As for the scare quotes; I might have a tendency to overuse them when I'm not exactly sure that something fits the generally accepted definition of sometihing. I'm not sure that this person meets the generally accepted definition of woman. Both because I don't know what that definition is, and because I don't know the specifics of her case. No offense intended
She identifies as a woman. She has lived her entire life as a woman. That should be enough for you to call her a woman, no scare quotes required.
To reiterate the problem: you have the real (men's) competition, and the "best of the sucky"-competition(s). Deciding who gets to compete in which competition is necesarry. People can earn serious money being the best of the sucky, when they would just have been sucky if they joined the real competition.
If I can just quote
this excellent article:
For years, women athletes had to parade naked in front of Olympic officials. This has now given way to more "sophisticated" "gender testing" to determine if athletes like Semenya have what officials still perceive as the ultimate advantage--being a man. Let's leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of athletic success. A country's wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.
I wonder—should we have a special Olympics for poor people, too?
My personal preverence would be to set the cut-off really low; the number of unusual cases is pretty small, but you only need 3 good male-like female runners on the entire planet to ruin the olympic chances of the other 3 billion females.
Your preference seems to be to set the cut-off pretty high, leading to "women's sports" being dominated by the intersexed, with 'normal' (eek, scare quotes) women again having no chance of ever getting that gold olympic medal, just as they had no chance when there was only a single (men's) competition.
Let’s get things in perspective, shall we?
Apparently Caster Semenya’s samples display
about three times as much testosterone as is found in the average woman’s body.
The average man has
forty to sixty times the amount of testosterone found in the average woman’s body.
Consequently—how would it be fair to say that Caster Semenya must compete in the men’s competition, when, looking at the raw figures, her testosterone levels are much closer to those of the average female than the average male?
And by the way—Semenya’s time wasn’t record-breaking. “Normal” women have run faster than her in the past. So no, you don’t just need three “man-like” female runners to beat all the other women, because having unusual medical conditions doesn’t magically make you brilliant.
Thousands of women are intersexed or have conditions like CAH; they are not all brilliant athletes. Being a brilliant athlete takes a lot of hard work, and to put all of Semenya’s success down to her status as an intersexed woman is dishonest and unkind.
I’d also like to add that there’s an undeniable undercurrent of racism blended with the obvious sexism. If a blonde, blue-eyed woman with a slim build and a high-pitched voice had produced Semenya’s time, would anyone have demanded that she take a gender test?
There is a pretty ancient form of racism against black women, the notion that their blackness somehow makes them less feminine. From the very beginnings of black slavery in the West, black women participated in strenuous manual labour alongside their male counterparts, and were consequently robbed of the feminine identity afforded to white women in the West, whose sphere of activity was largely confined to the home. Consider the bizarre attention to Michelle Obama’s “toned” (read “unusually muscular!!”
arms. Consider the prevalent trope of the “sassy” or “bolshy” or “strong” black woman. Consider the pressure on black women to appear more “Western” by straightening their hair and modifying their bodies and appearances in other ways. Consider the common practice of lightening black women’s skin in post-work on fashion and glamour photography.
This article on Womanist Musings also points out that this isn’t the first time a black female athlete has had her gender questioned because she has reached the top of her game. There’s a
long and sordid history of calling the femininity of black women into question—especially black women athletes.
As a black, muscularly-built, short-haired woman with a low-pitched voice, Semenya doesn’t fit most people’s model of what a female athlete should look like, and this mistrust of a successful, insufficiently “feminine” black woman has led people to demand gender testing. Yet for all we know, women athletes who are intersexed or have other hormone-related conditions, but who sit comfortably within the range of popular expectations for their gender and who have the skin colour that the majority of Western eyes find most appealing, may have been slipping under the radar for years.