Being a Bad Sport

[clovehitched]

The issue of whether South African runner, Caster Semenya, is to be allowed to compete as a woman, whether she'll "pass" various "gender tests", and so on continues to rumble on in the media. I'm finding it very distressing, and can't imagine how awful Ms Semenya must feel right now, facing the destruction of her career and humiliation by the international media because she miht "not be female enough".

Of course, as much as the definitely-a-man down the pub might like to pontificate about how you can "just check the chromosomes, women have chromosomes don't they? I saw it on the telly, they're pink", and thus subdivide the world with a neat, razor-thin line which everyone falls either side of nice and cleanly, reality is rather more complicated. It's not all that easy to even settle on a definition of what makes a male human or a female human. Whatever you come up with will have grey areas and exceptions.

With women like me, it's pretty obvious to myself that I fall into one of these "difficult cases" - I would have had to been paying spectacularly little attention to not notice the whole transition and surgery thing. But what about someone who doesn't know?

It's more likely than one might imagine - there are women walking around with a Y chromosome who don't know it. There are men walking around without one who don't know it. What happens when someone who has shown some sort of aptitude for a sport as a child devotes their entire life to excelling at it? When they attend a special school and devote much of their studies to practising what they're good at? When they face the world for the first time at an international athletics event, and fail a gender test and stand before the eyes of the World, humiliated with their career in ruins?

What happens to such women (and you can bet it'll be a woman to whom this happens)? Presumably there's a reason the sport is gender-segregated in the first place, and that reason will almost certainly preclude them competing in the men's event. Even if they did, they'd forever be a curiosity to point at and laugh.

I think this is not only grossly unfair, I also think it's massively hypocritical. Most of the men and women we celebrate as our finest athletes are in the position they're in because of some physical advantage which may be down to genetics, their childhood environment, or any of a host of other things. Athletics is, if anything, an exercise in unfairness - there can only be one gold medalist, and that's usually going to be someone who has longer legs, or longer arms, or can extract more oxygen from the air, or spent their life living at high altitude, or has an abnormally large heart, or has more testosterone in their body than the norm, and so on.

When athletics is, by its very nature, a celebration of those who have combined hard work with unusual biology to be the best at what they do, why do peculiarities of gender lead to shame and disqualification when peculiarities of height, stamina, physique, etc. lead to fame and fortune?

At the very best, I think it says something very nasty about our society's paranoia and fear of those who dare to transgress, visibly or otherwise, the sacred gender binary. The absolutely and without a doubt, red blooded, Y-chromosomed man down the pub needs his sharp dividing line, damnit (and I'm sure it's not just men - one need only see the vitriol hurled at those of us who challenge this perception by the Greers, Bindels and Raymonds of this world to see how invested feminism can be in the sacred gender binary too).

And perhaps even the hard of heart can feel sympathy for those who didn't know, but what about people like me, and others who do know? Is this to be an area of human endeavour from which we're to be forever excluded for our high crimes against gender? In my current favourite sport, indoor rock climbing, I watch other women, many who have a similar physique to me, perform feats which I can't match, which I lack the upper body strength for, which those who would proclaim me "really a man" would state I'd "obviously" beat "real women" at without breaking a sweat. Well, 'tain't so, and thankfully at least the IOC appears to agree.

But if we can't even handle Caster Semenya's situation without it descending into farce and titillation, then it's apparent that there's a very long way to go.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/208216.html - you can comment here or there.

Comments

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I've been following this story on a few forums. It saddens me that people can be treated with so little dignity and respect and that it's even considered newsworthy in the first place (I mean, really, I'm bewildered as to why it should be any of my business what chromosomes or genitalia someone has!).

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

I'm bewildered as to why it should be any of my business what chromosomes or genitalia someone has!

Me tool, but personal experience suggests a disturbingly large number of people who are never likely to see them still want to know.

It's always entertaining to be asked, "do you have a penis?" by a complete stranger...

[maellenkleth]

the correct answer is "no. do you?"

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Or: *pats chest pockets, hips pockets, bum pockets* - "Oh bother, no, sorry - I've come out with it again!"

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

Or even... *pulls out iPhone* "No, but there's an app for that!"

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

"No, I borrow one whenever I need it."

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

No, I have a man for that sort of thing..............

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

That exactly : )

[techiebabe.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you commented on this. I think that while women and men participate in events separately there does have to be some rule as to who is a woman and who is a man, in that men do have a physical advantage which is why these sports aren't mixed in the first place - but I thought they'd sorted the rules out; transgendered women are generally allowed to compete after transition, aren't they? I guess it depends what press you read.

I tweeted earlier:

Feel sorry for Caster Semenya - it must be hard having your sex challenged, if not your gender. http://bit.ly/m65T6 seems to explain well.

and

Whereas the Daily Heil leads with "Is she really a HE?" and uses the terms "sex" and "gender" interchangeably. Groan.

The whole thing is depressing. As many broadsheets have pointed out, it's not really fair for this to be played out in public. Maybe she is "intersexed" in some way (is that the right word?) and unaware of it. Maybe she just has PCOS and the muscles result from training hard. She's 18 years old FFS, why can't the IAAF handle this privately? Even less helpfully, the press keep reminding us of Santhi_Soundarajan who was put in a similar position, and then attempted suicide. What a mess and how depressing all round.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

I thought they'd sorted the rules out; transgendered women are generally allowed to compete after transition, aren't they?

In the Olympics, yes. I don't think their rules apply universally though.

it's not really fair for this to be played out in public.

Exactly - crass as hell, and that Mail headline - urgh!

Maybe she is "intersexed" in some way (is that the right word?)

I believe so.

[the-local-echo.livejournal.com]

it's not really fair for this to be played out in public.

I'm not convinced that it is fair to be played out in private in this case either. I don't feel that a gender panel should have enough power to ban someone like her who says she is a woman, has grown up as a female and has standard female peeing equipment (which she must have, because the drug testers have to watch the athletes pee). Let her be, and save the gender panel for checking that transsexual women have completed their transitions, and deciding the very few cases where there is an obvious ambiguity, all of which would happen before the athlete entered the competition.

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

I thought the whole idea of a panel of doctors deciding how to label her was horrible.

I'm afraid my first reaction *was* "Why not just check the chromosomes?". Not because I think that defines someone as male or female, but because it's simple, quick, cheap and objective. And athletes could have it checked early in their careers, to prevent this kind of hassle.

Although that might mean some renaming of the events: "We now have the XXY 100 metre sprint"...

I have a zero tolerance for nonsensical separatist crap.

[capybyra.livejournal.com]

And an equally zero claim to know how we can outgrow suchlike. To my take there's a deeper gaming afoot. It's less about the excluding of any one person or class. It's all about the concept of POWER. That sort of power perceptually derived from an ability to exclude. Perception becomes reality it's said. So what is their logic born from? Could it be their bigotry seeking to become an absolute power? Yeah, I guess it is. See Lord Acton for details.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

While I understand the paranoia left in the wake of people like Kratochvilova and the Russian twins whose names now escape me in the seventies who were performing outrageous times whilst pumped up with 'T' and other nasties by various eastern bloc sports organisations, the fact remained that these folks were women as the fact they went on to have children would tend to prove. The East German athlete, Heike Drexler was also a woman, but so screwed up by 'T' that he found it easier to transition upon retirement.

This actually got the IOC thinking about the difference between drug enhancement and genetic variation, which is why they take the stance they do.
You may remember that this also happened to a Bangladeshi athlete recently who turned out to be very definitely female. This was not supposed to happen again after that case. So?

Interesting that the Aussie golfer, Melanie Bagger and the retired US tennis player Renee Richards are/were nowhere near the top ten, let alone beating everyone in sight, isn't it?

[the-local-echo.livejournal.com]

The absolutely and without a doubt, red blooded, Y-chromosomed man down the pub

Can we hope for his sake that such a man has offspring to prove that his Y chromosomes exist? There are some men that are born with two X chromosomes, appear physically male in every respect, and never find out unless they get their infertility investigated! It would be very upsetting for someone who believed in chromosomal destiny to receive such a diagnosis.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

It would be very upsetting for someone who believed in chromosomal destiny to receive such a diagnosis.

Yes, because it would mean he was really a she, and it would be compulsory for his mates to take the piss, and for him to get his penis cut off.

It stands to reason, doesn't it? Stands to reason.

Now about that MMR jab wot gives kids artism...

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

*massive huggages*

When I saw it on the News, I couldn't even find the words to express disgust at the screen. All day the thing going round in my head is 'but this is 2009 isn't it?'

The knee-jerk stuff being flung around at the moment is so heart-breaking. Have we not evolved past this? So many 'isms' going on here that I can't count.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

So many 'isms' going on here that I can't count.

Yeah, it's seriously, seriously disappointing.

[utterlystrange.livejournal.com]

I've been bothered about something else too, besides this, which is horrible.

I've been looking into paganism...and a lot of it is about God and the Goddess, and the Goddess is a LOT about the 'womb' and such.

That really bothers me. Now, I've figured I don't actually believe in deities as such (I really just believe in a pure, nongendered spirit), but the book I'm reading, keeps on going 'MALE AND FEMALE YIN AND YANG' and it rubs me so wrong.

I'm kinda babbling here, sorry.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

In a sense, this is a natural result of deeper understand of what makes the sexes "themselves". As trans people, we do deconstruct our sex -- to put it back together again differently. In my life, I don't consider it so radical day to day, but it is a radical act. And because we have recognizable categories "man" and "woman" that depend on rationalized parts (to make the correct sum) we're going to have tests such as these. But it goes to show that our dichotomous categories don't well represent the complicated biological processes that "make" a sex.

Good lord though, shame on the IAAF for making it public. Their apology is pathetic.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Great post.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Got some ideas from, well, you know where :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Thing is, we don't even know if she has got any underlying intersex condition, etc. Not that it should matter if she has.

It's almost basically saying, "how can you be that good as a woman?", and the whole obsession by the media over her looks is just so misogynst, let alone racist because her looks are being judged on the grounds of mostly those in the white, Western world.

And as for some of the lame headlines like "Has a man won the women's 800m?", *head meet desk*

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

It's almost basically saying, "how can you be that good as a woman?", and the whole obsession by the media over her looks is just so misogynst, let alone racist because her looks are being judged on the grounds of mostly those in the white, Western world.

Yes, exactly this.

[(Anonymous)]

Greer has been doing her usual subtle slagging off of Trans women again using the usual stereotypes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/20/germaine-greer-caster-semenya

"Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn't polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man's delusion that he is female."

FFS.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

Oh for crying out loud - as if they're not happy to have enough trans misogyny from Bindel, they've now gone and dug up Greer from whatever reality TV show she's been involved in and got her to spew her crap again. Lovely.

[paulathomas.livejournal.com]

Oh dear another low point for what was a fine liberal newspaper. The only column worth reading these days is Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. Coincidentally bad science is what gender testing is.

[paulathomas.livejournal.com]

The most interesting part of this miss-handled mess is the support of the BBC athletics commentators who have been universally sympathetic to Semenya's situation.

The other curiosity is the statement by the IOC official who said that this came up because of the rapid improvement in her times. Um I'm confused is she supposed to be becoming a 'man'? Surely if she were a 'man' then her performances would have been consistent?

Lastly the thorny issue of definitions - what are the definitions here? Is it chromosomal, gonadal, psychological or hormonal or some (moveable) combination?

[the-local-echo.livejournal.com]

The other curiosity is the statement by the IOC official who said that this came up because of the rapid improvement in her times. Um I'm confused is she supposed to be becoming a 'man'? Surely if she were a 'man' then her performances would have been consistent?

I wondered about that, and came up with two possible explanations:

(a) It could be a puberty thing - may be that the gap between male and female performance is less noticeable at earlier ages, but suddenly widens in the late teens as the boys get testosterone on board. She's only 18.

(b) they could also mean that they only consider doing gender checks once a certain high standard is reached, and her rapid improvement didn't give them the chance to do it in a leisurely and discreet manner.

Lastly the thorny issue of definitions - what are the definitions here? Is it chromosomal, gonadal, psychological or hormonal or some (moveable) combination?

If they're looking at it on the basis of performance enhancements, I suppose hormonal would make the most sense. Only it would have to be refined to be "functional testosterone level" rather than raw blood test results, because androgen-insensitive women have lots of testosterone and can't metabolise it. I.e. a chromosome test would perhaps help work out whether the testosterone is doing anything or not, I don't know. But then there will be a hideous number of edge cases and social minefields :-( A mess indeed.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

This is a wonderful post. It's also clear how much standards of gender here are bound up with whiteness as Monica on transgriot pointed out. Yes, this crap happens to white women athletes, but not as often as with black women. I'm not sure where other WOC fall in this scrutiny, but the concepts of femininity here are also bound up with race.

[auntysarah.livejournal.com]

the concepts of femininity here are also bound up with race.

Absolutely - it's just fucked up on an epic scale.