Before I dive into what can quickly an essay on the social, not biological, construction of “sex”, I have to give credit to Professor Martin Weinberg, with whom I have taken the course Constructing Sexuality and will hopefully work with more throughout my graduate training.  My undergraduate training in sociology and gender and women’s studies provided me the skills to articulate the perspective that gender is not natural, rather it is a social construct; we as humans come up with the categories of “woman” and “man”, determine the criteria for appropriately falling into either category, and have in place a number of consequences for failing to be a woman or a man.  But, I must say, I was at first confused by Martin’s scheduled lecture on “the social construction of sex.”  At that point, I thought we had given sex over to biology and would settle for the nagging reminder that there’s not just male and female – there’s also intersexed.

[Editor's note: this blog was originally a comment on the XX-Why? IAAF out of Caster Semenya's Pants petition.]

Controversy and a lot of prurient interest exploded into the news this week when South African Caster Semenya outran her competition in the 800m world championships by a more than two second lead, only to be accused of cheating by being intersex. As an intersex person following this story, I've felt . . . well, largely appalled by what spews from the mouths of competitors, sport officials, news commentators, bloggers, and eyebrow waggling, head-shaking people on the street. It's hard not to feel depressed encountering innumerable snarky statements such as this one: "South African runner Caster Semenya (hehehe...she has semen in her name...hehehe) won the gold in the women's 800-meter at the World Championships in Berlin last night, but officials may snatch (peen, I mean, pun intended) away her victory if it turns out she's really a dude." (That one can be found here, if you're really inclined to read it.) So I wanted to share my perspective on this story. I do apologize to Caster for joining the pile of people giving her no privacy, but as the media are overflowing with details of her life...