Caster Semenya: Sex, gender and athletics

Image: José Sena Goulão/LUSA

As you’re probably aware, reports emerged this week that following medical tests, South African runner Caster Semenya has been discovered to be biologically intersex. This follows weeks of speculation after her 800m victory at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin. On balance, I think these reports are probably true, if only because the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which ordered the tests, haven’t issued a denial – they’ve just refused to confirm the results. The outraged reactions to the rumours from the South African government and Semenya’s family, while understandable, aren’t very convincing either. The former claim that the tests the IAAF ordered were conducted without Semenya’s consent, which might be true (and certainly shouldn’t be allowed to happen – in fact, the way the whole case has been handled and discussed in the media has been pretty insensitive), but has no bearing on the results of the test. Members of her family, on the other hand, have said that the claims are only being made out of jealousy (though it’s not specified who the alleged jealous party is) and that since she was raised female, there’s no doubt that that’s what she is.

This last claim is an interesting one. There’s a very important sense in which it’s absolutely correct. If someone’s been raised female and has always considered that to be their gender, it really isn’t anyone else’s business to tell them otherwise, irrespective of  their chromosomes, genitalia or anything else. Penny Red made much the same point a few weeks back, shortly after the speculation about Semenya began, together with the equally sound point that gender is socially constructed, non-binary and nowhere near as simple as it’s made out to be. But gender and biological sex, as we know, are two different things – that’s why some people’s gender differs from their biological sex, and why a number of people for whom this is the case choose to have sex-change operations. It’s also, unfortunately, why Penny’s wrong to argue that “genetics have nothing to do with” the question of whether Semenya is female. For some bizarre reason the medical tests Semenya underwent are called “gender tests”, but that’s precisely what they’re not – they’re to determine biological sex, not gender identity. (I don’t know why they’re mis-named. It could be that the IAAF is just depressingly prudish about the word “sex”, or it could be that they’re crassly insensitive to the gender/sex distinction – a commenter on Penny Red’s post mentioned that a psychologist was among the people trying to conduct tests, which lends some weight to the latter possibility.)

Penny concludes her post by implying that athletics (and other sports?) shouldn’t have separate men’s and women’s categories at all, and that the only reason they exist is that the IAAF is “paranoid over the existence of strict gender boundaries”. Here her argument is a lot less convincing. It doesn’t at all follow from gender being socially constructed and non-binary that biological sex shouldn’t matter in sport. I’m not denying that there would be advantages to abolishing the sex divide in sport; at present it’s completely unclear whether someone who’s intersex should compete in the men’s or women’s category (sadly, given that only 1 in 3000 people are intersex, it’s probably not practical to have a separate intersex category), and medical tests conducted in the glare of the world’s media are, for athletes like Semenya, a seriously unpleasant way to work that out. But without separate men’s and women’s events, (biologically) male athletes would completely dominate athletics. For example, Semenya’s winning time in the 800m final in Berlin would have put her in 47^th place (out of the 48 who finished) in the men’s heats for the same event. The abolition of separate men’s and women’s athletics events would result in a huge number of female athletes vanishing from the public eye (since it’s only athletes with a chance of winning championships that get decent amounts of media attention). This could even have the paradoxical effect of further entrenching simplistic gender stereotypes; if pretty much the only people we ever see on our screens competing in tests of strength, speed and agility were men, girls might well be less inclined to see strong figures like athletes as role models, and more susceptible to cultural pressure to conform to traditional, submissive and patriarchal conceptions of femininity.

My argument here is based on pragmatism, not principle; if, now or in the future, there’s a sport where there’s no significant difference between the abilities of the best (biologically) male and female athletes, then that event should undoubtedly be mixed. In the absence of such a sport, however, I don’t think it would be a good idea. The IAAF needs to get a lot better at handling issues like this with the sensitivity they deserve, but I don’t think removing the sex divide in athletics is a good solution.