In the news...South African athlete is asked to undergo a gender test after a striking performance at the Athletic World Championships in Berlin.
Serious things have happened in the world this week. Afghanistan, despite popular belief, survived its second presidential election. The Pakistani Taliban appointed the next Mehsud, despite, once again, popular hopes that the Talibs would kill each other in the fight for succession. Scotland refreshed its status as a cradle of Enlightenment and released one of the world’s most hated men on compassionate grounds, again, against popular outcry. It is in the world of sport, however, that a subject everyone was embarrassingly whispering about has made the blushing headlines.
Caster Semenya, the 18 year-old South African athlete who won the women’s 800 metre race with unprecedented advantage on Wednesday, would probably never make it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Hawkish and abrupt, she resembles a teenage boy not only physically. When confronted by allegations of her actually being a him, Semenya shrugged quickly, grumbled that she ‘doesn’t give a damn’ and walked out of shot in signature Premier League footballer style. After all, football is her biggest passion after athletics, her family says.
Questions about Semenya’s gender started sipping through the internet following her victory in the African Junior Championships at the end of July. For all its freedom of expression, the world wide web remains unbeaten in the disciplines of obscenity, narrow-mindedness and plain idiocy. But exactly what margin of bad taste has given the Brisbane Times the idea to break the story under the headline ‘Gender Bender on the IAAF Agenda’ remains a matter personal slapstick taste. How low down you are willing to go for a catchy header? Well, Downunder they should know.
The world media is full of outrage about such unhealthy attention to the young athlete’s rather private business. Publications world-wide are repeating fellow athletes’ criticism of the media’s shamelessness. Family members are continuously quoted saying: ‘it’s a girl!’ and waving birth certificates in protest. In its attempt to denounce the sensationalist savagery, the media is only making things worse. Mulling the issue over and again, bringing up past examples of gender confusion and detailed explanations of genital mutations is akin to hitting the already-bruised finger with the hammer. And incessant talk of the painful, embarrassing and plain insulting nature of the controversy is doing nothing to make the situation less painful, embarrassing or insulting for Caster Semenya. She may be used to teasing from her school years. But you can bet that childhood traumas in the sand-pit were nothing compared to this. The press could do everyone a huge favour and stop discussing the size of Semenya’s breasts. But that wouldn’t be newsworthy, now, would it.
While the media is stumbling all over the issue, smiling sheepishly, trying to convince us how sorry they are for having to bring this up, the South African political activists could not miss a chance to wave the red flag. The ANC’s youth wing, the Young Communist League spokesman claimed that ‘This smacks of racism of the highest order. It represents the mentality of conforming a feminine outlook with the white race’. Now, I am not sure what to say. All my life I was convinced that the ‘feminine outlook’ - a strange thesaurus hick-up - of the white race was on the scrawny side. While the media continuously parade black women celebrating their curves, it is their white sisters that have embraced the garden salad as dinner in their fight against cellulite. And what about those great African figurines in history museums? The Mother Africas. If the YCL guy was hinting at the fact that the West has an image of black women as being fat, he’s only got the archeologists to blame. Surely, no one is free of preconceptions, but this is really taking the racism issue far beyond plain eyesight. And if he knew better, he’d realise that Semenya’s chiselled abs are much closer to what women want nowadays - as opposed to sagging F-cups.
It is indeed a great shame that this is the way Semenya gets to celebrate her first international victory. I am not the first, and not even the hundredth person to write that this week. It is a shame that the race issue is still so fresh in our widely-publicised post-racial world. It is also a shame that the media just doesn’t seem to be able to stop itself from perpetrating the scandal by discussing the terrible perpetration of the scandal. So I am just going to shut up.
It seems that even the South Africans doubted her gender enough to perform tests.
ReplyDeleteGender and sex are complex issues. There are way more chromosomal permutations that just XX and XY. If Caster is in any meaningful way a man, then it is unfair on the other athletes. But the way the IAFF has sold her down the river is disgusting.
Bare in mind that she may not be a "woman" in a chromosomal sense, but have absolutely no knowledge of the fact, thinking that her vagina makes her female. A discovery that one was in fact wrong about one's own sex must be earth shattering for a young person.