Why Should We Cast 'er Away!

The facts are these.

Caster Semenya, a South African Middle-distance runner, won the gold medal in the 800 meters race at the Commonwealth Championship in athletics held in Berlin recently, with a time of 1:55:45 in the final. Her record time raised suspicions about her sexual identity. If Ms. Semenya was indeed a woman at all? If not she would be restrospectively disqualified from the race for not being a woman.

Hidden in this question is the assumption that if a woman is too good at what she does, she may in fact not be a woman at all. In organized sport, which today remains one of the most gender-insensitive domains in the world, this discrimination against women has felled several victims. If its not performance-enhancing drugs, it is the fact that a woman has some masculine attributes that contribute to her extraordinary success.

The IAAF recently made public Ms. Semenya's test results which illustrated that she had no ovaries, uterus and possessed internal testes. This the IAAF did to handle the accusation leveled against it that the body was rascist and was violating the privacy of an African runner.

It is bad enough that Ms. Semenya has had to deal with the loss of her sexuality as an individual, it is a hundred times worse that this has happened in public with several thousand people viewing her 'intersex' condition as tragic, pitiable, freakish, unwomanly. In short the world has robbed Ms. Semenya of her sexual identity.

This entire case has made me think very very hard about what it means to be a woman. Author of The Second Sex, Simone deBeauvoir, famously wrote that she was not born a woman, she became one. That is to say, the condition of womanhood goes beyond being born with a certain set of biological parts. It is conferred upon a girl, or she is shoved into womanhood (whichever way you want to look at it) by a broad set of social constructs that condition behavior, dress, and role in society.

Ms. Semenya's birth certificate states she is 'female'. She grew up as a girl, she probably played with dolls, dressed as a woman, was featured on the cover of Vogue magazine (in a rather pathetic attempt to reclaim her femininity), competed as a woman, was probably subjected to routine humiliations that women across the world suffer, probably was expected to do womanly things (cook, clean, iron, etc). Her career was based on athletics. Her downfall was that she wasn't bad at it.

It is quite possible that many 'women' are born with this abnormality. They are not to be blamed for it. The entire debate about Ms. Semenya has centered on her biology. Almost as if biology alone makes you a woman. There are several thousand women on earth who lose their breasts to breast cancer, their uterus to hysterectomies and are unable to bear children for a variety of other reasons. All of them face a crisis of womanhood for sure, because ingrained in us is this idea that a woman is somehow never more than the sum total of her body parts. This is true for most men as well, who face a crisis of masculinity upon losing a testicle (remember the debate about Lance Armstrong?).

Given that Ms. Semenya has endured the life-experiences of being a woman, I say she be allowed to hold on to her womanhood instead of being disqualified from the cult of femininity. Her experiences make her more of a woman than her biology ever did.

In the same way, I find her appearance on the cover of Vogue a poor sop to the strong argument that can be made in her favor. A ton of make-up, lipstick and rouge do not make one a woman. The ability to stuff yourself into very tight, lacy lingerie or a tight black dress does not make one a woman. The ability to walk for miles in insanely high heels does not make anyone a woman (are the transvestites listening?). If the idea was to make Ms. Semenya appear just frail enough, it failed. She is not frail and she need not be. Women need not be frail and weak in order to be considered women. Their strength need not be emotional and internal, on display only in crisis situations. Most women on earth today do back-breaking work on the fields, in the house, much beyond their physical capacities. Yet they do it.

When Santhi Soundarajan was 25 years old she won the silver medal in the 800m at the 2006 Asian Games. A similar gender test was administered to this Tamil track star from humble beginnings. She failed the test and lost her medal, and the ability to ever compete in women's athletics. Apparently she had androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) in which a person is genetically male, but because of insensitivity to male sex hormones, the body appears feminine. Soundarajan's personal life was affected, her mental health disturbed (there were rumors of suicide attempts) and now she runs a, athletics coaching institute in Tamil Nadu. Plans of returning to competitive athletics have long been abandoned.

She has something to say to Ms. Semenya, "You are a woman, full stop. A gender test cannot take away from you who you are." (quoted in TIME).