Run, Caster, run!

What on earth is a sex test? How is it done? Who does it? These were just some of the questions that ran through my mind as I came to last Friday after a debilitating, week-long, flu-induced stupor, to find the country in the grip of the Caster Semenya controversy.

The frenzy had completely passed me by and, as I picked up the weekend papers to reorient myself with the world, I tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

What a dreadful ordeal for this poor woman. After performing such a magnificent feat, doubt is cast on her and her performance, all because the powers that be don’t believe that this woman could outstrip others in the manner that she did. Her excellence on the track is being put to the test because it’s believed that a person bearing her genitalia couldn’t possibly be that awesome.

So, to prove that, she must fit into the mould that people expect of her, Caster Semenya must be poked and prodded in a series of humiliating and invasive tests that, according to sport physiologist Dr Ross Tucker, includes genetic, gynaecological, psychological, internal medicine and endocrine testing. But even then, says Tucker, this isn’t a fool-proof method.

Science it may be, but there is something that, to me, borders on the kind of guesswork reminiscent of the apartheid era ‘pencil test”, which was carried out on black people to determine their race, and the nonsensical ‘elbow test” which was carried out during last year’s xenophobic attacks on those blacks suspected of being foreign nationals.

For those who don’t know what the infamous pencil test was, it went something like this. Back in the dark days of apartheid, if there was a question mark over your race, you would be called in by the authorities for them to determine what your race was.

If the official concerned could not come up with a satisfactory answer simply looking at you, then the said bureaucrat would whip out a pencil, shove it in your hair and wait. This was critical state business you see.

If the pencil remained snugly secured in your tight, curly hair then, without a doubt, you were classified a black person, but if it slipped out, then you were safer from the more unsavoury ravages of apartheid and would be classified either white or coloured.

Imagine the precision that would be exercised in such a test: what make did the pencil have to be to be considered effective? Did the lead tip need to be pointy and sharp or would a blunt one do just as well? Was it a long or short pencil? Hmmm. This surely was the most stupefying and idiotic way to gauge race.

As any black person could have told the officials then, a tub of what was known as sheen straightener could make a black person’s hair any texture they desired. Did that change their race? There is something deeply offensive, sexist and racist about what is happening to Caster.

In my mind the underlying implication is that, because she does not look like a woman, or sound like one, then maybe there is something untoward about her. What absolute balderdash.

Just because she defies skewed and preexisting norms and stereotypes of what people think a woman should look like is no reason to think she isn’t.

What is a woman supposed to look like anyway? Surely we can look, sound and run as we please.

In an online exhibition, Women, Power and Politics, by the International Museum of Women, New York University organisational psychologist Madeline Heilman says of women leaders: ‘People are distressed when women lose their caring and feminine side and cannot get beyond this in their public perception of them.”

So Caster, while you wait in line to do your own version of the ‘pencil test” so that other people can determine who you are, some advice from former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher who, having being once described as ‘the best man in Cabinet”, might have faced the same sort of ridicule you are going through now: ‘One only gets to the top rung of the ladder by steadily climbing up one at a time and suddenly all sorts of powers, all sorts of abilities which you thought never belonged to you — suddenly become within your own possibility and you think, ‘Well, I’ll have a go, too.”