November 5, 2009

The first thing parents want to know about their new baby is
whether it's a boy or girl. No wonder. Sex and gender will
establish their infant's identity for a lifetime.

Unfortunately for some parents, that determination is not
easy. Rather than a life-long roadmap, a physical
examination of intersex children will result in an
unsettling ambiguity. Or worse, sexual ambiguity may be
hidden; not revealed by a simple physical exam.

For them, sex might seem conclusive until some incident
later in life. Caster Semenya's South African parents were
convinced that they had a girl but all that changed after
Caster won the woman's 800-meter race in the World
Championships. Her speed and body features made race
officials suspicious and examinations were ordered.

Tests revealed that Caster had three times the level of
testosterone as normal females and that she had internal
male organs.

The field of sports is an especially tough arena for
intersexuals. Sport celebrates the ideal male and female
form. Professor Gerald Callahan at Colorado State University
worries how hard it will be for Caster to cope in the
athletic world. "The male/female binary is really powerful,"
he told CBC's Quirks and Quarks.

Callahan, author of Between XX and XY: Intersexuality and
the Myth of Two Sexes, says that despite society's isistance
many people don't neatly fit into one of two boxes.

In fact, biological sex occupies a continuum between our
ideal notions of two sexes. Intersex seems like a rare
problem until you realize that 65,000 intersexuals are born
world-wide each year. That's about the same number as those
who are born with cystic fibrosis.

Intersexuals, previously called Hermaphrodites, are not a
single group. Instead, a cluster of approximately 100
conditions lay between the sexual poles. This range of
conditions is not a surprise considering the complex
processes that determine sex. "They are just as complicated
as those that generate fingerprints," says Callahan. Just as
each of us has a unique set of fingerprints, so is our
sexual makeup.

Sex is less like a light that is turned off or on and more
like a light controlled by a dimmer and continuously
variable. Yet social imperatives require an either/or answer
to the question of sex.

For a society preoccupied by sex, ambiguity is unspeakable.
But sexual determination is as variable as your height or
the shape of your nose. Parents don't fret if the colour of
their child's eyes is something other than brown or blue yet
they find any sexual identity that lies in between male and
female taboo.

Intersex is an umbrella term that covers hundreds of
different outcomes. Most of the conditions require no
medical intervention. Only frantic parents and doctors try
to surgically assign sex instead of letting the child decide
later in life.

Modern societies regard intersex as something to be "fixed"
but that wasn't always the case. For the Greeks,
Hermaphrodites were closer to perfection. Zeus, angered at
the humans, punished them by splitting them in half. From
then on, each half has forever sought to join the other. The
unity of male and female in one person represented a more
complete person.

The polarization of sexes is a modern phenomenon, says
Callahan. A study of drawings and sculptures before the
renaissance reveals a cultural view of similarities in
humans, not differences. While it's true that men treated
women different socially, the biological differences were
less emphasized. "If you look at anatomical drawings they
emphasized the similarities between male and female and they
were not fixated on the differences. They didn't focus on
opposite sexes as much as variations of the human form
necessary for human reproduction."

To assume that all women are alike and all men are alike is
not biologically true. Men near the middle of the spectrum
may be more like women and vice versa. "There is a range in
which humans come into this world and it's not accurate to
place all these people into one of two categories."

Despite the taboo of intersex, Caster Semenya is celebrating
her celebrity. She has been embraced in her home country of
South Africa where she was declared "our girl." Her makeover
appeared on the cover of You Magazine.

"God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am
and I'm proud of myself," she said. Hopefully, society will
embrace her embodiment of human perfection.
 

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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