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

[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.