Should Athletes Be Separated Into Men and Women?

Caster Semenya

Ariel Levy’s wonderful piece in The New Yorker raises the essential question about South African runner Caster Semenya, and then an even deeper essential question. Testosterone—which Semenya seems to have in excess quantities—is powerful stuff for an athlete. Maybe it’s not actually fair that she compete as a woman. Maybe it does make some kind of sense to divide athletes not into male and female, but into higher and lower level of testosterone, or some other measure of physical and chemical attributes that results in an even match. However:

There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.

Photograph of Caster Semenya by Paballo Thekiso/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Caster Semenya, South African runner

Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.

Comments

@einnocent: Well, in this

By: you know it is | Tue, 11/24/2009 - 03:11

@einnocent:

Well, in this case the problem arises because the activity in question, is a pointless and purposeless one that isn't directed towards any end. Ordinarily, when one encounters questions like "how should we classify or group things", i.e. quasi-philosophical questions about how to define things , one can look to what the end purpose is to settle the question. In this case, though, you can't, because there is no end purpose. It doesn't matter what you do. It makes no difference to anything if you put everyone into one competitive pool, or cut the categories so finely that every person ends up in a competitive category alone by themself, in which they're the top-ranked person in the world. The question "what should we do about grouping people?" doesn't have an answer because there's no purpose to the activity in question anyway. If there were some reason for competitive athletic activity in the first place, how to form competitive categories would be an easy question to answer. I think a good analogy would be the question "what is the right way to beat your head against a wall?" Naturally, to answer the question one asks the natural followup "what is the purpose of your beating your head against the wall in the first place?" If the answer to that is "no reason at all", then the answer to the first question is "then it really doesn't matter". And that's the same situation with competitive sports. Why do we have them in the first place? Well, as it happens, there is no reason. So no one knows what to do because the answer doesn't matter, and that's why the discussion ends up in the position described in the post.

SEPARATE

By: djantonu | Mon, 11/23/2009 - 22:36

spelling...granted, it's a difficult word

Should athletes be ...

By: Max1 | Mon, 11/23/2009 - 20:56

Should writers be separated into those that can spell and them wot can't?

Good point!

By: einnocent | Mon, 11/23/2009 - 20:45

Good point, ykii! If we would only just stop doing things, then we would also stop having the problems resulting from those things! C.f., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Euthanasia

There's no rational

By: you know it is | Mon, 11/23/2009 - 17:48

There's no rational justification for divisions based on matching characteristics. That just screws over people who fall just on the wrong side of the boundary between divisions. The people at the high end of any division get an undeserved bonus merely for falling just to the left of a certain point in the range, the people just slightly to the right get bumped to the next tier where they're the worst off.

The only logical way to do competitive sports is to have everyone in one big pool. Of course, this would mostly eliminate women from competition at high levels in many sports.

Of course, there's no reason why one has to have competitive sports in the first place. In these sorts of discussions many people seem to assume there is some sort of imperative that there be competitive sports. I can't see any obvious reason why this should be true, though. That is, I can't see any problem with simply ceasing competitive sporting activity thereby obviating the whole issue.