There is a lot of sports-related hysteria cropping up on the internet, in the wake of guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/19/caster-semenya-800m-world-athletics-championships-gender">the situation with Caster Semenya.  The South African runner swept the competition, winning a gold medal in the 800 meter at the World Athletics Championships.  The question of whether or not Semenya was born female has been officially raised, and she is currently circling through an embarrassing barrage of medical tests to determine her gender.

I can't speak for the World Athletic Championships, because honestly I'd never heard of them until now.  (I'm not much of a sports fan, obviously.)  But I did learn a lot this morning about how the Olympics work, and how my first impression - that the Olympics were WRONG AND EVIL AND SEXIST - was completely wrong.

This is an excellent example of how easy it is to go off half-cocked. The Outrage Gun has a hair trigger, you know?

First of all, the basic elements can make some of us edgy.  There are men's competitions and women's competitions, and rarely the twain shall meet.  As far as I was able to determine, the equestrian events are the only Olympic sports in which men and women compete directly against each other.

It's difficult in the year 2009 to justify gender-specific anything, honestly.  Much less something as clearly bounded as men's Olympic sports, in which women are NOT allowed to compete, and vice versa.  But there is no argument that men and women do not have the same physiology.  Separating the sports by gender, particularly at the Olympic level where tenths of a second matter A LOT, is the only way to make things fair.

According to a Guardian article, if the committee rules that Semenya was not born a woman, she will be stripped of her medal.  I, confused at several levels, originally interpreted this as "transgendered people are not allowed to compete in the Olympics."  How wrong I was!

In 2004, the International Olympic Committee ruled that transgendered people can compete in gendered sports, as long as their reassignment surgery was performed at least two years before the competition, and their hormone treatment levels are "equal to that of a person born to the gender."  In other words, as long as the gender reassignment has been completed, you're good to go.

You want to jump up and say, "How dare you question Caster Semenya's gender?  Just because she's good at something, you think she must be A MAN?!"  But then you read more about how she came out of nowhere to post a time that was ridiculously higher than her competitors.  And you can't help but think there must be something going on there.  Interestingly enough, taking artificial testosterone is a fairly common form of "blood doping" for both female and male athletes, and won't THAT confuse the testing results.

The problem is that these specific examples are - I think you will agree - fair.  But people like to equate sports with life, and generalize these specific examples to the rest of life, and the next thing you know, women are getting paid less in the workplace because "they can't compete against men."