(NOTE: I've been tweaking and thinking and re-tweaking this one for a long time. I think it's time to just post it and hope it makes sense. Or is long and rambling enough that no one will read it, and therefore be able to criticize me for writing it. d^_^b)

I admit, I don't follow athletics very closely. But it is hard to miss conversations about Caster Semenya, the South African runner who has been dominating sports headlines lately.

The extant furor is over the IAAF's decision to perform genetic testing to determine whether Caster should be allowed to compete as a woman. Caster consented to the testing, though we'll likely have to wait until November to hear the results. She and her family are quite dismissive of the whole affair. In the particulars, I'm with them. The IAAF has done bizarre things before and will do bizarre things again. Life goes on.

But in the abstract? Well, you know how I love me some abstract!

Chapter One: Defining Sex and Gender

For most people, under most circumstances, the nouns "sex" and "gender" mean pretty much the same thing. One is either male or female, man or woman, boy or girl. In a postmodern era where exceptions are permitted to swallow rules wholesale, it is increasingly "politically correct" to divide those terms in various ways (though anyone who insists that their definition is the "right" one is advocating an ideology, don't let them tell you otherwise). So when someone asks if you are "male or female," here are some of the many things they could mean:

Physical Traits: There is a fundamental physical difference between males and females that is obvious from birth. Like sorting apples from oranges, all it takes is one look. And, traditionally, this is how we sort people. However, there are ways for physical development to go awry; you will occasionally see news articles about girls from developing countries who reach puberty and find that they are physically male, there's just been a mechanical failure in the development department. These disorders are usually caught very quickly by modern medicine, and apparently remedied through a simple surgery, but in terms of sex distinction, this is a macro-scale challenge.

Chromosomal Expression: Because on a genetic level, these physical differences are the result of chromosomal differences: XY gives you a male, XX gives you a female. In most cases, chromosomes and physical expression align. But not always; Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome can result in a graded range of "mismatched" chromosomal expression, for example. And Klinefelter's Syndrome actually involves three chromosomes, resulting in an individual whose chromosomal designation is XXY.

Biological Capacities: Three sub-headings and we still haven't even touched the social question! Don't worry, we'll get there. d^_^b Another way to delineate male and female is via reproductive capacity. A healthy adult male is one capable of contributing genetic material; a healthy adult female produces offspring in the form of eggs or live births or what have you; any specimen incapable of either is biologically classified as "neuter." This pretty much covers the whole range of possibilities, with the possible exception of the extremely rare "true hermaphrodite."

This may be the best place to insert one sub-subheading, namely, that of hormonal expression. The easy-case men and women who develop according to normalized sexual expression are distinguishable not just physically and chromosomally, but also chemically. I don't know how it is in the animal kingdom as a whole, particularly if we're not talking about vertebrates. But in humans, even though levels of hormones secreted into the bloodstream (e.g. testosterone and estrogen) can vary radically even between individuals of the same sex, there is a clear sexual difference in the chemicals of adulthood, and messing with that balance can result in serious medical problems, including cancer. Indeed, hormones can dramatically influence one's physical sexual characteristics, regardless of chromosomal disposition--for example, introducing certain hormones in utero can alter a fetus' sexual development without reference to its genetic sex, and hormone therapy is central in sex-change operations.

Self Identification: But getting back to reproduction, let's just put it out there. Who wants to be called "neuter?" And how passé (indeed, offensive!) is it to identify someone based on their fertility, anyway? In our liberal awareness of people's feelings, we are justifiably reluctant to tell a woman who (A) looks like a woman (physical trait, plus some hormonal expression) and (B) believes she is a woman (self identification) that she is "in fact" not a woman because she (A) is genetically male (chromosomal expression) and (B) is reproductively neuter (biological capacity). This would be a textbook case of AIS.

But as a society we have yet to adopt wholesale the proposition that someone who "is a man" (physical, hormonal, chromosomal) but identifies himself as a woman is "in fact" a woman. This is the textbook case of gender through self-identification, and where certain progressive factions (most notably, the intersex movement) draw a line between sex and gender. There are other distinctions that I lack sufficient familiarity to expound upon here; suffice it to say that under most circumstances, using "sex" to describe biology and "gender" to describe social roles is the progressively preferred usage.

Chapter Two: Dispensing With Athletics

So, let us return to the case of Caster. Why does it matter whether Caster is "really" male or female, and what does the IAAF mean by "really?" The simple answer is that the IAAF wants to be "fair," which is really quite arbitrary and actually kind of funny on a number of levels. What they don't say, but what they almost undoubtedly mean, is that men are, as a sex, faster runners than women. It is one of those generalizations that we like to avoid because it smacks of inequality and discrimination and possibly straightforward wrongness. We all remember that one girl in elementary school who was a better athlete at 10 years old than I will ever be, ever... well, I remember, anyway. d^_^b But despite relatively total integration in virtually every station of first-world society, most athletics is still separated by gender (the notable exceptions being those where testosterone-linked attributes like raw strength are not primary factors).

Why should this be? Well, think of it this way. Steroids is a big deal in athletics right now. Remember the MLB hoopla? When you are "using steroids" what you are doing is shooting up hormones; some are synthetic, some are animal-extracted, I don't know all the different kinds but what I do know is that compared to females, males are always on steroids. That's why steroid-using women can develop male sex characteristics, and why the use of steroids by men and women both can result in infertility. It is a sex-distorting drug, because it originates in part as a sex-determining hormone.

Of course, hormonal balance varies enough from individual to individual that, assuming one's hormonal balance plays a role in one's athletic prowess, then our best athletes are "our best" in some small part because they won the genetic lottery. Oh yes, their dedication and practice and drive all play a role, no doubt, but here's a hint: you can't win the Kentucky Derby with a swayback, and you don't pay thousands of dollars for a chance to breed swaybacks, either.

Watch your step, or you'll slip down the embankment and find yourself up to your neck in eugenics--and that is not a stench you want clinging to you clothes. d^_^b People are not racehorses, and genetics is not everything. But when we divide athletics into male and female leagues, we are fundamentally acknowledging that genetics is at least something--if only because it determines your hormonal balance, which in turn impacts your physical development as you practice, which in turn influences your prowess as you perform.

The IAAF and others have been wrangling with this for a while. They don't want people "enhancing" their bodies for competition, and hormones aren't the only way to do it. The linked article is about a guy who runs on artificial legs. The disadvantages seem to balance out on the advantages, so far, and he has been allowed to compete. But it is not hard to envision a time when prosthetic technology outperforms the real thing. And at that point the IAAF will probably ban it, or maybe introduce an "enhanced division" if such a thing proves economically profitable.

Now, everybody seems to want to weigh in on poor, put-upon Caster; small wonder, when it seems pretty clear that she doesn't want to be having this conversation at all. But if you have read and understood, at minimum, the last fourteen paragraphs, hopefully you realize that Caster's story is compelling for reasons wholly unrelated to her "actual" gender. It is easy to dismiss Caster as an "outlier," because statistically speaking, that's exactly what Caster is. As a general rule, it is not hard to determine whether someone is biologically male or female.

But as with so many other things, the grey areas help us assess the true difference between black and white.

Chapter Three: I Am What (I Say) I Am

In Chapter One, I listed at least four possible ways to evaluate sex. But the fourth one is fuzzy, because "self identification" may manifest instead as "social identification" or a "mental state" or "spiritual destiny," i.e. "I want to live a traditionally masculine lifestyle" or "my brain is wired like a woman's" or "my eternal soul is really male." What ties these together is that they are internal states. We might argue whether there is any "choice" involved, which is the same argument that continues to be had over homosexuality, videlicet, is homosexual behavior the result of nature, nurture, personal choice, or some combination of the three (and in what ratio)? But when face-to-face with someone who says, "I am a man" or "I am a woman," as with someone who says, "I am a homosexual" or "I am a heterosexual," we are unlikely to convince them otherwise, no matter the cause(s) of their assertion.

This creates an interesting materialistic conundrum, particularly for the transgendered who insist that others treat them in counterintuitive ways. The linked article is about a "woman trapped in a man's body" who won the right to be placed in a woman's prison.

Think about that for a second. This prisoner was no Caster Semenya, this wasn't a biologically challenging situation. But he said "I'm a she" and the court said, "that's sufficient."

I have some questions.

Can I "be" Black? Can I call myself a "pre-op transracial Aboriginal Australian American?" Can I put "Black" on my fingerprint card? My university applications? The U.S. Census? Can I call it a "hate crime" and get a federal civil rights investigation if I get beat up by someone who refers to me with the vicious transracial slur, "poser?" (I'd use the W-word but some words are just so vile they should never be repeated.)

The jury is still out on the genetics of sexuality (short version: sexuality clearly has a genetic component, but the connection between genetics and behavior is fraught with Heisenberg-grade uncertainty). But the difference between "Black" and "White" is, well, black and white. A teeny, tiny hereditary difference results in readily identifiable physical distinctions. Those physical distinctions have, for better or for worse (but let's face it, usually worse), resulted in some social distinctions. And the difference between male and female? Well, a teeny, tiny hereditary difference results in readily identifiable... yeah, you get it.

Just as there are many people whose ancestry is not obvious from their appearance, there are some people whose gender isn't, either. But that doesn't mean we've jettisoned the terms, or that they aren't valid identifiers in certain contexts. So while I'm not super sympathetic toward the IAAF, I'm also skeptical of those who think Caster should be able to say, "I'm a woman" and end the controversy there.

Chapter Four: Philosophy Through the Ages

Now, let me state right here that I have no particular objection to the emulation of ethnic culture, while nevertheless recognizing that certain ethnic groups might find such emulation offensive or in poor taste. Similarly, I have no particular objection to men who dress in women's clothing, or even men who call themselves women... while nevertheless recognizing that certain individuals might find such emulation offensive or in poor taste. Liberty is a wonderful thing, for all parties involved.

But the very existence of the argument raises a question: is the mind like the body? In other words, can you have a "male" mind or an "Asian" mind or what have you? And what would that even mean?

In still other words, when someone claims that they are "a woman trapped in a man's body," they are making an assertion that presupposes Cartesian mind-body dualism. Dualism makes "us" passengers in our own flesh. Under a Cartesian framework, we have a frame of reference built into the very structure of our language that allows us to visualize our "true selves" crammed into a body not of our choosing. It's an easy metaphor to grasp, because if you chop off my arm I'm still "me," so obviously my body is not "me." Throw in some sci-fi life support and a Matrix-style hookup and you could conceivably strip "me" all the way down to the radiator in my skull.

Except that my brain is not my mind, either, at least not in the Cartesian sense. This is one reason why Descartes ultimately fell prey to Kant, at least in academic philosophy. Basically, the only thing that impacts matter is other matter, so Descartes declared without further exploration that "mind" influences the body through the pineal gland (this is something of a joke among philosophers). Now, if I'm not careful we're going to plunge headlong into metaphysics, which in most philosophy departments in the United States (dominated, as they are, by analytic philosophers) is even worse then the eugenics we avoided earlier. But consider the following Neal Stephenson quote:

A flock of sheep consisted of several individual sheep and was a flock only by convention--the quality of flockness was put on it by humans--it existed only in some human's mind as a perception. Yet Hooke had found that the human body was made up of cells--therefore, just as much an aggregate as a flock of sheep. Did this mean that the body, too, was just a figment of perception? Or was there some unifying influence that made those cells into a coherent body? And what of High Table at Trinity College? Was it more like a flock of sheep or a body? (Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, p.679)

Being an aggregate has its benefits, of course. There is enough redundancy built into your body that no single cell is necessary to your continued existence as "you." Indeed, like the ship of Theseus, your body slowly replaces worn-out parts with new ones. And that reference to ancient Greek philosophy was intentional--it turns out that the problem of identity has been with us for all of Western history.

(Which is a clue that we're not going to solve the problem here, so if you're still reading this meandering tome in hopes of a final solution, my apologies!)

But what makes the flock a flock may not be in any of the sheep. So a materialist will tell you that flockness is "not real," except perhaps as the state of chemical switches and levers somewhere in your head that points to "flock." And a metaphysician will tell you that flockness is real in a metaphysical sense, though the modern ones might say something delightfully befuddling like "the flockness is real, but it is not actual."

For you see, asking what makes someone "male" or "female," or "black" or "white," is really the same question Socrates asked thousands of years ago when has asked what made a horse a horse, instead of a dog. And the search for an answer to Socrates' question gave us biology, which gave us genetics, which continues to refine our understanding of the world around us but, importantly, never really answered the question. In many ways our inquiries have not given us a better grasp of black and white at all, but instead merely increased our sensitivity to the myriad shades of grey.

This is why Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, suggested that he'd "solved" philosophy. Modern philosophy of language is extremely challenging but often quite satisfying because it allows one to realize that the power of perspectivism--something hinted at by the rhetoric of the sophists, and Leibniz' monads, and of course Levinas' project--comes from its recognition that everything viewed requires a point-of-view.

And everything we talk about demands of us a vocabulary.

And that's why Caster's gender matters. Not because she's a better or worse person based on the test results, but because if we're going to think about something, we need to be able to talk about it. And simple feel-good relativistic "Caster is whatever she says she is" isn't going to cut it any better than hard-nosed absolutist "chromosomes tell us everything we need to know"; in both cases, politics hijacks language and we are left intellectually poorer for the theft. If I may be forgiven my token Pirsig reference, what we need is static and Dynamic.

Chapter Five: Digging Our Way Out

A couple years back, there was a lot of hoopla over Lawrence Summers, who "suggested that 'innate' differences in men and women may help explain why men dominate math, sciences and engineering." This is the conceptual opposite of the Caster problem; Summers, presumably a smart man, rejected Cartesian dualism, and was left with the mind as a mechanism. That mechanism is built according to the blueprints furnished by DNA, and therefore men's brains are different than women's brains... well, you can see that he was trying to connect some conceptual dots. He just missed the dot where saying unpopular things at the wrong moment can cost you your job, no matter how carefully you think you've thought them through.

I relate this story as something of a cautionary tale, as much for my benefit as yours. When discussing matters of race and sex, it's basically impossible to avoid offending someone, no matter how smart you are, no matter how careful you are, no matter how right or wrong you are. There's history, there, and sore spots galore. But discuss, as I've said, I think we must.

Because it's not really about Caster Semenya, in the end. Is she a man or a woman? Once we apply Wittgenstein's principle of context, there are several possible answers, all arguably "correct." The short answer is probably, "most of the time it doesn't matter." For purposes of athletic competition, she's "whatever the IAAF says she is." And the philosophical answer, or at least the long one, is what you're reading now.

Rather, the question of Caster's identity leads us to wonder about everyone's identity--not whether our friends are "actually" male or female, per se, but the extent to which our birth and our bodies are material to our identity. To what extent is our identity written in our genes? Our physical appearance? And do we embrace that extent, or shun it, or something else entirely? It's not an idle question, but a question of language, and therefore a question of how we think. It has ramifications for everything. Free will versus determinism. The appropriate administration of psychotropic medication. The role of racial homogeneity in nationalism. The dominance of visually-identifiable minorities in American identity politics. And all of these discussions require a context, a realm in which language is coherent, not riddled with concessions to people who would rather undermine linguistic coherence than give the slightest offense.

See? No answers, just more questions. But hopefully I've refined your understanding of the world around us... or, barring that, reminded you of something you wanted to say in the comments. d^_^b