When I first saw a picture of the 18 year old South African runner Caster Semenya I couldn't believe those biceps and abs could belong to an 18 year old.  Much less a girl.  Apparently even before she blew all the other women runners out of the water at the August 19 World Championships in Berlin, some of her fellow runners and their coaches were questioning her gender.  She totally looks like a guy.  And she finished the 800 meter race a bus length ahead of the next-fastest woman (a 2.45 second lead).  However, her time wouldn't have even qualified her for the men's heats.  So what's going on?  Is she just a far, far outlier among women or something fundamentally different?

    I feel really sorry for Semenya.  She was raised as a girl and probably endured more than her fair share of teasing about being a tomboy growing up.  She grew up poor in South Africa - a country where it hasn't exactly been fun to be black.  I imagine how thrilling it must have been for her to find out she was good at running and then win a gold medal at her sport.  Then as soon as she won it the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) said she needed to have tests to confirm her gender because she may not have been eligible to compete as a woman.  That’s got to be embarrassing having your private medical tests scrutinized by the whole world.

    Yesterday an Australian newspaper reported that she has no uterus or ovaries, but rather has internal testes and produces three times the amount of testosterone women normally produce.  The IAAF isn't confirming this.  If it's true that she isn't medically a woman, she could lose her gold medal.  I think it would be sad, but fair, if she lost the medal.  Because she isn't really competing in a level playing field.  But she can't compete with the men either, so where does that leave her?  It would be sad if she couldn't run competitively anymore.

    Another question is whether she and her coaches were deliberately deceptive about her condition.  Apparently she's never menstruated, but I doubt she had the access to medical care to find out why.  In fact, a lot of female athletes, due to their training and lack of fat, don't menstruate.  So they may not notice sexual development disorders because they attribute it to their training.

    If it's true she has no female internal organs or both male and female internal organs, it could be caused by androgen insensitivity syndrome.  In this condition, the person has XY chromosomes, but they look completely female at birth because they lack receptors for male hormones.  So if Semenya has the syndrome she'd be considered a hermaphrodite.  But if she had internal testes surgically removed, she would probably qualify to run under IAAF rules.  I wonder if she'd still be faster than all the other women?

    I think the interesting thing about Semenya is that her case shows how much our lives are influenced by hormones.  They determine what we look like probably more than any other single factor.  Nature and nurture are both important, but I'm increasingly convinced that gender and sexual orientation are biologically programmed.  I've read that growing up, Semenya frequently got in trouble for playing too rough with other girls, and that she loved sports and dressed like a tomboy.  She still dresses like a tomboy.  All that testosterone would explain much of that.  Then there's the famous case of David Reimer - the boy who because of a botched circumcision was raised as a girl until age 14, when he was finally told the truth about himself and then demanded to live his life as a boy because he'd always felt like one.  Or the story I read in The Atlantic last November about a boy who insisted he was a girl ever since he was a toddler, in spite of his parents trying to convince him he wasn't.  It's all so puzzling and makes me very grateful I've never had to deal with that myself.  The range of human experiences is amazing.  Nothing in life is simple, huh?