Monday 14 September 2009

third world war

Just in case you are only following the (sad) story of Caster Semenya via this blog: the BBC says that she's almost certainly has an intersexual condition (probably not the right expression). I don't know what this means in terms of her athletic career.

But certainly it is an incredibly complicated scientific problem - almost certainly one with no clear solution. South Africa's Sports Minister, the Reverend Makenkhezi Stofile is almost certainly a top international endocrinologist, and so he is taking a measured and sophisticated view of the issue. 'Caster is a woman', he says. 'She is our heroine. We must protect her.'

On one level, yup, ok, go for it: Caster has (almost certainly) been brought up a girl and this is a nightmare. But flat-out denying science, even if science isn't giving us either the answers we want or even clear answers is, well, whatever. Still, a desire to protect Semenya, a vulnerable young woman (I think she's a woman, basically, since we don't have a proper middlesex term, and it's what she thinks of herself as, and not unreasonably) is a good one.

Then the Reverend Stofile was asked what would happen if she were barred from future competition - there is little chance of her being asked to hand back her recent World gold medal, since no one, including her, was aware of the issue, and it would be blatantly unfair - and he replied: 'I think it would be the third world war.'

Stofile is the kind of idiot you don't need in a position of responsibility, and who South Africa's crappy, AIDS-ignorant, misogynist new President would pick to set fire to the oily troubled waters.

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