I hate this issue. I hate it for young Caster and anyone else who would have to face this scrutiny. I also hate it for the people who are supposed to deal with these issues as administrators of the sport. Because there is a spectrum of male and female; it is not black and white. And yet in sport we only have men vs men and women vs women. So someone's job is to make sure people are competing in the right place. Usually it is obvious. In rare cases it is not. There isn't much to go off of in the beginning, before actual medical testing, except for appearance. Therein lies the problem - athletes being judged on their appearance in a world - the world of sport - where that isn't supposed to matter like it does in mainstream society.

I don't know what the solution is - do we do random gender testing just like we have random drug testing, so that we are not "profiling"? But how ridiculous it sounds! And how angry the athletes will be, and rightly so, for having their privacy invaded.

I am sure of one thing - the authorities could have done a much better job of keeping this a private matter until the testing was done. There is no reason for everyone to know Semenya is having her sex questioned until and unless she is indeed ruled to be on the "male" side of the line and therefore must give up her medal. She is not the first female athlete to have many masculine characteristics. She also is not even the fastest women's 800m runner ever! In fact, the Beijing 800m champ ran faster than Semenya just last August. But she was petite and smiled a lot, so no one questioned her.

Friday, August 21, 2009 at 10:25am PDT

Ann: The IAAF has handled this abysmally. Our hearts should go out to Caster.

It is one thing to put in place checks to prevent male impostors from competing in women's events, quite another to endeavor to make fine distinctions in matters as gray as this one. Again, it seems to me rather like the dog chasing his tail:
"Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html

She has already cleared a number of visual tests, official and otherwise, and until recently lived her life as a woman without anyone questioning her gender. I take the word of her mother and grandmother:

"'I know she's a woman %u2014 I raised her myself,' the 18-year-old's grandmother said."

"If you go at my home village and ask any of my neighbours, they would tell you that Mokgadi [Caster Semenya] is a girl," said her mother. "They know because they helped raise her. People can say whatever they like but the truth will remain, which is that my child is a girl. I am not concerned about such things."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8211319.stm

How unfortunate, then, that she has to be put through this now. And why only her? It would be just as reasonable, nay more so, to suspect that Usain Bolt has genetic "abnormalities" that confer athletic advantages to him.

Viewed that way, it becomes quite clear how absurd all this is. Certainly more testing isn't the answer. We have too much testing now; sport has become a never-ending witch hunt, just ask Torrie Edwards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torri_Edwards

My opinion is that men and women will someday compete in athletics. Only then, I'm afraid, will this issue go away.

Friday, August 21, 2009 at 12:18pm PDT