UPDATE: Semenya withdraws from race in South Africa. If you follow track and field, you might be familiar with the controversy surrounding African runner Caster Semenya. She won the Womens 800m run at the World Championships last month, and now questions are being raised about her gender. People are asking if she's really a woman, and the South African athletic federation has been asked to conduct a gender test. 18-year-old Semenya has little international experience in track and field. She won the race by more than 2 seconds (a significant amount) and has substantially improved her times in the 800 and 1500 over the past few months. Her results, combined with the fact that she has masculine features, are raising eyebrows. Conducting a gender test isn't as easy as it sounds, and the results aren't always conclusive. It requires a team of doctors (including a gynecologist, endocrinologist and others) and was actually standard for female athletes in the Olympics until 1999. But not all women have standard female chromosomes, and there are always special cases (like ambiguous genetailia, for example.) Therefore, the standard test was dropped 10 years ago. Semenya has the support of her family and country, who say she's being unfairly targeted. The South African athletics federation feels she's being singled out because she is African, and are disappointed that this controversy overshadowed her outstanding accomplishment on the biggest day of her life. The testing has begun, but takes weeks to complete. So it might be a while before we learn the results. But if the results aren't always conclusive, there's a possibility the test won't give people the answers they are looking for. And then what happens? What do you think? Should a female athlete with masculine features be forced to take a gender test? Is this a form of discrimination just because she doesn't look like a "typical" woman? |
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