What Makes a Woman a Woman?

Semenya’s saga was made for the news media. A girl who may not be a girl! That chest! Those arms! That face! She was the perfect vehicle for nearly any agenda: was this another incidence of people calling into question black female athletes’ femininity (the Williams sisters, the basketball legend Sheryl Swoopes)? Was it sexist to assume women were incapable of huge leaps in athletic performance? Should all female athletes be gender-verified, as they were in Olympic competition until 1999? (The practice was dropped because no competitive edge was proved for the few women with rare disorders of sex development — it served only to humiliate them.) Should the entire practice of sex-segregating sports be abandoned?

Was that a girl, was that a girl. That’s what people kept asking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13FOB-WWLN-t.html?emc=eta1