“Games of Truth”?
A Foucauldian Commentary on the
Objectivation of Caster Semenya
Norman K. Swazo, Ph.D., M.H.S.A.
Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical
Ethics
College of Science and General Studies,
Alfaisal University
PO Box 50927, Riyadh 11533, Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia
Email: nswazo@alfaisal.edu
Mobile: +966 562736025
Office Telephone: +96612157726
ABSTRACT
Gender verification analysis has long been a contentious
practice in the regulation of athletes competing in international
competitions.In recent time, consequent
to her victory in the 800 meter race in Berlin, held in August 2009, the South
African teenager Caster Semenya’s long-lived sexual and gender identity as a
woman was challenged and Semenya subjected to gender verification testing.Unofficial disclosure of the results by the
public media has immersed the teenager into an international “game of truth”
having untold consequences for Semenya’s personal life, with a need for
revision of policy on gender verification such as implemented by the
International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF).In this paper, the thought of French
poststructuralist Michel Foucault is appropriated to highlight what is
centrally problematic in prevailing practices of gender verification, thereby
to call for reform of policy and practice.
“Games of Truth”?
A Foucauldian Commentary on the
Objectivation of Caster Semenya
It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple: one
must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
--Virginia Wolff
Introducing a Scandal
In August 2009, the South African teenager Caster Semenya
competed in the women’s 800 meter race at the 12th International
Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships in Athletics
held in Berlin.As Ryan Lucas reported,
“Semenya took the lead at the halfway mark and opened a commanding lead in the
last 400 meters to win by a massive 2.45 seconds in a world-leading 1 minute,
55.45 seconds.Defending champion Janeth
Jepkosgei was second and Jennifer Meadows of Britain was third in 1:57.93.”
(Lucas, 2009) If the truth be told as Virginia Wolf would have it, one must be
a woman manly lest one meet the fatality of being simply a woman.For Semenya, however, it is precisely because
she presented herself in the setting of the world championship race as “a woman
manly” that she was forced to endure the fatality of regulatory interrogations
that would determine whether she is, in fact, a woman pure and simple.
Semenya presents a global event—her
presence on the world stage converted suddenly from that of a gold-medal
champion athlete to that of a problem, viz., a perceived indeterminate
sexuality despite her having been reared in the rural environs of South Africa
as a girl and now a woman.Semenya’s
mother stated unambiguously: “She is my little girl.I raised her and I have never doubted her
gender.She is a woman and I can repeat
that a million times.”The grandmother
asks, “What can I do when they call her a man, when she’s really not a
man?”Indeed…What is anyone to do when denomination flies
rudely, abruptly, violently, in the face of a personal history in which
self-identity is held long secured by herself, her family, and her local social
relations?
The world championships are what they
are—they identify champions within the categories stipulated by various
regulatory governance structures such as the IAAF.But it is precisely this fact of governance,
of regulation, that brings to the fore what is centrally problematic in what is
now a scandal.As Jenny McAsey opined,
“It was simple enough for Caster Semenya’s rivals at the recent world
championships in Berlin.As far as they
were concerned, she looked like a man and ran like a man.She was a cheat, and should be barred.To the millions of people watching around the
world, the verdict also seemed clear-cut.She was running in the wrong race.” (McAsey 2009) The scandal is less
the assorted perceptions eliciting such superficial, even unwarranted,
judgments.The scandal is not even
merely in the public disclosure of (unofficial) results of Semenya’s gender
verification testing carried out under the authority of the IAAF which, prior
to the Berlin event, already had in place a policy on gender verification
prepared by the IAAF Medical and Anti-Doping Commission (2006).McAsey’s entry in The Australian made
it clear: Consequent to this interrogation, Caster Semenya is “lost in the grey
areas of gender,” though long before in her settled comfort of life in South
Africa she was hardly lost and quite at home as the woman all at home accept
her to be in fact.
According to public reports, the IAAF
panel investigating Semenya’s “gender” included a gynecologist, psychologist,
and internal medicine specialist.The
decision to compose a panel in this way discloses a governing prejudice—gender
verification is the province of medicine, and medicine qua domain of
knowledge is accordingly appropriated by the relevant international governing
authority to disclose the truth of the matter under dispute.The IAAF commission writes, “Whilst this
issue is far from completely resolved there is sufficient consensus of opinion
amongst experts in the field as well as sports medicine specialists to be able
to introduce a formal policy and mechanism, at least ad interim, so that proper
guidelines can be given to event organizers, national associations, athletes
and officials as to how to approach this problem and to come up with a
satisfactory solution when faced with such a case.” (IAAF Policy, 2006)Despite the policy’s explicit claim that
there is to be no “compulsory” gender verification during IAAF sanctioned
championships, Semenya was subjected to testing mandated by the IAAF in the
face of media uproar.Where there is an
official challenge, the athlete may be requested “to attend a medical
evaluation before a panel comprising gynecologist, endocrinologist,
psychologist, internal medicine specialist, expert on gender/transgender
issues.”It is unclear whether, or to
what extent, Semenya herself provided prior and explicit informed consent to
gender verification testing, consistent with operative standards of biomedical
ethics.Nonetheless, responding to media
reports on the results of Semenya’s testing, the IAAF issued a statement,
saying, media reports “should not be considered as official statements by the
IAAF” and, further, that “gender verification test results will be examined by
a group of medical experts.”
The Failure of Prejudice
IAAF may not be faulted for a premature
official decision in the Semenya case.Notwithstanding, having installed a conceptual framework with an
assortment of unexamined or unwarranted prejudices, IAAF manifests a failure of
governance from the outset.This failure
can be disclosed and contested with reference to the relevant medical standards
in place as well as with regard to assessment grounded in contemporary
biomedical ethics.But, the analysis
demanded by the Semenya case is much more fundamental, and thereby at once an
explicit challenge to the IAAF’s governing framework and a call for reform of
its policy of gender verification.The
work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault provides the requisite
analytical tools, to which we now turn.
Foucault locates his thought in what he
calls “the critical tradition of [Immanuel] Kant.” (Foucault 1984) His project,
he makes clear in a retrospective commentary to the first volume of his The
History of Sexuality, is not “an analysis of errors that might be gauged
after the fact.”He is, as he says,
concerned to understand a process in which subjectivation and objectivation are
formed in relation to knowledge (connaissance): “This objectivation and
this subjectivation are not independent of each other.From their mutual development and their
interconnection, what could be called the ‘games of truth’ come into being—that
is, not the discovery of true things but the rules according to which what a
subject can say about certain things depends on the question of true and
false.”Games of truth do not discover
what is true about a thing, about a person. Rather, they form a subject
as object of knowledge, this knowledge itself normative in the formation
of that subject such that a person then “observes,” “analyzes,” “interprets,”
“recognizes,” and understands himself or herself as “a domain of possible
knowledge.”“In short, this concerns the
history of ‘subjectivity’, if what is meant by the term is the way in which the
subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself.”
In The History of Sexuality
Foucault identifies in Western discourse on sexuality what he calls scientia
sexualis: Sexuality, in short, is what it is consistent with the scientific
knowledge, thus the scientific “truth,” one has of it.So identified, human sexuality is immediately
located in a context of power relations, in which the private and public become
intermingled, often to the violent disposition of the private in the public
domain of discourse.This violent
disposition occurs in the “medicalization” of sex, thus a discourse about
sexuality in which medicine determines the normal and the aberrant, what is
normal and what is anomaly relative to the categories of the healthy and the
pathological.Medicine, it is said,
provides “the” truth about sexuality as a typology of human anatomy and
physiology, as in the typology described by Stephen F. Kemp, who identifies
five aspects of sexual differentiation: “genetic (or genotypic) sex [“the
collection of chromosomes that an individual possesses,” thus males identified
as “46XY” and females identified as “46XX”], gonadal sex [testes for males,
ovaries for females], hormonal sex [androgen stimulation (testosterone) in the
male, estrogen in the female)], phenotypic sex [“development of external
genitalia”], and psychological sex [an individual’s emotive and behavioral
expression of sexuality].In most
individuals each of these aspects develops along the same lines, so that they
are all male or all female.”When this
is not the case in a given individual, this interpretive approach then speaks
of “discordance of sexual differentiation.” (Kemp 2006)
But, in postulating this typology,
medicine installs “a” truth disclosed in such typology and nonetheless installs
what Foucault calls “systematic blindnesses.”That is, medicine conceals what may otherwise emerge as “a” truth that
challenges its inductively derived norm-ing/taxonomical practices.These practices are given in clinical
codification, this code then serving a dual function—descriptive and
normative—in the service of accepted (dominating) social constructions, what in
the Semenya case are social constructions about human sexuality generally but
now specifically in those constructions that identify intersexuality. To
“medicalize” intersexuality is to manifest a hermeneutic comportment and
a methodological commitment—neither of which has the status of
invincible universal.Thus genetics,
urology, endocrinology, and psychology/psychiatry become the dominant medical
specializations determining method and outcome of investigations of
intersexuality.Through the impositions,
individual and collective, of this scientia sexualis (as Foucault would
say) medicine insists on manifest sexual confession—and this is clearly evident
in Semenya’s case.Either Semenya will
confess her intersexuality, or, the medical panel will confess it through its
official disclosure of the gender verification results.Semenya is then expected to understand
herself, to situate herself, in this game of truth—to observe, analyze,
interpret, recognize, thus experience, herself as intersexual, given the domain
of knowledge that identifies her so, that would thereby “govern” her
self-identification and the authorized practices that issue from this game of
truth.
What Semenya cannot and does not know
is that she (and we) need not play this game.Foucault’s analysis apprises us of “a systematic skepticism toward all
anthropological universals”—thus, e.g., skepticism about the reigning
anthropological universal that is given in sexual dimorphism—the “truth”
that humans are (thus, should be decidedly, normally) only male or female,
anything else an anomaly, an aberration, a “syndrome” subject to medicine’s
authoritative disposition.This is a
modality of self-conception that is also a modality calling for self-interrogation
in the sense that one can contest the application of the rules and so the
application of the identities imposed through the descriptive and normative
employment of those rules.These,
Foucault asserts, are historical constructs, despite their presentation as
anthropological universals. “The discourses of mental illness, delinquency, or
sexuality say what the subject is only in a certain, quite particular game of
truth; but these games are not imposed on the subject from the outside according
to a necessary causality or structural determination.They open up a field of experience in which
the subject and the object are both constituted only under certain simultaneous
conditions, but in which they are constantly modified in relation to each other,
and so they modify this field of experience itself.”
One is moved, thereby, to interrogate
the extant practice of clinical codification as it applies in the case of
Semenya, to ask whether one achieves through the installed codification thereby
the truth about human sexuality or, more telling, whether through this
codification there is installed merely a regulatory fiction, “useful” in
societal relations but already masking a will to power (as Foucault, echoing
Nietzsche, would say)—useful, that is, for medicine itself as a domain of
practices already appropriated by governance structures seeking social
assurances in the identification and protection of the “normal” against the
“anomalous” in human sexuality, even in the setting of a sport event wherein
one such as Semenya immerses herself as competitor.
Introducing the volume on Ethics and
Intersex, Sharon E. Sytsma speaks of “the challenges intersexuality raises
for both traditional medical practices and traditional cultural and religious
views on human sexuality in general.” She writes of the need for “not only the
improvement of our medical practices, but also an increasing social awareness
and understanding of intersexuality and its implications.” (Sytsma 2006)Sytsma defines ‘intersexuality’ as “the
biological condition of being ‘in between’ male and female.” Significant for
ethical analysis is the claim that “The awareness of human intersexuality has
emerged largely as a result of the trauma and harm some intersexuals attribute
to its medicalization—that is—to the fact that it has been treated as a kind of
pathology in need of medical intervention.” (Sytsma 2006)Sytsma adds, “In fairness, these medical
practices were grounded in larger unexamined historical and cultural
presuppositions.”Further, given the
practice of gender/sex-reassignment surgery, Sytsma observes, “it has been
stipulated that parents should be informed that traditional surgical practices
have not been based on evidence—that follow-up studies have not been conducted
to ensure that medical protocols were really working to increase the quality of
life of intersexuals, or that those practices would be better than simply
providing psychological counseling to help parents and children deal with the
ignorance and prejudices of people under the influence of the ‘sexual
dimorphic’ assumption.”The
“medicalization” of intersexuality has entailed the dominance of urology in the
management of such patients, “with input from endocrinology.”But, writes Sytsma, “those focuses need to be
informed by other disciplines as well—both medical and non-medical.Only fairly recently has the idea that
psychology and psychiatry could have an important role in the clinical
management of intersexuality been gaining recognition, yet we are far from the
point where psychologists are routinely incorporated into the clinical
management team.” (Sytsma 2006)
Sytsma considers the argument: “Let us
take as our starting point that intersexuality is natural.If intersexuality is natural, then the
assumption that all human beings are either wholly male or female, the theory
of sexual dimorphism, is false, or at least it is not the whole truth.Because there are so many causes of
intersexuality, and because all these causes admit of degrees, the idea of a
continuum between male and female emerges as a substitute for the ‘either/or’
model of human sexuality.” (Sytsma 2006)Further, “Another implication of the facts and etiologies of
intersexuality is that neither chromosomes, nor gene sequences, nor gonads, nor
hormones, nor rearing, nor genital appearance alone determine sexuality.Talk about being able to determine the ‘true
sex’ of a person by attending to just one of these physical elements is not
only arbitrary, but greatly misleading, and even harmful.The truth is: some people are
intersexed.”Distinguishing
intersexuality and gender identity, Sytsma writes: “Yet another continuum
characterizes gender identity.While
most of us, intersexed or not, think of ourselves as having either a masculine
or feminine gender identity, some of us feel in between these largely
socially-constructed gender categories, or capable of identifying with either
in varying degrees.Further, gender
identity is even more complicated, as is evidenced by the fact that in some
individuals it changes throughout the course of their lives.” (Sytsma 2006)
Arguments issuing from child psychology
and psychiatry distinguish sexual identity and gender identity. (Diamond 2002)
Yet, in the Semenya case these concepts and their factuality are readily
confused.The IAAF itself is concerned
with “gender” verification, yet the determination is decidedly medical,
concerned primarily with anatomy and physiology as Kemp’s typology of clinical
codification makes clear.The literature
manifests the primacy of medical analysis, “abnormal physical sex
differentiation”—even as the latter is related to a given individual’s
“psychosexual differentiation”—compared to “normal sexuality.” (Zucker 2002)
The medical model remains dominant, such that ‘intersexuality’ “has become the
preferred umbrella term used to encompass the diverse class of syndromes
characterized by some abnormality or anomaly in physical sex
differentiation.” (Zucker 2002; italics added) Intersexuality, thus, becomes in
an individual subject-ed to medical scrutiny, a subject (in Foucault’s
sense of a possible domain of knowledge with its scientific disclosure)
denominated a “disorder of physical sex differentiation,” thus a subject of
“clinical” management.
The fact is, nonetheless, that games of
truth are in play—proponents of the “medical model”versus proponents of
the “social constructionist” model. (Dreger 1998b; Fausto-Sterling 2000;
Kessler 1998) According to the medical model, “Efforts to devise accurate
taxonomic systems are, of course, dependent on our knowledge of multiple
parameters that constitute biological sex”—parameters that include “diagnostic
techniques,” including clinical miscroscopy, laparotomy, biopsy, histological
analysis.Despite such diagnostic
methods, Zucker (2002) concedes, “the notion of a ‘true sex’ in intersexuality
is problematic.Given that a person’s
physical sex is multidimensional in nature, there is no reason to insist that
one parameter should necessarily hold precedence over another.”The biological parameters are, of course,
hardly determinative, since psychosexual differentiation also contributes to
personal identity.That is: “gender
identity…refers to a young child’s developing a fundamental sense of
belonging to one sex and not another;” “gender role…refer[s] to
behaviors, attitudes, and personality traits that a society, in a given
cultural and historical period, designates as masculine or feminine, that is,
more ‘appropriate’ to or typical of the male or female social role;” “sexual
orientation is defined by a person’s relative responsiveness to sexual
stimuli;” and “sexual identity,” concerns how an individual
self-identifies (man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual,
etc.). (Zucker 2002)
Thus, any appropriate “gender”
verification in the case of Semenya cannot be limited to biological
parameters.It may be argued, indeed,
that Semenya’s gender socialization in the setting of South Africa—her
gender identity, gender role, sexual orientation, and sexual identity—discloses
more of who she is than does the sum of diagnostic results provided by medical
analysis (the urological or gynecological disclosure of reproductive
morphology, the endocrinological assessment of virilizing or feminizing
hormones, genetic assessment of chromosomes, 46XY, 46XX, or other
genotype).Whatever the model, approach,
and methods introduced, the fact is, as Preves concludes from her own empirical
study in the North American context, “medicalization is experienced as alienating
and shaming…” (Preves 2000) Despite IAAF’s presumed effort to implement its
gender verification policy in this case, basic biomedical ethics principles
have been ignored—non-maleficence, doing no harm to Semenya, despite beneficence
interests, seeking to do good with reference to international championship
participant protocol, in the collective sense.The medical subjectivation of Semenya itself unavoidably and irrevocably
introduces her to a prospect of sustained gender dysphoria, when otherwise
Semenya would be quite “herself” as before the ruckus elicited from Berlin.
It is, therefore, no surprise to find a
bioethicist such as Alice Dreger write a decade ago on ethical issues in the
treatment of intersexuality and juxtapose the expression “ambivalent medicine”
and “ambiguous sex.” (Dreger 1998a) The medicalization of sexuality and the
subjectivation of individuals declared to be intersexual disclose the
ambivalence of medicine in the face of a phenomenon identified as a syndrome,
but which, external to this game of truth, would have a different
disclosure.The mis-management of the
Semenya case highlights the presence of medical paternalism in conflict with
normally expected deference to the (seemingly lacking) prior explicit and
informed consent to gender verification testing in a teenager (or at least the
proxy consent otherwise accorded the parents).
Conclusion: Achieving Justice in Sport Competition
The Semenya
scandal brings to the fore the occasion and motivations that put the gender
verification process in motion and calls this process into question.J.C. Reeser writes that the goal of
regulations adopted by international sports federations “is to keep the
‘playing field level’ so that athletes may compete fairly and honestly.”
(Reeser 2005) Prima facie, the goal is honorable and uncontroversial
when the referential context is one seeking to assure fair and honest
competition, thus to ward off and prevent cheating and assure “the integrity of
the sport.”‘Cheating’ connotes
deception, intent to deceive that materializes in a fraudulent practice.In the case of Caster Semenya, neither she
nor her sponsoring team structure of South African sports officials entered
Semenya in the Berlin games with intent to deceive. Granted, as Reeser opines,
“It seems intuitively obvious, given the physiological differences that exist
between men and women, that athletes should compete against others of the same
sex, unless otherwise specified by rule—for example, in coeducational
contests—or in disciplines for which the physiological differences between men
and women offer no competitive advantage or disadvantage.” (Reeser 2005)
Thus, “in keeping with the ethic of
fair play,” Reeser adds, “most international sports federations…organize their
major competitions along sex restricted lines.”So it is with the IAAF Berlin competition in which Semenya
participated.Justice is achieved
through such sex-restricted competition—the ethics of fair play assures neither
competitive advantage nor disadvantage among competitors, and each is thereby
given his or her due.Giving what is due
to her (absent evidentiary disclosures of any occult gender verification
testing conducted by South African officials prior to Semenya’s entry into the
Berlin games), all can readily agree Semenya is not “a man masquerading as a
woman.”From the focus on Semenya’s
“manly” phenotype, one can identify an assumption, stated by Reeser more
generally thus: “most people exposed to testosterone from puberty onward will
develop physical and/or physiological attributes that contribute to a distinct
performance advantage over most women.” (Reeser 2005) Semenya’s physical
features suggest to many that her prowess in the 800-meter race derives from
such hormonal (pre-pubertal, pubertal, post-pubertal residual) influence, and
thus that she “upset the level playing field of female competition.”But, at best one can say Semenya is nothing
other than what Virginia Wolf found desirable, viz., to be a woman manly,
rather than a woman pure and simple.There is no injustice done when nature itself makes Semenya a
woman manly, though nurture makes her a woman pure and simple.Whether on the world stage in Berlin or in
the remote environs of South Africa, Caster Semenya presents herself as the
woman she is rightfully.
Accordingly, the IAAF’s policy of
gender verification is in need of reform, to be broadened to include on such
panels of experts the input of bioethicists and philosophers competent in
intercultural philosophy, so as to overcome the structured prejudices of the
medicalization of sexuality and the insults to intersexuals seeking their
rightful place in international competitions.
REFERENCES
Diamond, Milton. 2002. Sex and Gender are
Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different. Clinical Child
Psychology and Psychiatry, 7:3, 320-334
Dreger, A. 1998a. ‘Ambiguous Sex’—or
Ambivalent Medicine? Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Intersexuality. The
Hastings Center Report, 28
Dreger, A. 1998b. Hermaphrodites and the
Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Fausto-Sterling, A.2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and
the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books
Foucault, Michel (pseudonym: Maurice
Florence).1984. Foucault. Dictionnaire
des philosophes. 942-944, http://foucault.info/foucault/biography.html, accessed 13
September 2009.
International Association of Athletic
Federations. 2006. Policy on Gender Verification. http://www.iaaf.org; accessed 13
September 2009.
Kemp, S. F. 2006. The Role of Genes and
Hormones in Sexual Differentiation,” in Sytsma, S.E. 2006. Ethics and
Intersex. Springer. 1-16
Kessler, S. 1998. Lessons from the
Intersexed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
Lucas, Ryan. 2009. “South African Teen Caster
Semenya Wins Women’s 800 Meters at Worlds Amid Gender Questions,”http://blog.taragana.com/...south-african-teen-caster-semenya-wins-womens-800
–meters-at-worlds-amid-gender-questions-21459/, accessed 13 September 2009.
McAsey, Jenny. 2009. “Caster Semenya Lost in
the Grey Areas of Gender,”The Australian, 12 September 2009, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26060357-501..., accessed 12
September 2009.
Preves, S. E. 2000. Negotiating the
Constraints of Gender Binarism: Intersexuals; Challenge to Gender
Categorization. Current Sociology, 48:3, 27-50
Reeser, J.C. 2005. Gender Identity and Sport:
Is the Playing Field Level? British Journal of Sports Medicine, 39,
695-699
Sytsma, S. E. 2006.Ethics and Intersex. Springer
Zucker, Kenneth J. 2002. Intersexuality and
Gender Identity Differentiation.Journal
of Pediatric Adolescent Gynecology. 15:3-13