The question of whether or not Caster Semenya is a woman is moot. She is clearly a woman. She was raised as a woman, she has been identified as a woman from birth. She feels she is a woman. End of story.
The question that the world body of track and field jack asses is trying to assess is whether she has more testosterone than most women which gives her an unfair competitive edge.
I challenge the notion of unfairness at play here.
Most top athletes have genetic dispositions that make them superior to the rest of us in their physicality. It takes much more than hard work and dedication to get to the levels of peak performance that world class athletes achieve. Michael Jordan would not be Michael Jordan if he had been born with Danny Devitos body.
Caster Semenya is gifted. If her body is capable of greater performance because of its chemical makeup she is no different from any other gifted athlete whether that athlete be Michael Phelps or Florence Joyner.
The notion of unfairness at play here, frankly, is wrong, it's discriminatory and the officials in question who think this matter warrants investigation should be ashamed of themselves.
But then, we're talking about sports here, and the people who run sports are, frankly, idiots. They always have been.
Sport when it is pure competition, purely an effort at testing the physical and an attempt to be the best that one can be, that has merit.
In the first world, however, sport has become an industrialized enterprise wherein the values at play are much more cynical and much less engaged with notions of pure human achievement.
Instead there are issues of nationalism, of state pride, of money and performance enhancement, of technological advancement and superiority. All of this has nothing to do with whether or not an 18 year old girl has a right to not have her identity challenged simply because she is extraordinarily gifted in some way.
The people who care about these things do not understand it. It is clear in watching any sporting event that the passion involved in the fans is nearly preverbal, a lexically and philosophically unsophisticated embrace of a basic tribalism in our nature that has rarely if ever been fully acknowledged by the modern world. In all honestly, I think we ought to be a little more embarrassed by the primitive characteristics on display in our fanaticism for one sports team over another or the sense of reflected glory we feel when an athlete from our tribe has won laurels against the athletes of another.
In fact we should all feel proud at what our species can accomplish, at what determination and effort in combination with raw genetic gifts can achieve and simply let athletes compete amongst themselves for perfection without any partisanship on the part of we observers.
To do so would eliminate the strange application of fairness that has so victimized Ms. Semenya in the current case, where notions of racial superiority, nationalism, gender, and even class are clearly influencing the judgment of officials. They are using their authority to abuse her privacy and force her to submit to humiliating treatment at the hands of the world press and all because they fail to recognize their own biases inherent in their reductive, essentialist definitions of performance and gender.
The people in charge here should be ashamed of themselves, as should anyone who thinks what they are doing is in any way valid.