I have been interested, while following the story of Caster Semenya’s struggle with the athletics authorities recently, to realise that the greater part of the discussion fails to appreciate the real significance of her situation. Objections have been raised on her behalf to the undermining of her human rights by the ruling that she must submit to hormone treatment if she is to continue to compete in her chosen event. In my opinion more significant issues are exposed by her case.
The prevailing assumption in this discussion, on all sides it seems, is that it is possible to divide the human race unproblematically into men and women. The athletics authorities have decided that the only way to respond to the case of Caster Semenya is to make sure that she is a “proper” woman. You have to be one or the other, man or woman, by fair means or foul. In fact the situation is far less clear than this. I am coming to believe that perhaps sexual differences are much closer to the pattern of handedness (whether one is left- or right-handed.)
This is an issue close to my heart because I am left-handed, and experienced a period in childhood when my school attempted to compel me to be right-handed. Fortunately these days this kind of prejudice has been abandoned. Reflecting on my own experience, however, I am aware that left- and right-handedness are not simple, mutually exclusive states of being. People are more or less one or the other. For most purposes (to take my own example) I use my left hand. I even strung a guitar “upside down” so I could play it left-handedly, like Paul McCartney. Even so, I use a knife and fork the “normal” way, and I use a cricket bat and a golf club as if I am right-handed. Using DIY tools I am often equally able with either hand.
By analogy, I find myself asking whether our sexual identities might also be ranged along a continuum, physiologically and hormonally. To separate the human race into rigidly defined, mutually exclusive categories could (in fact) be going against nature rather than conforming to it.
I believe that this rigidly dichotomic way of thinking is rooted in the ancient judaic way of thinking on which both Christian and Muslim traditions are grounded. The ancient Hebrews were very much alert to “anomalies” in the natural world. The anthropologist Mary Douglas (in her book Purity and Danger) has argued that the widely-known system of Jewish food prohibitions derives from this tendency to view anomalies as “abominations”. Hence (in the words of the Bible) “male and female, created He them.” The sexual dichotomy is willed by God. So deeply-rooted is this way of looking at difference that we have tremendous difficulty in seeing beyond it.
The case of Caster Semenya is a challenge to this simple model of male-female as mutually exclusive identities into which it is readily possible to sort people. Should it really be that case that, if somebody is difficult to place within the model, they have to be “engineered” back into one category or another.
I’m reminded of a wonderful story by Kurt Vonnegut, entitled “Harrison Bergeron”. This imagines a world in which equality is strictly enforced, and the state appoints a “Handicapper General” to enforce equality in every sphere of life.* In this world the beautiful are compelled to wear masks, so as not to give them an advantage over the less beautiful. Particularly agile dancers have to wear sash-weights, in order to make them less superior to others. Intelligent people have a device inserted into their ears that makes an intolerable noise at intervals, to ensure that their superior powers of thinking are regularly subverted. Are we very far from Caster Semenya’s “sentence” to corrective hormone treatment?
Of course, I have some idea of the enormously disruptive implications of this new way of looking at things, and the suggestion that the “normal” male-female dichotomy ought to be re-examined. So much of our culture depends upon it. It would not only be women’s sport that had to be reappraised. The consequences of my question, however, should not prevent us from confronting the question. Caster Semenya matters to all of us, and not only to athletes …. or at least, she ought to matter.
*I’m sure that the resonance with the “witch finder general” is deliberate. In the story the official concerned has the terrific name of Diana Glampers-Moon.