When does a woman become a man?

Stephen Robinson
21.08.09

The straightforward answer to Professor Henry Higgins's anguished rhetorical question — why can't a woman be more like a man? — is that she can, and she is.

The next time you go to the gym, look at the women around you on the treadmills, pounding away, burning fat, sweating their way to the perfect hardbody.

Consciously or not, they — you — are trying to look more like poor Caster Semenya, the new world 800m champion from South Africa who this week finds herself in a humiliating “is she, is he?” row, with the flat-footed international athletics authorities creepily suggesting that they might have to probe deeper with something called a gender verification test. Internet conspiracies have even included an intruiging anagram of her name — Yes A Secret Man.

Most women would not want Caster's hair, or her rather “masculine” jaw-line. But look at those biceps, those endless thighs and tight buttocks, that rippled flat stomach she shares with all the other 800-metre runners lining up on the starting line, or the marathon greats such as Paula Radcliffe. Who of us, man or woman, would not want those?

Getting in shape is, almost by definition, a denial of a woman's femininity. “One of the main physical characteristics that distinguishes women from men is that they have more body fat. Breasts are mostly fat. When you train, you are essentially burning fat,” says Professor Kath Woodward, of the Open University. In that sense, obsessive training in a woman is not far removed from the impulses that can lead a teenage girl into anorexia. For some, extreme athletic training is an alternative to anorexia.

Most women athletes scarcely have breasts; many don't menstruate, at least not when they are in full training. Some, such as late American sprinter Florence-Griffith Joyner, are fantastically muscly but compensate for this in image terms with elaborate feminine twirls, such as long finger nails and extravagant hair.

Sometimes the charge of not being “all woman” is a code for something else. The snippy Swiss tennis star Martina Hingis cited her French rival Amelie Mauresmo's wide shoulders as evidence that she was “half man”, when in fact what she really meant was that she was a locker-room lesbian, which is a different matter altogether.

Sport and illegal drugs can combine to make women become men. Andreas Krieger (ne' Heidi Krieger) was one of the much-mocked East German shot put stars of the Eighties at a time when Soviet bloc coaches were pumping their charges full of steroids. Heidi's body changed radically but the changes were even more drastic than that in what the drugs did to alter her emotional and sexual makeup.

“I felt much more attracted to women and just felt like a man. But I knew I was not lesbian,” Krieger recalls. She thought her coaches were feeding her vitamins, when in truth she was one of the estimated 10,000 East Germans who were given anabolic steroids. In Krieger's case, it pushed her so far into becoming a man that the sex change operation he had 12 years ago merely confirmed the process. He is now married, and just to complete the caricature of the butch eastern bloc athlete, runs an army surplus store.

There is nothing new in this row about a female athlete not being “all woman”. The Nazi authorities condoned men competing as women in the 1936 Berlin Olympics for the glory of the Reich. In those days, disputes tended to be settled by an official pulling down the shorts and taking a peek, but that is now considered humiliating, as well as misleading.

Gender may be socially conditioned but sex, in theory, is biological. Yet it is remarkable how we are all programmed to be alive to sex distinction. The very first question we urgently ask after a baby is born is “boy or girl?”, and then we reinforce the answer with pink bootees or blue pyjamas.

In theory, girls  have two XX chromosomes while boys have X and Y. In most cases, this determines  whether a baby develops a penis and testicles, or a vagina, ovaries and a uterus. The problems arise with hormonal imbalances when there is too little testosterone in a “male” foetus and the testicles cannot develop properly, while too much in a female can lead to partial growth of male sexual organs.

The currently fashionable word for children born into this shaded world is “intersex”, and by some estimates one in a thousand children are affected to a lesser or greater extent by this. Sometimes imperfectly formed male genitalia are surgically removed.

Caster's family in South Africa insist that she is all-girl, though the headmaster in her rural school unhelpfully muddied the water: “She was always rough and played with the boys. She liked soccer and she wore trousers to school. She never wore a dress. It was only in Grade 11 that I realised that she is a girl.”

But even if some athletics referee pulled down Caster's running shorts and looked, it would not be definitive. A blood test could check for relevant levels of sex hormones which would reflect the appropriate levels of testosterone in a man and estrogen in a woman. But there are no absolute rules for how much testosterone determines a man, and estrogen determines a woman, no legally set bar that has to be cleared by an aspiring athlete looking for Olympic glory.

Caster's father, Jacob, told the athletics authorities to leave his daughter alone. He said: “She is my little girl. I raised her and I have never doubted her gender. She is a woman and I can repeat that a million times.” His ringing defence is laudable but sadly is not scientifically relevant, and it will not silence the doubters.

Even if Caster had partial male genitalia, she might still be predominately a woman. Equally, she might be mostly a man, who had had male genitalia removed, but it would be impossible to determine this by taking a quick look, or even a blood test, or even necessarily having known her from birth.

In normal life these days, we tend to be too sensitive about gender and sexual issues to be direct or censorious. Sport is one of the few areas in which direct questions can be asked, because a man masquerading as a woman is not a matter of harmless cross-dressing, which we can no longer condemn, but of “cheating”.

In this case, the “cheat” might not be cheating —“he” or “she” might be just as confused as the spectators who are thinking there might be something a bit strange about the way one runs. This issue is so political that no-one connected with British athletics will  be drawn into this debate. In South Africa, the ANC youth league were quick to see sinister global forces at play.

The cynical targeting of a young black woman showed that “imperialist countries can't afford to accept the talent that Africa as a continent has,” it said, adding that some states were pushing “their racist agenda” against South Africa.

Thus, in South Africa, the politics of international athletics are inevitably mixed with questions of race. This is a touchy area: in the run-up to the football World Cup in South Africa next year, the country's black football team are disastrous underperformers, who cannot even beat Swaziland, while their (overwhelmingly white) Springbok rugby team still rules the world. And to think, there are still those around who think you can keep politics out of sport.

Caster Semenya faces an uncertain future in this pitiless world of global athletics, where rumour and recrimination abound, where blood and urine samples must be surrendered on demand, where you can be asked the most impertinent questions about your very sexual being, and where there is not a natural hour-glass body to be seen.

As we pound away, grunting and groaning at the gym, trying to escape the imperfect bodies nature has dealt us, let us spare a thought for Caster, and all she might achieve.