Caster Semenya's trauma

Caster Semenya, the runner whose sex has been questioned as a result of her rapidly improved times, is reported to be in trauma counseling following findings that she is a hermaphrodite. Her gender and sex controversy has become a public event, and although Semenya was raised as a girl and identifies as a women, her biological sex has become all the rage.

As addressed on The Lady Finger last month, athletics rely on strict female/male categories that don't leave room for ambiguity. Semenya, though, may not fit neatly into either category even after the test results are all returned, serving as a painful reminder for those with ambiguous genders that we live in a world oriented sharply along the gender binary.

Her gender identity as a woman is clear, although tests have indicated that Semenya has no ovaries and has internal testes. The presence or absence of anatomy does not provide an entire picture though, and as writer Peggy Orenstein points out, "Identity is not simply a sum of our parts." After a double masectomy, is a woman still a woman? The close associations we tend to draw between physiology and gender become especially traumatic when they threaten to deny the gender identities of those, like most of us, for whom gender is a part of one's more general identity. For Semenya, it also threatens her career. -Sara