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The linked blog post is actually entitled “Interesting Times” and covers a few news items, but I’m linking it mostly due to the section dealing with Caster Semenya. Sometimes, I have or think others have the assumption that a blogger such as myself can always just sit and write and churn out good stuff day after day, but my experience isn’t like that. Sure, I’m a guy with an  opinion and I generally know what it is and am free to share it, but often, blogging is also a process by which I come to realize what I don’t know and seek out more information about it.And such is the case when it comes to writing about Caster Semenya. A Facebook friend first alerted me to her story, and since then, I’ve been following it, wanting to write something, but unclear what I wanted or had to say about it.

Bigger than just what is happening for Caster, I’m been immersed in learning more about the Transgender, Transexual, and Intersex communities and what these things are all about. We, in the most general sense, use the shorthand LGBT to mean Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, or a different version of the abbreviation that I prefer is GLBTQ for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer. And some go a step further and add an “I” to the end, to include Intersex. But what do these mean, how are they viewed by the real individuals who self-identity by these terms, and why are these groups of people linked together (or why shouldn’t they be)?

If you don’t know about Caster, she is a South African athlete who won the 800 meters at the World Athletics Championships, but then was pushed into controversy, when she was ordered to undergo gender verification testing. The claim was that she wasn’t really female, and had an unfair advantage. I especially like this quote from the Reuter’s Blog:

Many in South Africa feel a victory by their talented young athlete is being tarnished by bad losers and a world all too  ready to mock. Sensitivities to prejudice are never far from the surface in the country where apartheid white minority rule ended just 15 years ago.

My motivations for digging into a better understanding of issues surrounding gender and identity, began to percolate a while ago, as my interest in writing about Marriage Equality grew. It seemed to me then (and still) that one of the reasons not to make Marriage Equality the primary and only gay rights agenda, was because, while important, it does not speak to the needs and lives of everyone in these LGBT/GLBTQ communities. My primary interest was PA HB 300, a nondiscrimination protection for Pennsylvania that would add sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to the existing state protections. As we worked on this, I received questions about if we might get further if we dropped gender identity and expression, but the plan has been clear from the start, that no one group should be excluded simply to make things easier for another group. In states where sexual orientation was added with out protections for trans persons, they are now finding it difficult to add this like, in New Hampshire.

Then, I posted a blog post about a person speaking at a conference, and it prompted the longest thread of discussion my blog has ever seen- mostly with commentary by some who self identify as Transexual, expressing, among other things why Transexual and Transgender are not the same, nor even connected. Actually, for good or bad, I’ve written often about transgender on my blog. A quick search of my blog- I didn’t realize how many posts include content about transgender!  The comments by all who posted provided much information and display a few different viewpoints. But this blog post about Caster strikes a chord with me because of two other events that were recent for me, that were at one point, unconnected, but now I see differently.

First, I recently had a falling out with a fellow Pittsburgh blogger, over comments I made on Facebook. The blogger had made a comment about how big corporations rape us, and have bloated profits, and I objected heavily to the use of the word rape, feeling that such a use belittles the horrific and devastating physical, spiritual, and emotional experience of women and men who are physically violated in this way. Rape is never consensual, and always an act of power over the  one who is victimized, and the fact that such an act touches a person on so many levels- physical, emotional, and spiritual, seems quite different from the way our capitalist system and commodity lifestyle has set the stage for a few to get so rich off of so many.

Then, I had coffee with LaTasha Mayes of New Voices Pittsburgh, to learn more about her work with that group. I listened intently as she talked, not so about reproductive rights, but rather, reproductive justice- or maybe more accurately, how reproductive rights is a Justice issue.

And so, that brings me back to Caster Semenya. From the blog post:

In the local press, Caster Semenya’s gender test results were most insensitively leaked to the media and splashed all over the world’s papers. How very decent of them, rubbing the poor girl’s nose in the news that she failed and giving intimate personal details about the inside of her body so that no member of the public could be left in any doubt that there are doubts about her being female. Who cares that she is only 18 years old, faces the end of a hitherto fantastic future in athletics, has no other prospects as she hasn’t even finished high school yet, and may even retreat into depression or turn suicidal because of this? No, getting that headline first is far more important. And isn’t it a “moral duty” to report the news – whether it is true or accurate, or not – to a public hungry for something to gossip about for a few days?

At one time, I would have said that there could be no greater violation of anothers’ person/their body except physical rape, but now I’m rethinking that. To have these specific tests results, or any tests, plastered across the worlds news- truly unbelievable, definitely unacceptable. This was also a physical violation of Caster’s body. We have so much actual physical evidence in our world, that human beings as well as all living creatures, do not fit perfectly into two rigid categories of male and female, and yet in general, we seem to work so hard to pretend that it does, get rid of anything that would prompt us to rethink that dichotomy.

And yet there are many who still maintain she had an “unfair advantage” by “not being female”. Such statements are clearly fueled by both Patriarchy and ignorance.

Ariablue commented on my blog:

To buy into that “gender” paradigm pushed by theorists, certain feminists, and the T of the GLBT in this case is to do a great disservice to people born in such desperate straits.

How individuals do and do not fit into this rigid dichotomy, is not a social construct created by “theorists, certain feminists, and the T of the GLBT,” nor are they guilty of simply buying into it.

Interesting Times | sexgenderbody.