Last week at the world track and field championships, an 18-year-old South African woman named Caster Semenya won the 800m title. Unless you follow women’s track closely, you’ve probably never heard of her. But now she’s in the center of a bizarre controversy – not over steroids, training methods, or false starts, but over her gender.
Although Semenya competes as a woman, some details suggest otherwise. Her muscular, slim build, somewhat masculine face, and large margin of victory in the 800m have led many to believe Semenya is not a normal woman. After routine hormone tests showed her testosterone levels to be three times higher than normal for a female athlete, the International Association of Athletics Federations began an investigation into her actual gender. The final results won’t be available for weeks.
Strange as this story is, the leading theory diagnoses Semenya with a recognized medical condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS. People with AIS are genetically male but can appear to be female because their bodies do not respond normally to testosterone. All embyroes start developing as females. During the first trimester, a normal boy starts producing testosterone, which causes his boy parts to develop. A baby with AIS is coded to be a boy and starts producing testosterone normally, but his cells don’t detect it completely, if at all. The results can vary. Some people with AIS look like a combination of male and female. Many people with AIS look female externally but have internal testicles and none of the normal female sex organs. In these cases the boy is generally raised as a girl, develops breasts on time, and never knows of any problem until he reaches 15 or 16 and hasn’t started to menstruate. Once diagnosed, the boy must work through a difficult set of medical, emotional, physical, and spiritual questions. Although the medical buff in me finds this condition interesting, I ache for those who must deal with it. It’s hard enough to figure out your identity when you’re certain of your gender.
Looking back, I suspect that a good friend of mine had AIS. She looked and acted like a normal girl but never started her period. Around age 16 or 17 she finally went to the doctor, who told her she “didn’t develop right” and would never be able to have children. In a college neuroscience class I first heard about AIS and made the connection. At first I thought her doctor had withheld the whole truth from her. Imagine what it would feel like to spend 16 years thinking you were a girl and suddenly being told you were actually a boy, even though you still looked like a girl. How confusing and disturbing such news would be. But now I wonder whether her doctor didn’t tell her the truth, and my friend simply withheld the most shocking part from me. I understand if that’s how she chose to handle it. I still think of her as a woman, regardless of what the genetic tests might say.
Back to Caster Semenya…I feel terribly for her. If she has AIS, she could be banned from competing in track as a woman since she could have an unfair advantage over the normal women. Since she’s not fully male, either, she isn’t quite fast enough to compete with the men. Her countless hours of hard work would become almost worthless, her career over, due to a medical anomaly over which he had zero control. Even if she doesn’t have AIS, she’s been humilated by the gender testing and speculation, which will probably haunt her throughout her career.
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