The Cellar - Caster Semenya

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Caster Semenya - (S)he is great!

Gold medal for 800 meter sprint at world championships - at jeapordy? I have no idea if Caster is a he or she, but on the streets of my town, first and second glance would result in "it's a dude!"

Love this quote:
Casper Semenya's coach, Michael Seme: ""We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It's a natural reaction and it's only human to be curious.""

Granted, it is hard to tell at a glance, but it's not as though that's an unusual thing. There are at least half a dozen kids at my kids' school whose gender cannot be determined at a glance.

Presumably her gender would have been "officially" determined a while back. This should be a non-issue with today's technology. Poor girl, she's only 18 -to be subjected to that sort of crap is not what the developing adult psyche needs.

Not that it's very indicative, but sounds like a guy in the video at the following link:

http://www.mahalo.com/caster-semenya

She looks just as female as Marion Jones did back when she was a kick ass runner, I don't see what the prob... nevermind.

yaknow, if it was a he trying to pass as a she, donncha think he'd do a better job? Like use a highr voice or not give interviews?

she looks very similar to a girl that used to be on hebe's soccer team

I think it's more like she started as a she, but has shown up to the most recent races with a lower voice, bigger muscles, and a much faster time--I read an article that made it more clear that the suspicion seems to be that she's taking male hormones, and may have begun sex reassignment surgery.

They should just legalize all performance enhancing drugs. The fans want to see great athletics, the athletes don't seem to mind fucking up their bodies, and taking the medals etc. away a decade or so later doesn't really mean shit.

Testosterone shots will do that to a female.

She's a woman now, and if she won the race fair and square, then people should just shut up about it.

from Time

Quote:

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in the very same stadium where Semenya won her world title, rumors swirled that 100-meter runners Stella Walsh (nicknamed "Stella the Fella") and her rival Helen Stephens were men. After Stephens took the gold metal, the Olympics committee performed a manual check on her external genitals — and concluded that she was, in fact, a woman. And prior to the 1966 European athletics championships, female competitors were made to walk in so-called nude parades so that a committee could confirm their gender.

But Dr. Rob Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University and the author of "Intersex and the Olympic Games," a recent article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, says that determining someone's sex is not so simple, and that external genitalia can be misleading. A post-mortem on Stephens' body in 1980 revealed that she had "ambiguous genitalia." The post-mortem didn't go into specifics, but those genitalia could have been a small penis that was mistaken for an enlarged clitoris, or a small scrotum that resembled labia.

Ritchie notes that female athletes who in the past have been suspected of being men may have suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), a condition in which a person who is genetically male — that is, their 23rd chromosome pair is XY — is resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones that include testosterone. As a result, the testes present in that person's abdomen never descend, and neither they nor their parents ever realize they are actually boys. Those with complete AIS will have a totally female body on the outside, but will lack ovaries and a uterus. Others may demonstrate partial AIS. "They are partly sensitive to the male hormone so they might develop some male characteristics," he says. "They may well be a bit more muscular and have facial hair."

I recently applied for a job at a uni here. On the web application form, under "sex" it gave four options: male, female, transgender, and other (sadly, "yes please" was not offered).
Not everybody falls neatly into one of the two main categories. Which does make it difficult in cases like this.