SEMENYA’S GENDER: the right to be different

In conversation with NADIA SANGER

The controversy surrounding South Africa's new female 800 metre world champion, Caster Semenya, has created a hugely important space in which we can publicly talk about gender and gender presentation in our post-apartheid nation. And if there is one conclusive finding with which we can walk away from this episode, it is that gender and how we present our bodies is extremely important.

Semenya and difference

Few who have studied the photographs or footage of Semenya's famous race and its aftermath will have failed to notice her androgynous features. She has a six pack that would put any biological man to shame. Her biceps are large and powerful. She seems to have facial hair. She is strong, hugely athletic and runs like the wind.

So what is it about this image that makes us uncomfortable? Is it perhaps that she doesn't look like a ‘woman', at least in the way in which we have come to accept how women are meant to appear?

This non-conformity is acceptable to a degree among those young people who body-pierce, get tattoos, go punk or Goth while experimenting with their gender identities.

It is less acceptable when men and women shrug off the binary classifications laid down by society, the church and often the law and take up positions that don't fit. This makes us uncomfortable, disapproving and, at times, murderous.

Members of the 070707 Campaign acting to end homophobic hate found that the murder and ‘corrective' rape of black lesbians in South African townships are frequently linked to these women's appearance. They look too ‘butch'. They do not fit the norm, and therefore they must be taught a lesson, or disposed of.

Caster Semenya clearly doesn't fit the model. She presents herself in a particular way that is not the way society might prefer.

The fallibility of science

Faced by this disjuncture, what does the athletics fraternity do? They turn to science.

Even though, as feminists have been arguing for decades, gender is a social construct that is taught and learned, society appeals to science to intervene.

Science of course has its uses, it would be churlish to suggest otherwise. But science also has a bit of a chequered history when it comes to measuring social characteristics like race, gender, intelligence and ethnicity.

You don't have to dig far into our own national past to find scientists and bureaucrats doing peculiar things to determine identity, like measuring the lumps on our heads or running a comb through our hair.

Science is brilliant (but not flawless) for detecting cheats who take performance-enhancing drugs. Semenya, by the way, has never been found to have done this and we all know that top athletes are constantly tested.

Appearance and identity

So the controversy is not about Semenya's chemical make-up, nor is it about her taking illegal substances; it seems to be about what she ‘is' based on how she looks - whether she has a penis or is in some way chromosomically advantaged as a biological man. The big controversy is about difference - about how Semenya blurs what we think of as normal in terms of gender.

In spite of our national celebration of diversity as one of our most important political and constitutional principles, we are simply not very good at it. We are not very tolerant of difference. Indeed we dislike it intensely.

A recent study conducted by the HSRC found that more than 80% of South Africans think homosexuality is always wrong. This portrays a ubiquitous intolerance that is already playing itself out in the hate crimes being committed against lesbian and gay citizens and in the xenophobic violence that has killed and displaced so many people in our country in the last year.

Our constitution, and the long struggle that lies behind it, is predicated on the idea that we want people to be able to be whatever they want to be. We want to try to dissolve binaries around gender, race, class, geographic location, sexual orientation and disability.

But we cannot do that if someone who doesn't fit into our binaries gets treated as a spectacle and has to undergo a series of invasive procedures and tests to ensure they are placed in the right box.

One can only imagine the embarrassing, humiliating procedure of genital screening and gender testing that Semenya will have to endure at the hands of  scientists in Berlin. The body and one's prescribed gender identity are not the same thing, after all, as scholars have pointed out for years.

Indeed, some argue that there are many genders, even if only two are formally recognised.

The right to be different

What this treatment of Semenya indicates is that we are unwilling to allow people to be different from what we expect. And if they insist on making their difference public, we will make a spectacle of them, interrogate them and test them until we can categorise them appropriately.

This is profound intolerance, whether we are hoping to evaluate sexuality, gender, race or disability.

Semenya's story is making us question our principles, our tolerance of difference and the way in which our institutions define what is normal.

This is a heavy burden for an 18-year-old to endure. The spotlight of curiosity shines as brightly and harshly on Semenya now as it did in the 19th century on Saartje Baartman's body. We are similarly interested in the state and shape of her genitals, in her non-normative body and in her wish to be herself.

Semenya has demonstrated once and for all that gender matters. It matters in how people are treated. It also matters in how people are able to access justice and protect their rights. Perhaps it needed someone with the strength and talent of a world champion to take on this heavy mantle - and still win the race by a mile.

 Dr Nadia Sanger is a chief researcher in the research programme on Democracy and Governance.