By Pamela Scully

Early this month, nearly a year after the first public questions were raised about her gender, the world governing body for track and field declared that South African track phenom, Caster Semenya, is female and can now compete in local and international competitions.  Semenya wasted no time getting back into action; after missing 11 months of meets, the 800-meter runner won her comeback race at the Lappeenranta Games in Finland yesterday. The ruling ends an extraordinary official public questioning of the talented athlete’s gender.

But there is a larger issue at work here.

The media attention to the trials of Semenya, to Michelle Obama’s arms, to Venus and Serena Williams, all speak to societal-wide tensions around varied and conflicting expectations of femininity, and how they are immersed also in racial representations. While white women runners have also faced challenges to their gender, black women have to navigate a more complicated terrain of racial and gendered domination which rendered and continues to render black female bodies particularly subject to the public gaze. Historically, scientists have sought to understand whole societies through examining an individual black female body: science thus is not necessarily a friend to black women, as Dorothy Roberts’s work on the US has shown so eloquently.

In 2009, Semenya arrived at the World Athletics Championship as the African junior champion. Just before her 800-meter race, news leaked that in the weeks leading up to the championship, Semenya’s testosterone levels had been analyzed. The sport’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF ) had ordered a gender test. On receiving the result, the IAAF had asked the South Africans to withdraw Semenya from competition, which they had refused to do saying that she was a woman (her birth certificate registers her as female), and thus could run. Semenya won her 800-meter race in Berlin by a huge 2.45 seconds ahead of the second place finisher, which continued to fuel rumors about her gender.

The IAAF banned Semenya from competing in any other events until they had determined her gender. Caster Semenya in the meantime sat in limbo. She was not allowed to participate in a meet in South Africa in March, because gender testing had not been completed.

South African Reactions

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people including President Jacob Zuma, welcomed Semenya at Oliver Tambo airport in Johannesburg on her return from Berlin in late August 2009. South Africans are deeply passionate about their sport and are also very patriotic. The disrespect shown by an international body to Semenya, a black woman and a South African, chaffed at a society which prides itself on enshrining human rights after decades of apartheid rule.

South Africans expressed anger at the IAAF for humiliating this young woman and accused the IAAF for being racist in disregarding her human rights. Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, said that “as an African athlete she has been the victim of prejudice.” The South African government threatened to sue the IAAF with one minister calling it a “third world war” if the IAAF attempted to strip Semenya of her gold medal. The government also lodged a complaint with the United Nations about Semenya’s treatment. They highlighted how gender stereotypes “demonstrate the extent of patriarchy within the world’s sporting community.” The local South African body was also accused of foul play. Athletics South Africa apparently made Semenya take the gender test without her knowledge and consent before the Berlin games, telling her that it was a random anti-doping test. One of Semenya’s coaches resigned to protest the South African athletics establishment’s disregard of Semenya’s rights.

South African responses have been almost uniformly supportive of Caster Semenya, with little attention being given in the public to the question of her gender. In some respects, popular culture treated the handwringing over Semenya’s gender identity as a non-issue. In general, South Africans seem happy to accept Caster Semenya’s embrace of femaleness without much worrying about the possibilities of intersex, or the difficulties of determining gender identity. Members of her small community in Limpopo province, in northern South Africa said they are proud of her. Her family affirmed that she was “a girl.” A local magazine dressed Semenya up in elaborate sexy outfits implying that if there was anything wrong it was just that Semenya didn’t dress “properly” for a woman.

Determining Gender?

As of September 2009, most of the major sporting organizations themselves did not have protocols as to how judge gender identity. At the time of the Berlin championship, the IAAF had no procedures or standards to discuss gender identity. In January it was reported that the International Olympics Committee was recommending that medical centers be set up where athletes can be sent for tests. In fact, determining gender is a highly complex issue, and rooted very much in cultural understandings of sex and gender. The Olympic committee used to have gender testing, but gave this up owing precisely to the difficulty of determining gender.

One expert says there are 4 ways to determine gender, but that they do not necessarily accord with one another. The presence of particular sex organs is one way of making gender count, but it can be undermined by testosterone counts, by the self-identity of the individual, by chromosomes. Whether any of these criteria, or which combination of these, amount to the silver bullet for gender identity is far from clear. The history of gender testing and identification is a sorry one, in which both the medical establishment and international sporting bodies do not fare well. As work by Fausto-Sterling has shown, until very recently doctors tended to force people into either a male or female category, despite evidence that some people do not neatly align with either. In addition, feminist theorists question whether there is any necessary relationship between a supposedly neutral field of the body and gender. As Judith Butler has observed in a blog about Semenya “ sex-determination is decided by consensus…”

The Media

Able to rely only on hearsay and speculation about what the gender test of 2009 determined, the international media nonetheless have been remarkably willing to discuss Caster Semenya’s body in detail. They have reported on alleged testosterone levels, and on what may or may not be the case with her reproductive organs. It is in this regard that the Semenya case brings up echoes of the horrible experience of Sara Baartman at the hands of the European press from 1810 to 1815. Journalists hounded Baartman determined to write about what they saw as a strange female body, linked to the strange because it was African. Science also played a dominant role in the life of Sara Baartman and the icon of the Hottentot Venus. Scientists who sought to establish “truths” about links between sexuality and race studied Baartman’s body, both in life, and in death.

Given the complicated linkages between scientific observation and racial and gender stereotyping, observers of Semenya’s experience at the hands of the IAAF question the supposed neutrality of scientists. They query the claim that rigorous investigation will render a truth. Some authors have explored the different layers of structural violence inherent in forcing someone to be either male or female when human sexual variation is so much more complex, and others have also examined the intertwining of science with racial and gendered representations. In discussing the complicated linkages between gender and racial stereotypes, a variety of authors including Scully and Crais on this site, Mark Gevisser in The New York Times and Carina Ray in New African, have explored the ways in which Semenya’s public humiliation can be connected to that experienced by Sara Baartman. South African author Pumla Gqola argues that the media frenzy over Caster Semenya turned her into “the twenty-first century Baartman.”

The lingering gaze and public humiliation of this 18 year old woman smack of both prurience and deep insensitivity to racial and gendered humiliations. The saga seems to have drawn to an end, but Semenya continues to pay the costs of the ineptitude of the IAAF and Athletics South Africa. On July 11 it was reported that Semenya had not qualified to represent South Africa in the African Championships, owing to lack of fitness. Athletics South Africa has pledged to do all it could to help her get into competitive form. We look forward to a happy ending.

Pamela Scully is Professor of Women’s Studies and African Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She is the co-author, with Clifton Crais, of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton University Press, 2009).