How is This Legal
After reading the piece “Either/Or” by Ariel Levy, the ideas of sex within sports was heavily brought to my attention in a way that has never been before. In the beginning, I thought it was going to be more about “women vs men” within sports but as I kept reading it was more about the struggles that certain athletes have to face when their gender is being questioned by others.
Towards the first few pages of the article, something that really caught my attention was the significant use of the word “it” when referring to Caster Semenya. To a lot of people, Caster’s sex was often questioned because of her masculine features and her athletic performance- because of this, some thought it was okay to refer to her as an “it”. This was confusing to Semenya and her family because they all knew that she was born a female and she has never questioned her gender until all of the rumors arose that she was a male. Her father stated that he knew she was a female because he remembers changing her diapers.
As her story goes on and more people start to question her true sex, the I.A.A.F gave her a gender verification test without her consent, and annouced to the world that “she is a man”. Caster Semenya was born as a hermaphrodite. She was born with female external genitalia, but does not have the female reproductive organs, but has internal testes and has higher levels of testosterone than other women do.
Because of her body having more testosterone than other women, people thought she should not be allowed to compete with other women because they thought the abundance of that hormone as an advantage. Some even thought that she should compete with men because of her body’s chemistry but that is not correct because she identifies as a female. As a result of people’s confusion, they want her to take a certain medication before she competes that suppresses her testosterone to “even the playing field”.
What really is talked about a lot in this piece is how confusing and traumatizing these “gender verification tests” can be to the athletes. Since this was taken and exploited without Semenya’s consent, she experienced so many hateful words, actions, and even had her sport taken from her because of people’s lack of knowledge. How is it fair that she got picked out of the crowd and got a human right/ privacy taken from her?
My biggest question after reading this piece was how is it legal to be explored and examined in a way that should not matter? If Caster Semenya says she is a female, then she is a female. Why does her internal organs have more of a say than her words do? This piece was written in 2009 and Caster Semenya’s story is only one of many. These gender verification tests are still being used today.
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