S/he Runner Throws Gender-bending Questions into Sports Arena

SOUTH AFRICA – Is she male, is she female?

That’s what the IAAF running officials are wondering about the fantastic South African runner Caster Semenya.

(The Endurance Sports Examiner, Roman Mica, did a top-notch job of capturing the controversy, and you may want to follow more about this issue and the world of racing through the column. And, New York Celebrity Fitness and Health Examiner Samantha Chang is following what is going on with the issue, too!)

The issue is befuddling the sports world (and it’s about time!) Man? Woman?

Well guess what? What if she is neither—or all of the above?

Finally, people may start realizing that the definition of sex is perhaps as fluid as the definition of one’s sexuality. Yeah, just like people aren’t homosexual or heterosexual, they aren’t just simply male or female either. It’s really not confusing at all. It’s about learning a few more definitions, and realizing that world isn’t made up of just black or white, but many shades of gray.

I have known a handful of beautiful people who are considered “intersex.” (Sometimes, they are lumped into the “trans” category, which includes transsexual, trans-gendered and transvestite people, but that’s whole different column!)

The intersex people have (or had) genitals resembling both a male and a female. Sometimes, tragically, their parents have made a decision for them when they were babies to have one side forced upon them over the other side. Inevitably, the parents get the choice wrong. The child is pumped up with drugs or mentally pushed to live all the stereotypes of the chosen gender, but inside they may feel very different.

Alas, one of my intersex friends committed suicide because the overwhelming pressure of being different was too much. He/she (how he/she preferred to be called) couldn’t cope with the feeling that he/she was part of a freak show. Someday, I’ll go into more details about it, but it’s still a raw subject. But yes, these people do exist.

Also, they almost universally consider themselves bisexual. They have attractions, or recognize their attractions, to both males and females (and the wonderful, but forgotten, range of sexual identities in between.

See a wonderful explanation of an intersexed person by 37-year-old Misha Kailana below. Maybe it will open up your mind about the dual definitions of sex and how mainstream society defines it.

As far as the runner’s association, they’ve got a lot of mind-expanding issues to deal with themselves!

Courtesy Examiner.com