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The Meaning of Caster Semenya

Gender a more fluid concept than sports are prepared to handle

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Nov 23, 2009 1:43 PM CST

(Newser) – South Africa has rallied around Caster Semenya, but the IAAF still has no idea what to do with her—or the question of gender as a whole. Semenya’s case is particularly personal for South Africans. The country has an unusually high number of intersexed individuals, and apartheid left behind dark memories of people being reclassified against their will, Ariel Levy reports in a lengthy profile on Semenya for the New Yorker.

The IAAF still hasn’t decided what to do about Semenya. IAAF policy says an athlete can be tested based on any challenge—in this case, it took a single blog post. But there’s no one test for gender. The IAAF “seems to be working with a kind of ‘I know it when I see it’ policy,” says one bioethics professor. “And science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is.”

[Images (1)]

[Quotes (6)]

Caster Semenya celebrates after winning the gold medal in the final of the Women's 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)

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There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. - Ariel Levy

If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world.
- Ariel Levy

There’s no way that you can discuss about something that’s happened below the belt. All the time you don’t know what’s happening in your body, and there’s nobody that try to explain to you.
- Funeka Soldaat, a South African woman born with anomalous genitalia

We will never accept the categorization of Caster Semenya as a hermaphrodite, because in South Africa and the entire world of sanity, such does not exist. - The African National Congress
Youth League

We are not going to allow Europeans to define and describe our children. - Leonard Chuene, president of Athletics South Africa, who authorized the tests on Semenya, then lied about them

I just have to walk away. That’s all I can do. Walk away from all of this, maybe forever. - Caster Semenya

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The Meaning of Caster Semenya