FREE CASTER SEMENYA
If Leonard Chuene had any integrity, he would already have made a public apology to Caster Semenya, at the same time as announcing his immediate resignation as president of Athletics South Africa (ASA). Chuene should have made these announcements a week ago, at the press conference where he admitted lying about Semenya from the start of this sad and shabby affair.
Now it seems that the board of ASA, having given him a vote of confidence yesterday (Thursday), has as little integrity as Chuene. Which is to say, none. This incidentally is the same board who commended Chuene two weeks ago for his handling of the Semenya case.
This does not necessarily mean that Chuene’s post is secure, since the national sports ministry and the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC) may step in and demand Chuene’s departure anyway. However, given that the sports minister threatened ‘World War Three’ if Semenya’s gold was withdrawn, no one should hold their breath on this one.
To recap: doubts about Semenya’s gender emerged three months ago, when her masculine figure and an unfeasibly huge improvement in her 800 metres times, contributed to her winning the African junior 800 metres title. By the time she won the world senior title by over 15 metres, the clamour for clarification about gender tests became a cause celebre around the world.
Chuene incited a bunch of rabble-rousers in South Africa, by claiming that she was being victimised by racists, and that IAAF’ demands for pre-Berlin gender tests were lies. It turns out (on his own admission) that it was Chuene who was lying, in almost everything he said about Semenya.
In refusing to apologise or resign, Chuene is demonstrating the same arrogance and insensitivity that led him to ride roughshod over wiser counsels. Like the ASA team doctor who apparently advised that Semenya be withdrawn from the Berlin team, on the basis of results of gender tests, conducted in South Africa. Chuene repeatedly claimed that these tests had not been done prior to the world championships. The subsequent resignation of high-performance coach Wilfred Daniels suggests that not everyone in ASA is as incompetent and mendacious as its boss.
The worst thing in all this is the continuing public exposure of a potentially vulnerable young woman, who was ‘used’ to win a gold medal, and has subsequently been forced into being a poster child for racial politics in South Africa.
Those of us who saw through Chuene’s bluster from the start (see column, August 26) can draw little comfort from being proved right. It’s confirmation of another depressing chapter of abuse in Africa. Yes, the colonialists, such as my British predecessors have a lot to answer for. But when ruling parties lose democratic elections, as in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and insist on staying, in what are mockingly called ‘power-sharing’ governments, in order to further their kleptocratic agendas, it is hardly a good example to anyone, either in government or any public office throughout Africa.
Unfortunately South Africa, the major power in the region, was heavily implicated in those electoral farragoes, with former SA president, Thabo Mbeki feeling he owed more to Robert Mugabe’s anti-colonial activism 40 years ago, than to the Zimbabwean president’s current demagoguery. Ditto Mbeki’s bow before vested interests in Kenya.
South Africa, with the model of sanity and sanctity that was Nelson Mandela, avoided the meltdown that was widely predicted when majority-rule was installed. But South Africa has enormous social problems, not least its incidence of HIV/AIDS, easily the highest in the world, with an estimated 5.5m infected people in 2008.
Yet like with ‘democracy’ in Kenya and Zimbabwe, the example of successive South African presidents, Mbeki and Jacob Zuma has been the biggest drawback to addressing the problem.
Mbeki’s refusal to accept coventional wisdom on the causes of HIV/AIDS resulted, claimed a Harvard research paper in an extra 300,000 deaths, despite increasing availabity of low-cost retrovirals. As for Zuma, a man with several wives, although exonerated by the court at a trial for rape in 2006 (pre-presidency), he admitted sex without a condom with someone he knew was HIV positive, but said in his defence that he, “took a shower afterwards”.
Zuma’s lack of concern for the health and safety of his wives reflects a society, whose attitudes to women still leave much to be desired; as Mandela once implied when, in one of his first post-prison speeches, he talked about the future of South Africa as, “non-racist and non-sexist”.
Because the other worldwide statistical tables that South Africa tops are those for murder and rape. And they have begun to come together in South Africa in the most disgusting fashion, exemplified by the gang rape and murder of Eudy Simelane last April.
A former footballer for the SA national women’s team - then a coach, and hoping to officiate at the forthcoming soccer World Cup - Simelane, an overt lesbian, living in a township was, in the words of Judge Ratha Mokgoathleng, “stripped naked, stabbed, assaulted, raped. What more indignity can a person endure?”
The judge, sentencing a second man to over 30 years imprisonment this week, denied that Simelane’s sexuality had anything to do with her death. But Phumi Mtetwa, executive director of the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project said, “How did people know her in the township? She was a soccer player, who was ‘butch’ and was known. People are killed because of who they are”.
Is it attitudes like that to women, especially those who are ‘different,’ which led Leonard Chuene to think that he could use and abuse Caster Semenya as a political pawn?
September 25th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
In 1966 the first gender tests were conducted at the European Athletics Championships, when female competitors had to embarrasingly parade naked before a panel of medics. Originally this was simply to stop men competing as women (as had happened in the women’s high jump at the Berlin Olympics). Women hated this indignity of course, and in the 1968 Olympics the buccal (cheek cells) smear test was introduced. This was looking for ‘Barr Bodies’ in at least 50% of 100 cells counted. In terms of the ’sex chromosmes’ men have an X and a Y; women have two X’s. But women don’t use both - one X chromosome is always inactivated and put to the edge of the cell’s nucleus - and called a Barr body, after its discoverer. And under the microscope that’s what is seen in the cells from the cheek smear.
However, although this seemd fine - it is an easy sample to take and in no way degrading - there were/are problems. For example In a condition known as Turner’s Syndrome, a woman is born with only one X chromosome in her cells. So she has no Barr bodies. And failed the chromosome test.
Also, there is a condition in men, Klinefelter’s Syndrome, where men have an extra X chromosome - i.e. they have two X’s and a Y - and one of the X’s becomes a Barr Body - so technically such man could have passed the chormosome test (I don’t know if any Klinefelters tried to cheat - I never heard of any!).
So, the test was absurd in Turner’s syndrome - and just as bad in the ‘Androgen Insenstivity Syndrome’ or ‘Testicular feminisation’ - who were very female-looking women (a bosom, broader hips, tapering legs, often a ‘carrying angle’) BUT who have an X and a Y chromosome - i.e. the male complement - in which, hoeever, the Y simply doesn’t work - so these women (and there have been a number of them) were unfairly barred from competing.
However, in 1990 an IAAF committee recommended dropping gender verification tests, and in the Sydney Games they were not done.
Nevertheless - Turners, Kilinefelters and the androgen insensitivity syndromes represent but three of several ‘intersex’ conditions. And of more relevance to Caster Semenya would be that she might have
the Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (adreno-genital syndrome). This would be normal female XX in chromosomes but would have more androgen (so-called ‘male hormone’ although normal women have it too, at about 10-20% of the male level - indeed that is the hormone of women’s libido -as well as men’s!) This adrenal hyperplasia syndrome is associated sometimes with ‘ambiguous’ genitalia, and usually with pronounced musculature.
There is also a ‘Polycystic’ condition in the ovaries, and it too is associated with higher levels of androgen.
And there is genuine Hermaphroditism, which may have resulted from what should have been a pair of non-identical twins, of different genders, but who didn’t separate at an extremely early enmbryonic stage. This gives some cells with XX chromosomes, and some with XY. And a whole spectrum of body types - from fairly female - to fairly male. They may have breaasts - and a penis. Some identify with male gender, others as females. But they do tend to be muscular.
In the course of 40 years of sports physiology working with elite squads I have seen many very muscular women - partly genetically, partly training - (not counting those on anabolic steroids). Caster MAY simply be such a muscular woman - some of my very muscular friends have had children.
And there is another point - We ALL, male and female, have a local muscle hormone - ‘Myostatin’ (Myo for ‘muscle’; Statin for ‘Stop’) whose job, oddly enough, is to STOP muscle growth. But there are beef breeds of cattle, e.g. the ‘Blond D’Aquitaine’, and the ‘Belgian Blue’ - and some greyhounds - which have too little myostatin, or perhaps lack the receptor for it - and they are remarkably muscular - like body-building animals, as it were!! There is evidence that such genetic myostatin deficiency occurs in humans. And Caster just may be like that.
BUT - in all of this, all sorts of Officials have behaved extremely badly, as Butcher’s Blog above indicates.
In statistics, anything that is a very long way from the arithmetical average can be called an ‘outlier’. And if you think about it - that is exactly what Track and Field Athletics is all about - finding the extreme performance outliers - such as Usain Bolt!! He is an absolute outlier!!
But Caster is not a man faking being a woman. She is an absolute outlier - like Bolt. If she had, by genetic freak, a highly unusual percentage of type 2A anerobic fast muscle fibres - no one would say anything - but would praise her performances. Her outlier-ness MAY lie in an advantageous intersex condition - but if she has been raised as a girl/woman - and feels that in her own mind - then, she IS a woman. A woman with outlier tendencies - but a woman. (and did someone not say ‘I know she’s a woman - she wears panties’?) - that’s not as facetious as it sounds - one identifies with a gender by one’s behaviour.
So, a lot of officials have behaved with appalling insensitivity. I have, as most of you will have - a huge sympathy for the plight that she has been thrust into. And for me - she’s a woman. As some man will find out - if she does have high androgen levels - she will have a heck of a libido!
Anyway - all good luck to her. It’s interesting that she is apparently studying sports science at Pretoria. She could do a study on intersexes for her dissertation - and at least salvage something. In Professor Tim Noakes in Cape Town, South Africa has one of the greatest (and nicest!) exercise physiologists in the world. Possibly a quiet word with him, when all tests have been done, could be of real help to Caster.
September 26th, 2009 at 7:52 am
Another superb piece of writing, your logic full of elegance and power. If only you could still run with these qualities. Lol. But enough of such frivolities and back to the basic question of “eligibility”.
It would hardly surprise if the IAAF “expert panel” decide after all that Semenya is a female.
On that basis then she must be eligible to compete against women.
And with that decision the flood gates must open: The logical extension then must be to eliminate the eligibility rule, thereby eliminating the need for competition exclusively for women.
Open competition will be welcomed by the panel of experts as being the only fair way to proceed … and on to hell in a handbag…
October 13th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
thank you good information
November 16th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
A blog well-done! It has always been a joy reading your posts. I honestly think you have a talent and creativity in blogging. You make my day! ^^
December 15th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
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