(Hat tip: The Kinks)
The story of the gender-tossup South African track star/let just keeps getting stranger.
Female sprinter Caster Semenya “handily won” (as the New York Times reported) the 800 meters race at last week’s track and field championships in Berlin. Problem is, lots of people think Caster Semenya is a man.
The victory came just hours after international track officials said that Ms. Semenya, a muscular, husky-voiced 18-year-old, needed to undergo sex-determination testing to confirm her further eligibility.
Unfortunately, Ms. Semenya didn’t help her cause with this post-race statement:
“I took the lead in the 400 meters and I killed them, they couldn’t follow. I celebrated the last 200 because I knew, man.”
Girlfriend! Never say man.
Also not helping, this detail from the Times:
Ms. Semenya, who attends the University of Pretoria, has been described as “traumatized” by the row over her sex. But she has been suspected of being a male before. “Boys used to tease her all the time,” said her great-aunt, Martina Mpati. “Sometimes she’d have to beat them up.”
Girlfriend! Never beat up the boys.
Campaign Outsider 
I suppose her track & field coach didn’t help either. Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin wrote “her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, ‘We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.'”
Zirin says that “medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women and/or have chromosomal variations from the XX or XY of women or men.” He also went on “Morning Joe” and said there are more women/men with chromosome variations than Jews in America! Did you see that? He didn’t substantiate it.
Still, an interesting perspective, nevertheless.