Saturday, September 12, 2009

Sympathy for Caster Semenya: Hermaphrodites Are People Too



by John Devereux



Imagine for a moment that you’re eighteen years old and the entire world is wondering if you’re a man, woman, or something in between. Helpful people have tried to remove the uncertainty by giving you a feminizing makeover. Welcome to Caster Semenya’s life.
Semenya’s prowess at the women’s 800 meters, combined with her muscular physique and curiously male demeanor have made the world wonder about her true sex. It has now been leaked by track and field officials that Caster Semenya has been declared a “hermaphrodite”.
In order to compete in track and field she has been forced to submit to an intrusive investigation of her chromosomal make-up and the structure of her reproductive organs. How would you feel in her shoes? Humiliated, embarrassed, downtrodden, ready to crawl into the nearest hole and never come back, I warrant. Can we show a little sensitivity and understanding in this difficult situation? After all, nobody is accusing Caster Semenya of cheating. She has been raised as a girl, considers herself to be a girl, and for all intents and purposes is a girl.

Is Caster Semenya a Hermaphrodite?
Technically a hermaphrodite is someone or something with both male and female reproductive organs. Hermaphrodism in humans is rare, but far from unknown. According to a Developmental Biology textbook by Scott F. Gilbert, human hermaphrodites typically have a sex organ that is somewhere between a penis and a clitoris. Some hermaphrodites have both a penis and large breasts.
Babies born with ambiguous sex organs are typically assigned a gender by doctors based on the size of the organ. Smaller equals female while larger equals male. Surgical procedures may be performed to “normalize” the organ. Some biologists consider gender to be part of a continuum rather than a binary situation.
The question is not, then, whether Caster Semenya is a man or a woman. She is perhaps somewhere in between. Since her gender identity has always been female, should she be allowed to competed in athletic competitions as a woman?
The answer is not so cut and dried. Semenya’s testosterone level has tested within allowed limits for female athletes. Who is to say than, that she should not be considered a woman? The question, I suppose, is whether it’s fair to other female competitors of unambiguous gender to force them to compete against a person whose unusual genetic make-up may give her a significant advantage. After all, the segmentation of competitors by sex is meant to level the playing field for female athletes.
Adding to the controversy is the fact that Caster Sememya is a black woman from South Africa, a country without a great history of success by black athletes in international competitions. During the apartheid era, South African athletes were long banned from international events. Now that the majority black population has political control over the country, they are understandably touchy about efforts to draw in to question the achievements of one of their own. Mutters about “racism” have been heard.
I suspect that Caster Semenya will be barred from future competitions, but I don’t see how anyone can be happy about it. Fairness is a hard thing to come by in this world, but there’s nothing very “fair” about excluding someone who doesn’t fit our conception about what a “normal” human being is. Here's the link to the original posting by John Devereux: TBD

Monday, September 7, 2009

Brazil Independence

I wonder what it would be if Brazil and Portugal were still a monarchy...on the contrary of many of you, I think such an early independence wasn't such a great idea after all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil