sex are not clear-cut. There is no such thing as men’s competitions and women’s competitions. These notions are socially constructed and biologically inaccurate.
So what criteria do we use? Does this mean all hell breaks lose and those who are deemed not female or not male compete in their own ‘Special Olympics’? Does it mean they don’t get to compete at all? Does it mean that all genders should be lumped together? Well clearly these aren’t solutions. I think the paranoia that belies excluding intersex, transgender, transsexual or non-gender conforming individuals in sport is that they are somehow using an unfair biological advantage.
For instance, a transsexual female athlete such as women's downhill mountain bike racer Michelle Dumaresq (who wins, btw) is seen to not only be parading as a fake woman, but that the parading is purposely for using an unfair advantage to win. I mean, does anyone care if transgender athletes compete if they don’t win? As in the case of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, female athletes are being sex tested and their biology sometimes comes into question, yet they are allowed to continue to compete. Is this because they passed as women? Or is it because they didn’t actually win? What exactly is an unfair advantage?
While I pray that this public degrading of Caster’s accomplishments does not succeed in bringing down this young soul’s spirits – I think it’s about time we examined as a whole our gender expectations of women, intersex, and transpeople in sport, and in general. Perhaps this case will make way for the inclusion of a spectrum of gender so that folks like Caster don’t have to pretend to be anything but what they are.
What we are.
