Caster Semenya is too ugly to be a woman.
That's not the only issue in the complicated story of Caster Semenya, but it's the main issue. Nobody thinks she's too fast in the 800 meters -- which she won by almost 20 meters a few days ago at the world championships -- to be a woman. She didn't break the world record, so it's not like she's too good.
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| Caster Semenya did not set any records while winning the 800 in Berlin. (AP) |
Close your eyes and picture her as Naomi Campbell, or better yet, as former 800 world-record holder Mary Decker. She's still running the 800 in 1 minute, 55.45 seconds, still winning the world title by an enormous margin. But if the face that crossed the finish line first were beautiful, there would be no outrage here, because her winning time and even her margin of victory were plausible. Remarkable -- but plausible.
On a prettier woman.
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But Caster Semenya is fast and dominant and she's not what the world would call beautiful. So that's the answer: She's guilty of some form of gender cheating. How do we know? Because she's too ugly to be a woman.
The world is thinking that, and you know it.
And the heartbreaking thing is this:
She knows it, too.
Heartbreaking. Even if she's guilty of doping, of ingesting so many anabolic steroids or so much testosterone that she has morphed into something between male and female, it's heartbreaking. Cheaters -- if that's what she is, and I don't think she is -- have a lot coming to them in the form of ridicule and scorn, but they don't have this coming to them. The world calls you a cheater, and that's justice. The world thinks you're hideous? That's not justice. That's abject cruelty.
She's 18 years old. Good Lord, it's hard enough being 18 when you're considered attractive. Imagine being 18 and being told, basically, that you're too ugly to be a girl.
That's why this entire ordeal is a failure of epic proportions. Never mind that women have run the 800 faster than Semenya, whose 1:55.45 clocking isn't even one of the 10 fastest of all time. That's not the failure here. The failure is that, in this era of sporting fraudulence, we have taken our natural inclinations to be cynical and accusatory and morphed into a cold, callous pack of jackals.
I blame us for being so cruel, but I blame South African and international track authorities -- the International Association of Athletics Federation -- for letting it come to this. If there were questions about Semenya's gender, they should have been asked and answered before she raced. If she was female enough to enter the race, she should be female enough to win it. She didn't get any less feminine in the 1:55.45 it took her to win. Her gender never would have been questioned had she finished seventh, because she wasn't too ugly to enter the race. She was just too ugly to win it.
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The issues here aren't just too sensitive to be debated in public; they're too complicated, too. The general population -- and believe me, I'm in this mix -- is simply not smart enough to understand this conversation, much less to engage in it. The easiest answers to digest intellectually would be either that 1) Semenya is a man hiding his current or former manhood or 2) she has taken gender-altering drugs that allow her to run with the power of a man.
Nobody thinks it's the first option. This isn't that scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, where the beautiful police detective has been stashing "Captain Winky" under her skirt. Nor is Semenya the track version of Renee Richards, who was born "Richard Raskind" but became Renee Richards -- and a top 20 professional tennis player -- after having a sex change in 1975.
The second option, about drugs, is a possibility. I can't pretend it's not. The coach of the South African track team is Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, who once coached the drug-riddled East German team. One of his athletes, shot-putter Heidi Krieger, was so masculinized that she underwent sex reassignment surgery and now lives as a man named Andreas Krieger.
The Telegraph of London reported Monday that tests on Semenya have shown her to have three times the normal female level of testosterone, which isn't as damning as it sounds. The typical man has 40 or even 60 times the amount of testosterone as the typical woman, so Semenya is hardly "manly" from a chemical standpoint.
More to the point, world-class female athletes tend to have elevated levels of testosterone. Naturally gifted athletes, male or female, are born with elevated levels of something, somewhere. It's why they're "naturally gifted." Unless Semenya has become a years-long science project for Arbeit, it's inconceivable that she could consume enough steroids or testosterone to be transformed by age 18 into the next Heidi/Andreas Krieger.
The truth is probably somewhere else, and again, the search for it is complicated. The New York Times commissioned a Northwestern University bioethicist to write an essay on the Semenya matter under the headline, "Where's the Rulebook for Sex Verification?" Almost 900 words later, I still don't know where the damn rulebook is. I don't even know what was in those 900 words. All that discussion of genes and chromosomes and hormones, not to mention the size of an enlarged clitoris, sailed over my head, and I'm a semi-intelligent person trying to understand.
People congregating on the Internet sacrifice their intelligence at the altar of groupthink, where nobody even wants to understand. They get off on being vicious and cruel, which is what's happening here with Caster Semenya. People don't understand the science behind her physiology, but they understand this: She's not very feminine, and she is very fast. Conclusion: She's too ugly to be a woman.
People are saying it. The IAAF is investigating it. If she wants to keep her gold medal, Semenya will have to undergo a series of humiliating tests to prove she's womanly enough. A week ago her name was unknown outside her village in South Africa. Today she's famous. Thanks to the bumbling of South African and IAAF authorities, the world knows her as the ugly trackling -- the girl who is too ugly to be a girl.
Everywhere, people are laughing.
Somewhere in South Africa, a little girl is probably crying.
