When is a girl not a girl?

The case of Caster Semenya, who won the women’s 800m at the World Atletics Championships this week in Berlin, is causing a bit of a stir in the media. Gender is one of those areas where commonsense wisdom can be hard to dislodge.

But the fact is that gender and sex are a bit more complicated than we usually acknowledge.

First we need to grasp the word ‘dimorphic’. This means that in a given species, there are two forms e.g. male and female, as with humans.

Now, check out the words of sociologist RW Connell:

” In several respects human bodies are not fully dimorphic. First, there is a complex group of intersex categories, such as females lacking a second X chromosome, males with an extra X chromosome, and others. The biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (Sexing the Body, New York, Basic Books, 2000:p51) estimates that intersex groups, taken together, may account for 1.7 per cent of all births: a small but not trivial number. Secondly, physical differences between male and female change over the lifespan, but even in early adulthood the physical characteristics of males as a group and females as a group, overlap extensively.” Connell , Gender, Polity Press, 2002, p29-30.

Sociologists generally use this sort of evidence to make a number of points about gender, but particularly that gender is a social construction. There are indeed natural sex differences, but as Connell points out, these are in fact more complex than our (socially constructed) classification systems often allow for.

So it will be interesting to see what the IAAF tests come up with - and indeed, it will be interesting to know what tests they will use.