I’m not a big fol­lower of ath­let­ics, but two news items have some­how made their way to my men­tal inbox from the IAAF World Ath­let­ics Cham­pi­onships in Berlin: how ridicu­lously fast Usain Bolt is, and the con­tro­versy sur­round­ing Caster Semenya.

On the lat­ter, Caster is cur­rently under­go­ing gen­der ver­i­fi­ca­tion tests and in the process has gar­nered a lot of press attention—attention that appears to come from peo­ple who are vastly une­d­u­cated on the issues being debated. The Nation looks at these issues and describes how sex­u­al­ity is more ambigu­ous than you might think.

Let’s leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of ath­letic suc­cess. A country’s wealth, coach­ing facil­i­ties, nutri­tion and oppor­tu­nity deter­mine the cre­ation of a world-class ath­lete far more than a Y chro­mo­some or a penis ever could.

[…] Gender–that is, how we com­port and con­ceive of ourselves–is a remark­ably fluid social con­struc­tion. Even our phys­i­cal sex is far more ambigu­ous and fluid than is often imag­ined or taught. Med­ical sci­ence has long acknowl­edged the exis­tence of mil­lions of peo­ple whose bod­ies com­bine anatom­i­cal fea­tures that are con­ven­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with either men or women and/or have chro­mo­so­mal vari­a­tions from the XX or XY of women or men. Many of these “inter­sex” indi­vid­u­als, esti­mated at one birth in every 1,666 in the United States alone, are legally oper­ated on by sur­geons who force tra­di­tional norms of gen­i­talia on new­born infants.

There are a num­ber of good arti­cles writ­ten on this, one of which is this excerpt from Robert Peel’s Eve’s Rib (that dis­cusses the case of María José Martínez Patiño), and the Wikipedia arti­cles I’ve linked to above.