Intersex in a Two Sex World

Amidst the recent media firestorm surrounding Caster Semenya, the South African runner who won gold in the 800m World Championships in Berlin, new discussions about intersexuality have been cropping up, shedding light on a topic that has seldom been in the public eye.


The intersex issue goes beyond the arena of international sports and this recent gender controversy, though it comes at the expense of a teenage girl, is illuminating in a number of ways. First, it highlights the fact that most people are only vaguely aware of what intersex means and the numerous variations that the term encompasses. Second, it shows that few people are able to separate gender, which is cultural, from sex, which is biological. The situation with Semenya, not only presents intersexuality as a concern for sports authorities but for the medical community and the general public as well.


In Western societies, indeed in most societies, gender is a binary condition. You are either one or the other. On official forms there is a very rarely, if ever, a third box to check beyond male and female. This approach to gender/sex is not the case in all societies however. There are examples of a so-called “third sex” in a number of cultures, the Hijra in India being the most commonly known.


However, most cultures divide the world into two sexes and, since humans tend to make sense of the world by categorizing and labeling things, it becomes very difficult for people to make sense of anyone who falls outside of those well-defined parameters.


The desire to push people into one of those two categories led to the general acceptance of sex-assignment surgeries for intersex infants, that is, until recently. The decision to operate on children is very controversial and has been the topic of much discussion in recent years. Advocacy groups have been arguing for the rights of intersex people in the hopes that they will have a say in what permanent changes are made to their bodies, as those changes can have lasting social, psychological, emotional and physical repercussions.


The upside of Caster Semenya’s global “outing” from the intersex closet is that it highlights an issue that has too rarely been discussed, or even thought about, by the general public (the one exception might be the attention Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Middlesex, brought to the subject). This new awareness will undoubtedly contribute to a better understanding of the struggles intersex people face and, with time, that awareness may ultimately lead to greater acceptance.


Links of interest:

Two Sexes are Not Enough by Anne Fausto-Sterling, Professor at Brown University

Intersex Society of North America

CNN Article: "IAAF Urges Caution Over Semenya Intersex Claims"

Synopsis of HBO Documentary "Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She"