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

Show More
Related

  • Gender Roles in Little House on the Prairie

    2315 Words  | 5 Pages

    Brannon, Linda. "Chapter 7 Gender Stereotypes: Masculinity and Femininity." Gender: Psychological Perspectives. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2005. 159-83. Print.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Dakota Culture

    923 Words  | 2 Pages

    To begin, I think it is important to analyze the difference between “sex” and “gender”. Up until researching for this paper, I though that the two terms were interchangeable in meaning, rather, they are separate ideas that are connected. According to Mary K. Whelan, a Doctor of Anthropology focusing on gender studies, sex and gender are different. She states, “Western conflation of sex and gender can lead to the impression that biology, and not culture, is responsible for defining gender roles. This is clearly not the case.”. She continues with, “Gender, like kinship, does have a biological referent, but beyond a universal recognition of male and female "packages," different cultures have chosen to associate very different behaviors, interactions, and statuses with men and women. Gender categories are arbitrary constructions of culture, and consequently, gender-appropriate behaviors vary widely from culture to culture.” (23). Gender roles are completely defined by the culture each person lives in. While some may think that another culture is sexist, or dem...

    Read More

  • Women and Sport in Girlfight, Billy Elliott and Dare to Compete

    808 Words  | 2 Pages

    When a woman or man joins a non-traditional sport for their gender or sex, it can have drastic social and cultural costs. These impact not just the individual but also the entire community. When a person challenges the gender roles of society, then they change the perceptions of what men or women are capable of doing, they further androgynize cultural norms, and they open up sports for others.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Gender Essay by Myra Jehlen

    905 Words  | 2 Pages

    perspective on the concept, arguing that gender is a cultural performance. Her careful reading of

    Read More

  • The Gender Blur

    1540 Words  | 4 Pages

    In “The Gender Blur: Where Does Biology End and Society Take Over?” Deborah Blum states that “gender roles of our culture reflect an underlying biology” (Blum 679). Maasik and Solomon argue that gender codes and behavior “are not the result of some sort of natural or biological destiny, but are instead politically motivated cultural constructions,” (620) raising the question whether gender behavior begins in culture or genetics. Although one may argue that gender roles begin in either nature or nurture, many believe that both culture and biology have an influence on the behavior.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    2016 Words  | 5 Pages

    ...socially directed hormonal instructions which specify that females will want to have children and will therefore find themselves relatively helpless and dependent on males for support and protection. The schema claims that males are innately aggressive and competitive and therefore will dominate over females. The social hegemony of this ideology ensures that we are all raised to practice gender roles which will confirm this vision of the nature of the sexes. Fortunately, our training to gender roles is neither complete nor uniform. As a result, it is possible to point to multitudinous exceptions to, and variations on, these themes. Biological evidence is equivocal about the source of gender roles; psychological androgyny is a widely accepted concept. It seems most likely that gender roles are the result of systematic power imbalances based on gender discrimination.9

    Read More

  • Learning Gender In a Diverse Society

    999 Words  | 2 Pages

    This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...

    Read More

  • The Gray Areas of Human Gender

    893 Words  | 2 Pages

    This site gives in depth analysis of gender by Dr. Bushong. It explains his theories.

    Read More

  • Problems with the Gender Binary System

    2310 Words  | 5 Pages

    The gender binary of Western culture dichotomizes disgendered females and males, categorizing women and men as opposing beings and excluding all other people. Former professor of Gender Studies Walter Lee Williams argues that gender binarism “ignores the great diversity of human existence,” (191) and is “an artifact of our society’s rigid sex-roles” (197). This social structure has proved detrimental to a plethora of people who fall outside the Western gender dichotomy. And while this gender-exclusive system is an unyielding element of present day North American culture, it only came to be upon European arrival to the Americas. As explained by Judith Lorber in her essay “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender”, “gender is so pervasive in our society we assume it is bred into our genes” (356). Lorber goes on to explain that gender, like culture, is a human production that requires constant participation (358).

    Read More

  • Infanticide: Cross Cultural Analysis of the Causes of Infanticide

    1804 Words  | 4 Pages

    Low, Bobbi S. (2005). "Women's lives there, here, then, now: a review of women's ecological and demographic constraints cross-culturally". Evolution and Human Behaviour 26 (2005) pp. 64-87.

    Read More

  • Persuasive Essay On The Role Of Women In Sports

    994 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first perspective is that women are disadvantaged at any sport. Some people reiterate the difference of men and women in sports. This is influenced by strength and the natural power men hold, comparable to women. Rodriguez questions “Is this because female athletes don’t have what it takes to make it in the world of sports or could it be more of a social issue?” This perspective seems to be a social issue based on the notable skills women acquire vs. the apparent judgments of gender issues. The second perspective is the idea that women deserve and inherently earn their right of equal attention and equal pay. “Sometimes, the secret to equality is not positive discrimination, it 's equal terms. It 's the shrug of the shoulders that says "what 's the difference?" The moment worth aspiring for is not seeing people celebrate the world-class female cricketer who competes at comparatively low-level male professional cricket, but the day when people are aware that she does, and don 't find it notable at all” (Lawson). Lawson makes it a point to confirm the biased notions against women in sports and relay an alternative worth working toward and fighting for. Both outlooks can be biased but only one has factual evidence to back it up. The second perspective reviews an ongoing gender issue. This problem is welcome for change depending on society’s

    Read More

  • Family Gender Roles

    1303 Words  | 3 Pages

    Psychologist, Richard A. Lippa, takes on the challenge of proving the concept that an individual’s idea of gender is derived from their brain, an issue otherwise recognized as “nature vs. nurture” in his book, Gender, Nature, and Nurture. Francis Galton, defines nature and nurture, as, “Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every influence from without that affects him after birth.” Galton emphasizes the fact that nature produces the infant, with direct influences, determining both “growth of body and mind” (Galton) while nurture is an alteration of the environment for the comfort of the infant. Lippa establishes that each gender displays different levels of hormones, and physical capabilities, which will contribute to “nature.” An intriguing study conducted by Henry F. Harlow, whether the gender of a monkey can be determined, with or without the aid of parental influence. Regardless of whether the monkeys had a parent, the behaviors that they demonstrated in their natural environment were the same. The fundamental principle behind this is due to the fact that males were “influenced by the exposure to testosterone.” (122) As human beings, we vary in physical attributes, which subconsciously come into play when it comes to our preferences. This explains why the things that we do are gender

    Read More

  • Media Coverage Of Women's Sports

    1641 Words  | 4 Pages

    When it comes to women's sports and popularity in the 21 century it has been little progress made toward gender equality for woman sports, now in the 21 century more kids and adults know who some of these females athletes are but as far as media coverage goes for female athlete are in the shadows of the male athletes dominance and the tradition that males developed in sport due to what gender establish athletics first, because women sports were brought up years after men athletics had been established.

    Read More

  • Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter

    2366 Words  | 5 Pages

    Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism. From The Essential Difference. Ed. Naomi Schar and Elizabeth Weed. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994.

    Read More

  • The Many Benefits of Single-Sex Classrooms

    1333 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kwong, Matt. "The Gender Factor." SIRS Researcher. OCLC, 21 Sept. 2013. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.

    Read More

More about Caster Semenya: Hermaphrodite

Open Document