September 14, 2009

The Semenya Tragedy

Posted in Feminism and Gender Equality, Media, Society at 9:00 am by Paul Sagar

I know I have a stack of people’s comments to reply to in previous posts. I will get around to doing this (comment-replies are the best thing about small-time blogging because they force me to sharpen up and the dialogue is always creative). But i’ve had a busy few days, and so have only found time to bash out a couple of posts. Comments will thus be replied to over the next few lunch-breaks…

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The Observer reported yesterday that Caster Semenya, the South African athlete forced to undergo a gender test after her 800 meter win at the World Athletics Champion, is receiving counselling to deal with stress. Given the remorseless personal scrutiny Semenya has been subjected to, this is hardly surprising. Yet her personal agony is saddening for another reason: it’s the unsurprising outcome of a saga which is fundamentally tragic due to a web of underlying complexity and conflict.

The Australian Daily Telegraph last week reported that it had obtained leaked evidence showing Semenya to be biologically both male and female – meaning she would be stripped of her World Championship gold and prevented from competing in athletics as a woman ever again. We don’t yet know if the Daily Telegraph claims are true. But let’s leave that aside for now and cast memory back to when this story broke.

Initially, many responded to the possibility that Semenya had male biological characteristics in a mixture of two ways: demanding that she could not be allowed to compete against “real” women, and a thinly-veiled disgust at the idea of this thing, this freak that was not truly female and had somehow exploited its freakishness to win gold. (This nasty attitude towards those who are intersex bubbles away viciously beneath the surface of society: I remember being myself a vicious 15 year old class clown who got a lot of cheap laughs and attention from peers by referring to a particular maths teacher as a hermaphrodite. Those cheap laughs were only available because the concept of being intersex was so taboo and unspeakable in its allusion to the disgusting that the pay-back from playing on it was huge).

Feminist and gender activists hit back. They had very good points to make. That, for a start, being intersex is far more common than most people realise: 1.7% of people have been estimated to be born as intersex by one reckoning (that’s 17 children in every thousand born, and means 102,000,000 people born intersex globally, if my bad mathematical skills hold up). Yet in the vast majority of cases doctors apparently make a decision at birth to “make” the child one or the other. This highlights the fact that we live in a society which simply doesn’t tolerate the idea of third options: there is a gender binary – male or female – and those who do not fit initially are usually forced into one or the other, and the cracks papered over in later life not with social awareness and open acceptance of difference by others, but with hormone treatment and psychological “counselling”.

The Semanya case thus raised important and difficult issues about what gender is. Most of us grow up thinking that there are just men or women. It turns out nature is not so straightforward, and this applies to more than a one-in-six-billion “freak”. In turn, many of our attitudes towards gender turn out to be highly socialised, but passed-off in the guise of being “natural”. The Semenya case offered a chance to highlight this truth, and also to raise questions about the way we as a society view and treat those who don’t conveniently fall into the gender binary standardly operated upon.

Unfortunately, highlighting the disjunct between nature’s inconvenient complexity and our simple binary attitudes didn’t do much for Semenya – she was still being publicly scrutinised and personally put through hell (the individual angst incurred was itself a product of society which cannot tolerate difference and where the possibility of Semenya being intersex was a stimulus for her to feel ashamed and embarrassed).

Perhaps in line with these thoughts, some feminist and gender specialists tried to extend critiques of gendered social binary structures to the world of sport which was treating Semenya so cruelly. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned critiques tended to go awry. Take for example (the normally spot-on) Laurie Penny’s piece at Liberal Conspiracy, which made good points but quickly ran into trouble (see the comments threat) when the critique of socially-constructed gender binaries was extended directly to the world of sport.

The reason for this trouble was, essentially, as follows. At one level, the world of sport does operate on a socially-constructed gender binary: men compete against men, women against women, and there is no place for those who don’t fall neatly into either camp. No doubt, the origin of this binary in sport lies to a great extent in the society from which sport is formed: sports adopted “men vs. men” and “women vs. women” at least in part because those were the obvious classifications to use in a society where that pair are presented as the be-all and end-all of gender questions.

Yet there is more to it than that. For a start, Laurie was wrong to say that because Semenya had lived her whole life as a woman, “her genetics have nothing to do with it”. In the world of sport at least, they do have something to do with it, because the genetic gender binary of male and female when applied to sport is incredible useful. It allows for separate competitions where the vast majority of competitors can pit themselves against those who are biologically relatively similar, with the best coming out top and winning. It is incredibly beneficial for female athletes not to compete against men – it means they have a chance of winning, which would in most cases be removed if they had to compete alongside the biologically bigger, faster and stronger males.

Although the sporting gender binary is at some level (and probably quite a substantial one, in terms of historical emergence at least) based on socialised concepts of gender, those socialised concepts are incredibly useful for sport because they track underlying biological differences too (even if those biological differences are not as cast in stone as is usually supposed). Sport needs the binary, not least for the good of many women, who would effectively have no incentive to compete without the binary.

The problem is that this useful binary – at some level based on gendered social conceptions, but at some level drawing reference to different gender predominances and their impacts upon biological capacity and ability – is exclusive of those people who are intersex. The result is, in effect, a trade off: the strict gender binary in sport is helpful to “ordinary” women, yet at the same time excludes athletes who don’t fall neatly into the binary division. And this isn’t – it’s worth noting – simply because of unjustifiable social constructs about what’s viewed as acceptable. It’s also about the logistics of sport. 102,000,000 million intersex births worldwide is a lot more than most people probably expect. But not enough of those people are going to grow up and become professional, or even amateur, athletes for the myriad of sports worldwide to find it viable to establish “intersex” competitions alongside the binary (not least because, within “intersex”, there’s a whole host more distinctions to be made).

The whole issue is, ultimately, rather tragic. The Semenya debacle highlighted the gender is not a straightforward issue and that our preconceptions of “obvious” binaries are mistaken. Yet this awareness has not been taken forward to challenge gender roles or gender norms in society, but has instead been focused upon the future of one athlete. In the process, it has exposed the failings of sporting classifications – but it also appears that those failings may be in some way necessary or practically unavoidable.

It remains to be officially confirmed whether Semenya is “really” a woman or if she is intersex. If it turns out she’s the latter, the tragedy will be acute: she will be stripped of her medal, declared a freak for the world to behold, and forced to accept that the career as a professional sportswoman she has trained for all her life is no longer a possibility. This will be sad indeed.

Yet even if Semenya turns out to be a “true” woman and not intersex, the tragedy will only be averted in the immediate sense of her own suffering and future career. What of all those other hundreds of millions of people worldwide, forced into a binary they don’t fit, shunned and regarded as freaks, debarred not just from sport but from acceptance by societies which don’t even wish to tolerate their existence beyond deciding whether or not they can keep a medal?

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