"Gender is not a black and white issue..."

Readers looking for the moral behind the Caster Semenya morality play are to understand

The lesson of the past 11 months is that gender is not a black and white issue but the IAAF must surely be satisfied that it is now a level playing field.

The original concern was that if Semenya’s testosterone levels were raised, she could be receiving a muscle-building advantage. One can only assume that this has now been addressed.

"Been addressed?"

So we presume the IAAF--appointed medical committee has doped this black South African athlete...

back to full femininity so she no longer has the unfair advantage of unnatural levels of testosterone.

If so, we're back to where we started: there is male and there is female. Black and white, as it were. There's no gender continuum, but only bifurcated sexuality.

When an athlete tries to live on the feminists' gender continuum, he's bashed back into the same old rigid, antedeluvian, bifurcated mold.

Comments

Ya know, the article gives a pretty clear indication that Semenya does not have a "full femininity" that she can be "brought back to." My compassion is out to this person; they're playing junior chemist with her (his? ???) body.

I'm not sure I understand. Was her heightened (before these therapies) testosterone level artificial? Or a product of genetics?

Ms. Semenya was born with a hermaphrodite condition. It's fine to say that gender is black and white. That is how God intended it. But it's also important to realize that like all other aspects of our biology, it is fallen. It's a rare condition, but hermaphrodites do exist, and they deserve our compassion. Ms. Semenya's heightened testosterone levels were a product of her condition, and to say that she is less of a woman due to a genetic anomaly that gave her ambiguous genitalia is quite harsh and strikes me as less than compassionate.

>>to say that she is less of a woman due to a genetic anomaly that gave her ambiguous genitalia is quite harsh and strikes me as less than compassionate.

No one said anything of the sort, here.

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