you're almost certainly ahead of me

Since I expect, like most of my readers, you are a top international endocrinologist, you are aware of how nightmarishly hard it is to say what sex someone is.

Since you are a top international endocrinologist with a keen interest in athletics, you know that I am raising this because a South African teenager called Caster Semenya is having to face gender testing after she suddenly became brilliant this year and smashed everyone in the World Championship 800m final. She didn't do press conferences afterwards.

The IAAF media guy, Pierre Weiss, said this:

We know you want to talk to her, but she is young, she is inexperienced and she is not able to reply properly to all your questions. I will answer for her. The decision not to put her up was taken by the IAAF and the South African federation. I repeat, she was not prepared for a situation like this.

Fair enough. This is one of those things that seems like a funny joke when it is probably the tip of a sad and confusing iceberg.

Miss Jones will be all over this post like a cheap suit, and will be waiting for me to chat about the eight athletes who failed sex tests at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and were subsequently cleared; about Ewa Kłobukowska, a Pole who won some medals in Tokyo, 1964, and was the first person to fail tests; and about Tamara and Irina Press, some multi-medal-winning Russians who suddenly stopped turning up for competitions when people started doing the checks. Now I have done that. I am going to put up a picture of the Presses, since their story is more naughty than sad.

But other stories, and probably Semenya's are bedeviled by intersex issues. There are women who grow vestigial male genitalia. There are physiological females with male genetic make-up. The Journal of American the American Medical Association says:

gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate. Furthermore, these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors (eg, some 46,XX males), are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who 'fail' a test.

Something differently funny to finish with: Dora Ratjen came fourth in the 1936 Berlin Olympic high jump. She set a world high jump record at the 1938 European Championships. She was a man called Hermann Ratjen who was forced to disguise his gender by the Nazis. He looked like this: