Word: gender
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...length - ahead of her nearest rival. But it wasn't just her performance that set her apart. While the other runners sported ponytails and nail polish, Semenya was conspicuously masculine. After the final, the general secretary of the IAAF, Pierre Weiss, explained that inquiries into Semenya's gender would involve a gynecologist, a psychologist and specialists in hormones and internal medicine. If they concluded Semenya was male, Weiss said, "we will withdraw her name from the results." Said Italian Elisa Cusma Piccione, who placed sixth: "For me, she's not a woman. She's a man." (See pictures of Semenya...
...open-topped car, blushing and waving like a prom queen. A few minutes later, it was a burly-looking Semenya who rolled up to a microphone, baseball cap on backward, and thanked the crowd in a cracked baritone. Family and friends admit there is more than a hint of gender ambiguity about Semenya. "She looks like a boy," says her elder sister Nico, 24, at the family home in Masehlong...
...resistant to androgens, the male sex hormones, which include testosterone. In a male with AIS, the testes may never descend, the genitalia may resemble a female's, and while the body produces testosterone, it is insensitive to its effect, prompting it to produce more. But though science acknowledges gender can be a continuum, sport - which requires like to compete against like - does not. A decision on where to draw the line, and whether Semenya is blessed by natural gifts or unfairly endowed with a freakish biological advantage, can only be subjective, says Malcolm Collins, chief scientist at the Research Unit...
...Athletes with AIS and similar intersex conditions are often allowed to compete in international athletics. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, seven genetically male athletes with AIS were allowed to compete as women. On Friday, the IAAF emphasized that Semenya's gender verification tests were a medical issue, not a doping one, and there were no insinuations that the athlete - whose family in South Africa insist she is female - cheated...
...Daily Telegraph and South Africa's response only serve to keep in the public sphere that which is a very private matter. Semenya, at least, seems to be displaying the same gritty fortitude that propelled her to victory in Berlin. When asked by South African magazine You about the gender issue, she reportedly said: "I see it all as a joke, it doesn't upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I'm proud of myself. I don't want to talk about the tests...