On Gender, Sex, Athleticism, and My Usual Navel-Gazing

So I haven't had much to say about Caster Semenya, mostly because organized athletics bores me silly and I figured it would end up just being a garden-variety steroids case, since her body doesn't look that different from the Chinese women swimmers who got busted for doping a while back.

Nope. Not only has it turned out otherwise, but the various sports organizations involved have behaved incredibly badly from beginning to end, including repeatedly confusing gender with biological sex and then apparently leaking the results to the press before informing the athlete herself.

So an intersex person weighed in on the controversy over at ThisIsDiversity.com. I particularly liked this bit:

What Caster's situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth--sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads--they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.

Hey, look, the food metaphor again.

( I gripe and make this All About Me again Behind The Cut )

On Gender, Sex, Athleticism, and My Usual Navel-Gazing

So I haven't had much to say about Caster Semenya, mostly because organized athletics bores me silly and I figured it would end up just being a garden-variety steroids case, since her body doesn't look that different from the Chinese women swimmers who got busted for doping a while back.

Nope. Not only has it turned out otherwise, but the various sports organizations involved have behaved incredibly badly from beginning to end, including repeatedly confusing gender with biological sex and then apparently leaking the results to the press before informing the athlete herself.

So an intersex person weighed in on the controversy over at ThisIsDiversity.com. I particularly liked this bit:

What Caster's situation illustrates, from an intersex perspective, is that we exist. Dyadic sex is a myth--sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads--they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour. Sure, ripe cherries are sweet and ripe limes are sour, but most fruit gets its savor from both tastes, and some fruits balance at the tangy sweet-and-sour midpoint. You can measure all the fructose and ascorbic acid you want, scientifically. You can create a rule that divides all fruit into sweet and sour categories using precise measurements of sugars and acids. But that will not eliminate the fact that the experience of tasting fruit is complex, and that this complexity is what makes eating fruit delicious.

Hey, look, the food metaphor again.

( I gripe and make this All About Me again Behind The Cut )