Sex-Determination Testing in Track and Field

“These kind of people should not run with us,” Elisa Cusma of Italy, who finished sixth, said in a postrace interview with Italian journalists. “For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.”
Mariya Savinova, a Russian who finished fifth, told Russian journalists that she did not believe Semenya would be able to pass a test. “Just look at her,” Savinova said.

Of course sex can not be determined by looks alone, and gender is not something that we get to decide for others, as Cusma suggests. “These kinds of people” is language taken straight from the bigot’s handbook. I think both of these athletes should be asked to do an empathy-determination test, not to mention be schooled in sex, gender, and biology.
Their first reading could be a new book by Gerald N. Callahan, Ph.D.: Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and the Myth of the Two Sexes. He reports that every year more than 65,000 children are born who aren’t obviously either boys or girls. He writes, “In truth, humans come in an amazing number of forms, because human development, including human sexual development, is not an either/or proposition. Instead, between ‘either’ and ‘or’ there is an entire spectrum of possibilities.'” The book is really beautifully written, highly accessible, and visionary in its own right. For more on this topic, I also suggest Anne Fausto-Sterling.
The ambiguity of sex may not even be at play with Caster Semenya, but the public’s reaction to her performance and body are flash points for our continued discomfort with admitting that the world does not come in such simple dichotomies as we safely like to think it does. My heart goes out to Semenya, who meanwhile has to deal with this shit instead of celebrating her victory and reveling in the moment.
Alice Dreger, a professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, appropriately, has the last word in the NYT article, and I’ll give it to her here as well: “At the end of the day, they are going to have to make a social decision on what counts as male and female, and they will wrap it up as if it is simply a scientific decision. And the science actually tells us sex is messy. Or as I like to say, ‘Humans like categories neat, but nature is a slob.’ ”

Thanks to so many readers for the heads up.