Caster Semenya: Hermaphrodite

1474 Words3 Pages

Caster Semenya is a black athlete track star from South Africa and is a gold medal winner for the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships with the fastest time of the year finishing the race with 1:55.45 time and after this event many have questioned her gender due to her masculine physique and built. Everyone believed that there was no way a woman can be running that fast of a time and demanded that she take a drug test, so the IAAF (International Association of Athletic Federations) did a test and they have found no type of performance enhancing drugs in her system, then what comes next is that many believed she wasn’t a women. So the IAAF performed a gender test just in a short period of time after they did a drug test and found out that Caster Semenya has both female and male organs so she could not be categorized as a male or a female and labeled her as a hermaphrodite. This brings a problem for IAAF for whether or not she has a competitive advantage in competing with women in races even though she could not be categorized as a woman or a man in competition and there wasn’t a separate race for hermaphrodites. It was a very controversial on how the IAAF first did a drug test and found nothing since they believed she was doing performance enhancing drugs and after that they did a gender test which brought some historical athletes in protesting the gender test and one of those athletes was Michael Johnson who is a retired sprinter and many have said the reason of this scrutiny has to be with her race as well since she was a black athlete.
There were many forms of popular culture that came to form with this athlete. Caster Semenya was viewed in society to be seen as male due to her physical appearance. Her body was very mus...

... middle of paper ...

...s gender identity. Caster Semenya’s harsh observation has led me to believe that equality among all races hasn’t been fully achieved and when you’re black and achieving success, it just brings more attention and question marks on whether your successes are fair and meeting the rules and regulations or what most people think is that they have somewhat and unfair advantage when it comes to their success.

Works Cited

Ortner, S. (1996) Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993, April) The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Hookes, B. (1992) Reconstructing Black Masculinity Retrieved from http://moodle.csun.edu
Blanche, C. Dealing with Gender Huffington Post Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blanche-capel-phd/dealing-with-gender_b_641220.html

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