04/18/24
November 25, 2009
Either/Or: Sports, Sex and the case of Caster Semenya: a long, thoughtful piece on gender from the New Yorker.
This whole thing is absurd...she/he/it should NOT be allowed to race against other competitors that are CLEARLY women.
posted by StarFucker at 03:39 AM on November 29, 2009
Starfucker: what's absurd is commenting on an issue that you haven't bothered to educate yourself about by means of a handy link to an article that you clearly haven't read.
posted by lil_brown_bat at 08:10 PM on November 29, 2009
Starfucker: whatever the state of her hormones, she is not an "it". Do you have the faintest idea of how unbelievably offensive that is?
I'm glad you posted it though so I can ignore eveything you ever say on any subject, ever. Asshole.
posted by rumple at 08:30 PM on November 29, 2009
From the article:
...setting aside the issue of gender, there is still no such thing as a level playing field in sports. Different bodies have physical attributes, even abnormalities, that may provide a distinct advantage in one sport or another. The N.B.A., for instance, has had several players with acromegalythe overproduction of growth hormone. Michael Phelps, who has won fourteen Olympic gold medals, has unusually long arms and is said to have double-jointed elbows, knees, and ankles. Is Caster Semenya's alleged extra testosterone really so different?
There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don't know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we've organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn't done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.
...emphasis mine.
There is no such thing as a level playing field in sports, and when we stubbornly or blindly insist that there is, or that there should be, we tend to transgress terribly against real live human beings in the pursuit of some abstract and poorly-understood "justice". No matter how it's explained, I don't see how you can say that Caster Semenya isn't getting a raw deal out of all this. Thanks for posting the link, rumple.