Caster Semenya’s been kicked around enough!
I’m not no red football
to be kicked around the garden
No noRed Football, Sinéad O’Connor
As I watch the tragic farce of the Caster Semenya’s sex verification debacle unfold, I feel sorrow for her. What must it feel like for her to learn, in such a publicly humiliating spectacle, that she has testes hidden inside her?
One small piece of good news in all of this is that apparently someone finally saw fit to give her access to professional trauma counseling. I just sincerely hope that those counselors are well and truly independent of those bastard organisations that put Caster in this spot in the first place.
As the sex row washed over our newspapers, like a weeks-long slow-motion crash test, I’ve learnt a lot more about the many ways in which human sex and gender is só much more intricate than our simplistic notions would suggest. (Not from the newspapers though – their reporting is generally atrocious).
And I feel a growing sense of outrage at the paternalistic, daddy-knows-best, keep-em-in-the-dark way these people have been treated.
It’s a recurring theme: well into early adulthood, pediatricians, gynaecologists, parents, deliberately lie to someone about exactly why doctors are so concerned about their nether regions. People giving consent to surgery to have their “twisted ovaries” removed – only to find years later in life that they never had ovaries in the first place, and that “twisted” was an euphemism for “your ovaries were testes, girl”.
I know a lot of this is motivated by a desire to protect these children with atypical sex development. But what I read from the adults who emerge on the other side, it just doesn’t work. They know there’s something different, they know it’s not normal to have genital surgery every few years, to have countless hormone therapies – and the fact that no one will tell them what and why this is happening to them just makes them feel isolated and lied to. That’s a recurring theme: for many of these people, having been lied to and operated on without their knowledge and consent is the bigger pain – not so much the fact that the have unusual sex organs.
And amongst the shameful treatment of Caster, I see echoes of that same paternalism. The fact that Athletics South Africa saw fit to do a secret sex verification means that someone there very well suspected that she had some or other intersex condition. The fact that they did it under false pretenses, and didn’t involve her in weighing the risks of competing internationally versus having her sex questioned on the world stage, just feels like gambling with an innocent teenager’s psyche.
As an aside: how the heck does one do the intensive kind of sex verification they did surreptitiously, any way? “Ok, girl. The first part of your drug testing was when we took blood. That was to test for steroids. The second part was when the psychologists kept asking you questions about whether you feel more like a man or a woman. That was, ahem, er – to test for cocaine. Now, for the next part, we now need you to get in the stirrups so we can photograph your privates, so, er, we, um… it’s all Science my dear, just trust us!”
Lastly, I am outraged at the cowardly way some of the officials involved try to hide their mistakes. “The South African constitution forbids us to do sex testing, and that’s why we had to send her off to Berlin without warning”. Yeah right. The constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. How do you leap from there, to the notion that the constitution forbids the consensual diagnosis of sex-related conditions, or forbids psychological counseling to help a teenager learn and understand why that diagnosis might need to be sought in the first place?