Sorry, Caster, saying you're a girl doesn't make it true
Is Caster Semenya, the amazing 18-year-old South African athlete, a man or a woman? According to a source close to the International Association of Athletics Federations, Caster is biologically a hermaphrodite. That is to say, she has both male and female reproductive organs, but, at birth, would have been considered to be female because the outward genital organs seemed female.
If Caster is a biological hermaphrodite, as reported, it would mean that she carries the XY male chromosome, and instead of ovaries and a womb, her internal organs would be testes. Being a hermaphrodite is a rare condition which occurs in the embryonic stage of pregnancy when the hormone "messages" somehow get mixed up.
If Caster is indeed a hermaphrodite, then it would seem a cruel business to expose her condition to the world, especially when her own family want no such speculation.
Her uncle, Lesiba Rammabi, has said that her whole family has felt "very humiliated" by the global focus on Caster's very private life. The family had raised Caster as a girl, and would always regard her as a girl, and they would never accept that she was not a female.
The situation has also gone political -- perhaps unsurprisingly in view of the sensitive historical background to South Africa's former race laws.
The political establishment in South Africa has bridled fiercely against the charges that Caster was partly male. Makhenkesi Stofile, the South African Sports Minister, has wholly rejected the suggestion that Caster might be hermaphrodite. If there is a ruling from the International Association of Athletics that Caster cannot in future run as a woman, he has threatened a "third world war" level of agitation. It is, he says, an outrage against Caster Semenya's human rights as a person.
"Caster remains our heroine," he said. "The issue is not whether she's a hermaphrodite. She's a girl."
One cannot but have sympathy for the 18-year-old's situation, and indeed, some empathy too with the pride that the black South Africans, in particular, feel for this remarkable athlete. Barring her from future competitions -- let alone depriving her of her 800-metre win at the World Championships in Berlin last month -- seems so mean-spirited: don't rain on the young champion's parade.
But who started this saga of questioning Caster's biological gender?
The first complaints came from other female athletes who felt that if Caster does have male chromosomes -- then it just isn't fair on competitors who are all-female.
Can a female win a Ladies' Tennis Championship if she is not fully female?
Can a female hockey team, say, zoom to victory if their wing forwards are fellows in disguise?
The Caster Semenya debate sharply brings into focus the fact that when it comes to sport, men and women can never compete on a level playing field.
As Princess Anne once said in a moment of dry wit: "The only sport in which a man and a woman can compete on equal terms tends to involve a horse."
In recent times, the transgender debate has veered towards the notion that individuals should be free to "choose" their biological sex.
If a male "feels" that he is really a woman, then he should be free to alter his sex accordingly, via a surgical operation and a dose of hormones. (And vice-versa: though it is harder for a woman to "become" a man, surgically: there is also much less demand for female-to-male transgendering, than for male-to-female.)
There are also individuals whose sex is wrongly identified at birth, and who are brought up in the "wrong" gender: it seems that a newborn infant's genitals can sometimes look surprisingly ambiguous.
But there are also those who believe that sexual identity is purely a social matter, and that, because it involves social conditioning, people should be free to choose their sexual identities in adult life.
The Caster Semenya controversy contradicts this liberal notion that we are "free to choose" our sex identity. The entire inquiry focuses on a hard-science examination of whether Caster's organs and chromosomes are biologically male or female.
The South Africans who revile this line of inquiry, and regard it as a slur on the heroine of whom they are so justly proud, are reacting with understandable loyalty.
But at the same time, there is a strong element of reality denial.
Saying that Caster is a girl because her family regard her as a girl is -- in this context -- like Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty saying, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- nothing more nor less." It is believing that something is so because you wish it to be so.
The fact is that if Caster has male chromosomes and male gonads in place of female organs, she is not, biologically, a girl.
It is indeed cruel to expose the young person to this globalised scrutiny and there will be more headlines when the athletics panel examining the evidence reports officially in November.
Yes, if Caster's family wants to think of her as a girl, and if she thinks of herself as female, then she should be allowed to live in peace with that construct.
The problem arises, however, from entering her into high-profile world athletics.
Had this not happened, her life would possibly have gone on undisturbed.
But once there is competition, there will always be other competitors ready to question the biological basis of an athlete's identity: because being masculine, in any competitive sport, confers a strong advantage over being feminine.
- MARY KENNY
