Results of the gender investigation aside, Caster Semenya’s humanity has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.
Semenya's Race and Sex Struggle
by Kai Wright
What stood out most as Caster Semenya faced reporters at last week’s track and field world championships was that she’s just a kid. Baby-faced and leery, she parceled out answers to ostensibly innocuous questions. “What was your running background before this year?” But a more insidious query lurked for the teen: What kind of freak are you, anyway? That’s the real question the world wants South Africa’s new star athlete to answer.
The International Association of Athletics Federations has demanded Semenya, who won the 800-meter gold last week, submit to a sex test; bookies are taking bets on the results. But whatever the IAAF’s shameless doctors conclude, the verdict about Semenya is already in—she’s a monster. What remains is to determine what type of monster we’re gawking at. A hermaphrodite? An intersexual? A genetic boy whose parents raised him as a girl? Or just a mannish woman, after all?
If “science” concludes the latter, Semenya can keep her medal. Her humanity, however, has already been sacrificed to Western culture’s desperate, frightened effort to maintain the fiction of binary, fixed gender.
Read the Full Essay @ The Root
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