Caster Semenya

It’s a bit dated, but was sitting on my “to write” bookmark list. Casster Semenya is an athelete who happened to be transgendered. Obviously, this blurs the idea of “male” and “female”.

I can see why people were upset. It could give Caster an advantage over others in the same category, simply because of the differences in biology.

But, there are things I hate about the entire thing. One is the officials idea that it is a “dangerous” condition. It isn’t a dangerous condition being a hermaphrodite. It is what nature gave and there are relatively few things that are directly related to that condition that are fatal.

The dangerous part is that it is different. People want neat little boxes, male or female in this case. Being both is just as disturbing as being neither. I’ve encountered that myself, but in a less drastic way. Over on DGF, Perro actually asked me to “pick a gender” about the time I started maintaining the site’s technology. He doesn’t care about my real gender (though he knows it, hard to hide those things on the phone), but he also respects my desire to be… vague about it.

The other sad thing about this is that something Caster fell is private is now public. Everyone knows and all those prejudices are out in the open. If anything is a “dangerous” disease, it is others knowing you don’t fit in the simple binary genders.