As we go to press, the “results” of the “sex test” for 800m gold-medal winner Caster Semenya have not been released. However it turns out, the way the organizers of the world athletics championships in Berlin have treated her is nothing short of shameful. They have conspired to make the process a publicly humiliating one, instead of employing a modicum of discretion and tact. And the way that South Africans have rallied around her in support is a matter of pride for her and her country.

As Germaine Greer pointed out in The Guardian recently, in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, genetic testing was required for all female athletes. After more than 6,000 tests, no one was found to be a man masquerading as a woman, but quite a few women discovered they had developmental sexual disorders that they weren’t aware of before. It succeeded only in embarrassing a lot of people, and was discontinued.
Evidently, the authorities have decided to bring back testing (this time involving a whole panel of “experts”) because of Caster’s unique winning physicality. The South Africans naturally put it down to envy. (However, the envy may be a manifestation of another kind of suspicion, to wit the none-too-subtle comments in the press about her “recent dramatic improvement in performance”, which is usually code for “we think someone’s been doping on the sly”.)
Notwithstanding that particular thorny issue, she is a striking woman. And indeed with her low voice and masculine physique, she does make one wonder about how the binary construct of male and female in our culture fails to describe adequately the variations that occur naturally in our species. Her family, from an impoverished village in Limpopo province, affirms that she was born a girl, and also that she was a classic tomboy, loving soccer and showing no interest in girly things. In other words, her story is not of a young man deciding to cheat and enter the girls’ races so he could win; her narrative is one that many women the world over can identify with, and certainly, I would imagine, a large proportion of women who are sporty. While many tomboys grow up into lesbian or bisexual women, it is of course not reliable to infer sexual orientation by the degree to which one displays “masculine” or “feminine” attributes. That is, to fall into the binary trap, to see everything as one thing or the other. Human beings have always been somewhere in the middle. Aren’t you?
Neither, it seems, is it reliable to infer gender by appearance alone. Statistics are easy to manipulate, but it is fair to say that somewhere between one in a thousand and one in a hundred people are born with a certain ambiguity in their gender. (This figure of course is multiplied many times if one includes those that aren’t 100% heterosexual). This may manifest in something as obvious as being born with genitals that are a mixture of both male and female, or something less clear cut like a very large clitoris or a small penis, or it may only manifest in adolescence, when things don’t turn out the way they are “supposed to”. The variations from the binary norm can manifest in our genes, in our hormones, and/or in our genitals.
Intersexuality is separate to the experience that is classified “gender dysphoria”, in which a person in adulthood comes to the realisation that they were born into the wrong sex, in the wrong body. And indeed this is also separate from the experience of growing up gay or lesbian, in which one’s chosen love-object is not the cultural norm. In many societies, being a gay man is synonymous with being effeminate, such as the ladyboys in South-East Asia.
Any of these natural variations can lead to a deep questioning about gender, about sex roles, about what is expected of us as a man, as a woman, as a human being. For many of us it is a journey of self-discovery that is like trying to work out a puzzle, to which there is no solution. Because the problem is society’s, not the individual’s.
In wealthy families, or families with good public health systems, the parents of children born with ambiguous genitalia are often offered early surgery to “correct” the “abnormality”. This is why we don’t hear so much about intersex adults, certainly in Ireland or the UK - the “correction” is made early on in life, and as long as adolescence proceeds without a problem (I mean without more than the usual problems), then the natural variance in body shape remains a private matter. Of course, the awful possibility exists for parents that they choose the “wrong” sex for their child, ie one that the child eventually decides is wrong for them. However, in Caster’s case, her parents had no such recourse. Presumably, therefore, her body as a little girl raised no suspicions or fears.
One in a thousand Irish people works out at around 6,000 people on this island. It is of course impossible to know how many of them as adults were informed about their surgery in infancy, if they had it; I would guess that, so embarrassed are we about sexual difference, many Irish parents have chosen to keep such matters as secret as possible. Parents have an understandable wish to protect their children from feeling like outsiders; but, sadly, the more they do so, the less likely that things will change for future generations.
The limits of a circle define it - by which I mean those who test the boundaries of human experience create more of a sense of security for those who find themselves comfortably in the middle. But we tend to demonize and scapegoat those on the edge, as opposed to show them gratitude or respect for the difficult path on which they find themselves. Because we fear difference, it unsettles us. And those who are most fearful, most suspicious, most hostile, tend to be the ones who have their own secret fear of letting their differences be known.