Facial hair and heavy musculature lead track authorities to question sex of 800-metre star
At the tender age of 18, Caster Semenya finds herself in the eye of a tempest today, after it emerged that the IAAF has ordered her undergo a gender test. Semenya won the 800-metre world title last night, but has been dogged by suspicions that she is not—or not entirely—a woman. The case has raised all kinds of questions. Exactly what, for starters, is the determining feature of a man or woman? Genitalia? Hormone levels? It has also humiliated Semenya in what should have been her hour of glory. Relatives, including her parents and grandparents have rushed to her defence. “She is my little girl,” her father Jacob told a Sowetan newspaper. “I raised her and I have never doubted her gender. She is a woman and I can repeat that a million times.”