Finding the Common Thread: Anti-Intersex Bigotry in the Media

Logging onto Yahoo today I found another of those obnoxious, offensive, sensationalized headlines: “Hermaphrodite shock: IAAF tight-lipped.” Wow. Just...wow. But, oh, it gets so much worse...

By now everyone must know about Caster Semenya (after all, I rarely read the news and never watch TV, and I still know about her), but in case you had forgotten, here’s a quick recap: Caster ran in the Olympics, and she ran amazingly well—knocked out the competition without seemingly trying to. And, because she kicks ass so hard, and because of the way she looks, officials ordered gender testing. Jenny Finney Boylan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03boylan.html) a little over a year ago discussing why gender testing is neither reliable nor ethical. The examinations test chromosomes, hormone levels, and genotypes, the assumption being that males will have one set testosterone range that females will not have, and that males will have Y chromosomes while females do not. But this obviously leaves large gaps around intersexual and transsexual people. While transsexuals are allowed to compete in the Olympics, they are required to have undergone genital reassignment surgery and have had two years of hormone replacement treatment. This, in my opinion, is really warped, as it sets up a classist basis for transsexual competitors. Intersex athletes are more of an ambiguous issue as they can have wide ranges of hormone compliments and/or genetic makeups. Often the athletes are unaware of their intersex status and the impromptu revelation of something as intimate as their sex to the public—something that also frequently destroys their careers and sends their social lives into a Helter Skelter hell—can be psychologically disastrous. This brings us back to Caster.

It has just been announced that Caster Semenya is intersex, having female external genitalia and internal testis. First thing the papers have done wrong is refer to Caster as a hermaphrodite. The term “hermaphrodite” is generally used to refer to an organism that has functioning male and female sex organs, though many hermaphrodites do not undergo asexual reproduction (i.e. they do not self-fertilize their own eggs). Hermaphrodites can be either simultaneous, in which case they have both male and female reproductive organs present at the same time; however, sequential hermaphrodites also exist that are born one sex but change sex at some point in their lives, usually in response to environmental stimuli. The important thing to note is that while cases exist of humans having both ovarian and testicular tissues, humans are incapable of producing both eggs and sperm, and therefore can never be true hermaphrodites. Indeed, humans who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue have a condition that is now (more accurately) termed ovo-testis (the name is self-explanatory).

So why did the media use the word “hermaphrodite” to describe Caster when the appropriate word is “ovo-testis”? Well, aside from the general public being absolutely ignorant of such terms (as well as biology in general); the media is trying to sensationalize the story. The obvious problem is the “hermaphrodite” when applied to humans is an extremely loaded and offensive term. It has been used—and continues to be used—to stigmatize intersex people; just reading through the comments section of the Caster Semenya articles is evidence enough (I’ll address this more in a bit). The Intersex Society of North America put it this way, “five ISNA-associated experts recommend that all terms based on the root ‘hermaphrodite’ be abandoned because they are scientifically specious and clinically problematic. The terms fail to reflect modern scientific understandings of intersex conditions, confuse clinicians, harm patients, and panic parents.” Given the dark history of medical intervention into the lives of intersex children, and given that better, more accurate terms are readily available, and GIVEN the intense social stigma attached to the term, it is despicable that the media has decided to handle Caster’s story in this manner.

Let’s talk about the comments of the even-more ignorant masses, shall we? First all the comments reverting to mixed pronouns (i.e. “she/he”). Caster is a woman. She has been raised as such and she identifies as female. Therefore the pronoun is “she,” not “he,” or “she/he,” or “hir,” or “ze,” etc. Using a pronoun aside from the feminine in the case is disrespectful to Caster’s gender identity. This should be self evident. But, worse than this are the people referring to Caster as an “it.” Do I even need to go into this? “It” is used to reference inanimate objects; in using “it” as a pronoun you are effectively not only being disrespectful to Caster’s gender, but you are also dehumanizing her—suggesting she is not a person. Stay classy. There’s a deluge of idiocy that I won’t even touch on here. Instead, I have two more points I still want to make:

The first of these is all the commotion about Caster deceiving people and competing in an unfair way. This is preposterous; it is very possible that Caster never knew she was intersex, and even if she did that is scarcely evidence of deception. Such an argument boils down to an attack on Caster’s own gender identity; to make her “out” herself—to require her to reveal publically that she was born intersex is both an invasion of her privacy as well as tantamount to asking her to stigmatize herself. If a person live and identifies as a given gender, that, really, ought to be good enough. There is the issue that Caster and many other intersex female athletes have high testosterone levels and that this gives them an unfair advantage in competition. The problem with testing hormones and declaring certain levels as unfair advantage is that naturally occurring hormone levels vary widely between individuals. Where is the threshold of male levels vs. female levels, and what happens when a female individual with no other biological anomaly shows up with “male” testosterone levels? Is she barred from competing? Because hormone levels have such variance, and because those same levels are ambiguous, putting rules in place based souls on hormone concentrations is unreasonable. Furthermore, such qualifications will serve to only further alienate anyone who identifies outside of the gender binary. The notion that a naturally occurring high testosterone level is “unfair” advantage is a mine field of logical fallacies and small-mindedness.

The last point I want to make here is concerning the stunning lack of biological knowledge in the comments I have read. A lot of these boil down to people thinking the presence of testicular tissue indicates maleness, which is clearly a phallocentric assumption that is would otherwise be challenged by the mere existence of ovo-testes. Unfortunately a lot of misinformation is also spread by individuals trying to defend Caster against the bigoted remarks of the ignorant. For instance, Pam Spaulding (of pamshouseblend) wrote that Caster’s condition would not be potentially fatal (as an article suggested it would be). The truth is that intersex conditions often come with a number of additional health risks, due in no small part to intersex conditions being caused by mutations in genes essential for development of not only reproductive organs, but other tissues as well. A mutation in the Sox9 gene will result in an intersex condition as well as a bone deformity. Many intersex conditions, especially those resulting in internal testis tissue or undeveloped gonads (as in Caster’s case) come with high risks of cancer—hence the “potentially fatal condition.” Other people have argued, in defence of Caster, that all people are born “programmed” as female; this is that common misunderstanding that people are girl in utero until a male sex-determining pathway is triggered. While this hypothesis used to be popular, it is dead wrong. In embryonic development we start off with the potential to develop into females or males. I could get into the details here, but it would take too long. The take home message is that it takes work to develop into females as well as males. These processes are very complex, so there is a lot of chance for errors along the way—this is probably why intersexuality is so common (~1 in 100 births).

At the end of the day, though, this isn’t about people preaching biological misinformation—though that certainly pisses me off. This is about the mistreatment of Caster Semenya, along with all intersex people, at the hands of the media. I feel like in our subdivided alphabet soup communities (LGBTTQQIA...etc) we forget about the plight of our fellow letters, especially those who are less prominent. Yes, Transgender is one of the less prominent, but Intersex is usually even further down the list, relegated to the world of medicine and even less understood by the general public (though make no mistake, the general public and even the queer community more often than not fails to understand either Transgender or Intersex). But look at all that’s been said about Caster is the past few weeks and see how eerily similar it is to the crap trans people have been going through. Truly, we are sister communities, and while our battles are often very different there are many moments in which we are one...though not only in our combined subjugation.