| MEDIA COVERAGE of Caster Semenya, who won the women’s 800-metres race at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, has taken an odd turn in recent days.
Those following the case have been told that Ms Semenya has been discovered to have an “intergender” condition, to be “intersexed”, to be a “hermaphrodite”, and even to be a “man”. Before the pronouncement that Ms Semenya had elevated levels of testosterone, sports commentators at the BBC said that she was undergoing “gender tests”. All demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of the complex interactions between sex, gender, and sexuality.
Moreover, “hermaphrodite” is now generally considered archaic, stigmatising, and inaccurate — medically, hermaphroditism, more probably called ovotestes, describes only someone with both ovarian and testicular tissue, a small proportion of those with intersex conditions. “Intergender” is not commonly used, and seems to have been invented by a BBC newsroom loath to say “sex”.
Approximately one in 2500 people is born with a physical intersex condition (also sometimes called DSD, or Disorder of Sex Development), a congenital condition where there is a disjunction between chromosomes and genital appearance, or where the physical sex is otherwise atypical.
It is still commonplace in some quarters to “correct” ambiguous-looking genitalia in childhood, to make the child look like a “normal” boy or (usually) girl; but this has been criticised by intersex activists since the 1990s because it compromises genital sensation and reinscribes highly heterosexual norms. (It is considered crucial that a girl has a vaginal opening capable of being penetrated by a penis, even if surgery eradicates her own capacity for sexual pleasure.)
The precise nature of Ms Semenya’s condition is not known publicly — and probably never will be; but given that her family insists they have never had any doubt that she is anything but a normal female, it seems likely that Ms Semenya’s genital presentation is typical of a female.
Ms Semenya’s medical history is her own business — something the IAAF has summarily failed to respect in its handling of her case. Reflection on one, relatively common, intersex condition, however, demonstrates that sex is not always easy to pigeonhole.
With Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, an XY foetus (which would typically develop into a male child) cannot respond to testosterone in utero. This means that the child has internal testes rather than ovaries, but also the clitoris and vulva typical of an XX female child. People with AIS are almost universally brought up as girls and have feminine gender identities.
At puberty they develop breasts and hips, but do not grow pubic or underarm hair (also triggered by testosterone), and do not menstruate. If a child is diagnosed with AIS, the testes may be removed, since if they remain inside the body there is a small risk that they will become cancerous later in life. Since the testes also produce oestrogen and progesterone, which are essential to healthy bone density, however, if the testes are removed the individual will need to take hormone-replacement therapy for the rest of her life.
ENORMOUS ethical issues surround Ms Semenya’s case, not least the question why an 18-year-old woman has had her private medical information broadcast around the world.
But intersex raises broader issues even than this: what is it that makes someone male or female? At various points in history, the deciding factor has been thought to be hormones, chromosomes, genital appearance, gonads, or sexual attraction. Biologists in our own age often appeal to sex cells: people whose bodies make sperm are male, and those with eggs are female, no matter what the external appearance is.
The fact is that standards of sex have changed over time and between cultures, and are likely to change again. The work of scholars such as Thomas Laqueur shows that reading bodies is never simple. This is disturbing to a sports organisation such as the IAAF, which separates athletic competitors into male and female without being quite sure what to do with bodies that push the demarcations.
It might be even more disturbing to Christians who are unwilling to acknowledge that human sex and gender are more complex than theologies grounded in gender complementarity suggest. Male and female might well be made in the image of God, as the Genesis creation narratives state; but this does not mean that only male and female are made in the image of God, and that atypical or recalcitrant bodies must be made to “fit in”.
Nor should we assume that the biblical writers meant exactly the same thing by the terms “male” and “female” as we do now.
The full implications of this are crucial for Christians to consider: can one still claim that a woman should not preach, pray aloud, or be made a bishop if one is no longer certain what a woman is?
If marriages are only to be contracted between men and women, what happens when men are not unequivocally male or women are not unequivocally female?
Informed, considered Christian reflection on such questions, in the light of intersex conditions, is long overdue.
Susannah Cornwall is an Honorary Research Fellow in Theology at the University of Exeter, and the author of Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ: Intersex conditions and Christian theology (to be published by Equinox in May 2010).
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