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'm a little bit annoyed at the use of "myth" to mean "falsehood" there, but the statement is true even using "myth" the way I would - we, not just in this culture but pretty much in all industrialized cultures, use "male" and "female" as one of the big organizing principles, so much so that many languages have gender as part of their grammatical structure. (One of my big issues with Wicca is that it makes the male/female distinction one of the most important, if not the most important, cosmic signifiers.) It's one of the big metaphors, to go all Lakoffian. And that automatically others anyone who blurs the distinction between them, whether by being sexually responsive to both, or presenting in a mixed-gender manner, or being transgendered, or being physically or genetically intersexed. Caster happened to be in a slightly gender-transgressive area to begin with - women aren't 'supposed to' run and be proud of their speed and strength - and so her being potentially intersexed turns out to be particularly salacious. The underlying message of the media reaction isn't literally "Oooh, little girls, beware - if you're athletic and indelicate and coarse-of-feature, you, too, might be a freak and your medals taken away," but it might as well be.
I'm also impressed by the mention of sex as a spectrum. As a person with PCOS, I occasionally think of myself as 100% female and then 30% male on top of that. I suspect there are a number of people out there with a similar mindset - they are cisgendered, identifying with their assigned gender/genetic sex, but also identify with the other gender to some degree. And the usual distinctions, even the ones now in the public eye because the intersexed and transgendered communities have worked so hard for them, just sort of fail in the face of actual lived human experience.
We need better words for this sort of thing, underpinned by better metaphors. Preferably ones that don't dichotomize quite so very much.
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'm a little bit annoyed at the use of "myth" to mean "falsehood" there, but the statement is true even using "myth" the way I would - we, not just in this culture but pretty much in all industrialized cultures, use "male" and "female" as one of the big organizing principles, so much so that many languages have gender as part of their grammatical structure. (One of my big issues with Wicca is that it makes the male/female distinction one of the most important, if not the most important, cosmic signifiers.) It's one of the big metaphors, to go all Lakoffian. And that automatically others anyone who blurs the distinction between them, whether by being sexually responsive to both, or presenting in a mixed-gender manner, or being transgendered, or being physically or genetically intersexed. Caster happened to be in a slightly gender-transgressive area to begin with - women aren't 'supposed to' run and be proud of their speed and strength - and so her being potentially intersexed turns out to be particularly salacious. The underlying message of the media reaction isn't literally "Oooh, little girls, beware - if you're athletic and indelicate and coarse-of-feature, you, too, might be a freak and your medals taken away," but it might as well be.
I'm also impressed by the mention of sex as a spectrum. As a person with PCOS, I occasionally think of myself as 100% female and then 30% male on top of that. I suspect there are a number of people out there with a similar mindset - they are cisgendered, identifying with their assigned gender/genetic sex, but also identify with the other gender to some degree. And the usual distinctions, even the ones now in the public eye because the intersexed and transgendered communities have worked so hard for them, just sort of fail in the face of actual lived human experience.
We need better words for this sort of thing, underpinned by better metaphors. Preferably ones that don't dichotomize quite so very much.