Intersex matters

Last night a South African athlete, Caster Semenya, won the women's 800m at the World Athletics Championships. She won by a whopping 2.4 seconds, and is only 18 years old.

Both of those factors alone would be worthy of comment for sports fans - she was almost unheard of, yet clearly the best runner in that distance competing in the women's events by some distance. Now, however, there is even more chatter surrounding Semenya amid widespread reports that she is to undergo a complex 'gender identity test', to prove that she is in fact a woman and eligible to run in women's events.

Semenya is certainly strong and muscular, with a build that is different to many of her rivals' lean physiques. At first sight it is easy to see why she is considered to be unfeminine; she does not sport long hair and has not been 'blessed' with a narrow waist or noticeable bust. Comment has centred on whether she is 'male' or 'female', as if she could only ever be one or t'other. Her coach and South African officials have insisted that they are 'completely sure that she is female', suggesting that doubters should enlist Semenya's roommates for corroborating evidence. 'They have already seen her naked in the showers', said one official, 'and she has nothing to hide.' Meanwhile, media outlets have taken great delight in asking the question, 'Is she a MAN?' (or, its variant, 'Is SHE a HE?'). The only indication that it may be more complex than that comes from those who admit that determining gender can be a fraught business; it has been reported that Caster Semenya will have to undergo a series of tests involving a gynaecologist, internal medicine, a geneticist, an endocrinologist and a psychologist. If we are all absolutely male or female, how come it will take all of that to decide which Semenya should be classified as?

The fact is that there is a group of people who are neither male nor female, but who are accorded no recognition by our society at all. These people are intersex. I do not mean to suggest that Semenya herself is necessarily intersex - I am no gender scientist, and I am less interested in her gender identity as such than I am in the absence of the word 'intersex' from what has been a pretty loud and sensationalised debate so far. In fact, this omission nothing new. Intersexuality has long been misunderstood, overlooked and ignored, so much so that I feel obliged to give a definition of it here. The Intersex Society of North America defines intersexuality as 'a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.' In practice this means that intersex persons display physical attributes that are considered 'male' as well as physical attributes that are 'female'. It is estimated that 1 in 100 live births can fall into the category, with 1 in 1000 undergoing 'corrective' surgery to restore 'normal' gender identity. Thus, although intersexuality is rare, it is not that rare. It's not so rare as to be completely ignored by wider society, I'd have thought.

Of course, there are many reasons why Caster Semenya and her team's officials would be reluctant to even suggest such a possibility in her case. She would be disqualified from racing against women, given that women's events have to be contested by people who are determined to be female. This would end both her reign as world champion and her career. But again, I sense more than this is at stake. For many newspaper reporters and their readers, there seems to be a reluctance to even countenance the possibility of anything other than male and female. After, all our society is built on the importance of the heterosexual pair, the organisation of men and women into individual partnerships. We simply don't have a place for intersexual politics, an identity that falls outside of the male/female binary.

As well as leading to injustice and discrimination meted out to intersex people - ranging from social ostracism to invasive surgery - there are other, possibly even larger implications resulting from our reliance on a binary understanding of gender. If we as a society really do think that everyone is male or female, we are closing down the possibility of 'playing' with gender, the possibility of seeing more variety than we currently admit to. This is the sort of rigid thinking that leads to women and men being considered inherently different to each other, and being assigned complementary roles, e.g. women as nurturers and men as providers. I don't mean to argue that all men and all women fall into those roles in an uncomplicated way, but as long as we rely on this way of viewing gender, we will have trouble giving each other the flexibility we might well benefit from. For example, I would like very much for Simon and I to both be considered nurturers and providers; and yet it is only I that is questioned as to my career plans after the baby is born.

I wish Caster Semenya all the best in what is about to happen to her - invasive tests, international scrutiny and perhaps being stigmatised for the rest of her career. I also wish we could perhaps move to a more empathic level of comment and debate when such people come to our attention. We could all benefit from widening our horizons on gender, I reckon.