One Last Olympic Controversy

As the Olympics draw to a close, we've had more controversy around Caster Semenya, the South African runner. She's widely believed to have some sort of intersex condition, which may help her athletic ability.

People always seem to have a fit when presented with this case, as they can't seem to wrap their heads around the idea of a person who doesn't fit clearly in either gender. The fact is that there are a number of ways to explain this. For instance, there is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, where a person's body is genetically and internally male, but externally female. This isn't even the first time the issue has come up in the Olympics. It's a difficult subject, since it brings up the Olympics' unfortunate history of gender testing. Yes, they once physically inspected female athletes to determine that they were, in fact, female. That goes beyond a desire for fairness, and into paranoia.

Whatever the exact cause, Semenya's condition probably gives her an advantage over most women. You might be quick to call it an unfair advantage, since extra injections of testosterone is one of the performance-enhancing substances they test for. But, is there really a problem of fairness here? After all, most athletes have some sort of genetic advantage; hers is merely an easily-quantified advantage. And that's where this gets awkward, because we have to confront the question of what exactly sports are supposed to be measuring. We often kid ourselves that is a competition of who had the most dedication, who's practiced the most, or that old cliché, who wants it more. And those things do contribute, but really we're often just running one person's genes against another.

But then we also have to ask the question of what exactly is the purpose of separate competitions for women. If we're just going to concede that sport can be a simple measure of genetics, you could argue that having a Y chromosome is just one of those physical advantages. Taking that arguement to its extreme, we wouldn't have divisions for gender at all. But that isn't a situation we want. So you could argue that if we're going to have separate competitions for women, then they should be open only to people who have a similar physical starting-point. For that reason, we should probably make the gender-distinction based less on how society defines gender and more on the physical capabilities. That's more of a scientific question, which will take a while to sort out.