THE SALACIOUS sports media and the puritanical zealots who run international track and field have joined forces to hit a new low.
Someone in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) leaked to the press that Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old 800-meter track champion from South Africa, is, in the words of Oren Yaniv in the New York Daily News, both "a woman...and a man!"
After being subjected to a battery of "gender tests," which included invasive exams by a gynecologist, an endocrinologist and a psychologist, Semenya's private business is now being presented for public consumption.
If the leaks are to be regarded as true, they show that Semenya has internal testes and no womb or ovaries. She is possibly one of the millions of people in the world (one of 1,666 births in the U.S. alone) who are classified as "intersex."
Or she may have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), which affects two to five out of every 100,000 births. The different biological gender classifications are complex, ever-changing and, ideally, private. But to the drooling press, it's vulture time.
As Yaniv wrote, "The tests, ordered...after Semenya's 800-meter victory in the World Championships, determined she's a hermaphrodite--having both male and female organs." Now the story has gone international, and Caster Semenya has gone into hiding.
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