Like most, I have been following the story of the South African runner who is on the female track team, but some say is actually a man.
They base their opinion on her size, muscularity and low voice.
Caster Semenya is in fact going through gender testing. The results will come in several weeks.
And we will learn what, exactly?
We will probably learn that Caster suffers from some hormonal or chromosomal variance, meaning most parts of her body react in female ways, while other parts react in male ways.
That would make her something of an intersexual, meaning between sexes...a little of this... a little of that...
It happens more often than people realize and this is what Olympic gender testing has basically discovered over the years. Gender testing has been around for a long time, although the Olympic governing body did away with it officially in 1999.
At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, 8 women were challenged for their lack of femaleness, prior to their various competitions. Six of them had hormonal deviations that they'd been born with and two of them had chromosomal deviations that they'd also had since birth.
The problem, if it is such, usually happens in the womb. All of the women were cleared and competed as females.
Gender testing was instituted to make sure the playing field was level for women, in other words to insure that men didn't try to compete with them in drag, so to speak.
However, all it has done is to reveal that there are many variations on the boys or girls theme in real life....
For instance, instead of men always being XY chromosome entities...sometimes they are XXY or XX with a lot of testosterone. Women can be XXY, too, or XY, or XX with lots of male hormone..
It happens.
As Caster Semenya's father said...”she's always been my little girl..”
It could be some form of chimerism.
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