When She Deviates Too Far - Policing Female Bodies

Caster Semenya competes at the 2016 Rio Olympics
- from Google's Olympic competitors tracker.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” - a question dropped from between most expectant parents’ lips, sometime between the ultrasounds and delivery.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” – an inquiry piled on by relatives, friends, acquaintances, the neighbor down the street.

“Aw, what a cute *insert gender here*” strangers say, as a new parent slogs through the grocery store with their wee tiny new human.

As a society, we use sex and gender as a way to categorize and understand the basis for human identity. As discussed within Anne Fausto-Sterling’s piece, “Dueling Dualisms,” a linear relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality is imposed and reinforced by the upbringing of new children. This linear relationship is assumed and created to help explain how we as new humans are expected to move and interact with the world around us, specific ways influenced by cultural and historical context.

Sex, as defined by Susan Stryker in Transgender History, “refers to reproductive capacity or potential – whether an individual body produces one or the other of the two specialized cells (egg or sperm) necessary for our species to physically reproduce itself” (8). It becomes wrapped up in the appearance of a baby’s genitalia as well as the sex status deemed genetically through chromosomal analysis, labeled as either female or male (8). Gender is widely understood as “the social organization of different kinds of bodies into different categories of people” referred to using the words woman and man (11). As Styker notes, often the two are conflated and used interchangeably – notably when adults deem sex an inappropriate word to use around children (here I am reminded of how health education in my public elementary school referred only to our genders when discussing bodily developments that were cheerfully “just around the corner”).

Lastly, sexuality “describes how (and with whom) we act on our erotic desires…the most common terms we use to label or classify our erotic desires depend on identifying the gender of the person toward whom our desire is directed…[and] also depend on our understanding of our own gender” (16). These terms used to quantify sexuality are heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual – with heterosexual tending to dominate the typical linear projection of sex -> gender -> sexuality understandings.

When bodies are born that do not easily conform to this narrow linear relationship of identification, we take constructed models of understanding and try to mold these deviant bodies to reaffirm our dominant understandings of identity. This happens because we start from a place of social categorization rather than starting with the body as a place for forming identification, reinforcing the binaries between male/female, femininity/masculinity, and heterosexual/homosexual.

Often, this linear progression is assumed until certain behaviors and characteristics cause a person’s sex to come into question. In the work of Elizabeth Reis, “Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620-1960,” she retells the story of a disruption in popular understandings of this linear system of identification. In 1849, a three-year-old girl was taken to one Dr. Samuel D Gross, a professor surgery at the University of Louisville. For the first two years of life, this child has been understood to be a girl, but then a change began to occur. She more of less rejected feminine modes of play – her dolls - for more boyish sports. This elicited a comment from the doctor that she seemed “healthy” (meaning: physically presenting as female in frame, complexion, and build) and thus he began to investigate, deciding the cause of her change in taste lied in her ambiguous genitalia (433). Thus, he was attributing her deviation from typical gender norms (i.e. interest in dolls over sports) to her ambiguous genitalia – linking gender with sex.

As the body deviates from specific binary categories, it brings up new questions of identification and categorization. While these are the most common, 1 in roughly 2,000 babies are born with intersex conditions. Intersex, as explained by Stryker, are variations of the most typical organization of human reproductive anatomy (9).

While it may seem archaic to call into question the biological sex of female due to her pursuit of sports and less than feminine interests, this questions persists within the realm of global competitive sports: the Olympics. It often begins when a woman displays behaviors and interests that disrupt the cycle, typically under the label of gender. These events highlight the tensions that exist when bodies aren’t neatly packed into a linear system of sex -> gender -> sexuality.

As female participation increased within the male dominated realm of sports, skepticism began to mount that such women could even be women. According to an article in the New York Times Magazine, as early as 1936, female Olympic competitors at Berlin were accused of being men masquerading as women. Runners Stella Walsh from Poland and Helen Stephens of the U.S.A. were believed to be male due to their “remarkable athleticism, ‘male-like’ muscles, and angular faces.” Their incredible physical feats can mean only one thing – they must be male. Who needs to talk about their training routine?

Fast forward 80 years to the 2016 Olympics held in Rio. Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, sets out the fastest pace for the 800m for females worldwide this year. She has recently come under inquiry, believed to not be female enough to participate. Indeed, the IAAF believed she should only be able to compete if she relents to hormone-suppressing drugs. Semenya occupies a body with higher than average levels testosterone and more masculine body frame; thus, her ability to compete as a female competitor has come under scrutiny.

In an article by the Sydney Morning Herald, the reporter wrestles with the differing opinions of critics and Semenya herself on her gold-winning performance. She repeatedly tries to focus on the performance of athleticism and her achievements as a runner, though she must field the questions of drugs and speculations of intersex. The end of article tries to mediate the confusion of Semenya by placing her back within the liner system of identification, albeit slightly modified. For an article discussing her athletic feats, it ends with the announcement that Semenya is happily married to another South African woman. This insertion of her sexuality feels like a stab at placing Semenya within the system – her masculine characteristics, her higher levels of testosterone and muscle development, and her interest/relationship with a woman – places her in warped understanding of the identification system, an attempt to relax anxieties around her supposedly deviation.

Examples like these highlight the power discrepancies hidden within the folds of binary categorization. To be female is to not be male. To be feminine rests in opposites of traits associated as masculine. When male/masculine becomes the dominant framework from which to label, female/feminine becomes leftover categories, defined by what they are not. When institutions such as the International Association of Athletics Federations (I.A.A.F.) and the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) rest upon traditional understandings of sex and gender to determine participation of athletes, they are reinforcing outdated understandings of how humans interact with their bodies. 

There is power that rests in the lack of questioning of male athletes as females remain under strict scrutiny through doctor’s examinations of genitalia and chromosomal testing, a strict policing of their bodies as they exist naturally and as they perform. After eighty years pass and nothing changes, when does it become acceptable for humans to demand the right to exist without scrutiny in the bodies they occupy?