Reply to comment

 news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/8344591.stm

I was perusing the internet and found this update about the controversy in South Africa, thought I'd share...

"Athletics South Africa wishes to publicly and unconditionally apologise to Caster Semenya and her family, the President of South Africa as well as to all South Africans for the handling of her gender verification processes and the subsequent aftermath."

I'm really appalled about this part of the story, I cannot believe this is the way the tests were conducted:

"She was told it was random doping tests she was being taken to in South Africa and Berlin, in the meantime it was gender verification tests.

"She was never briefed properly about her rights and the implications about the outcome of the tests.

"She was never given the opportunity to make a decision to compete or allow medical interventions that could regularise her situation."

_______

Also, in Junior Seminar we are currently reading Walt Whitman. I found some quotes from his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that reminded me of this course and Kate Bornstein, especially considering the issues of identity that we are facing right now with her work.

"I too had receiv'd identity by my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I / knew I should be of my body." 

And another, 

"Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are, / You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul, / About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas"

Though the poem itself isn't necessarily about gender and sexuality as identities, it does give an idea of unity between the speaker and the reader and kind of outlines processes for moving past individual identities, the individual identities Kate Bornstein suggests are holding us back. From Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, Howard Nelson writes that this movement beyond identity can be taken "through the physical world itself, through shared human nature and experience; and through works of art (and especially this work of art)" (link for citation: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_10.html). It's fascinating to me that even in the 19th century, phrases such as "receiv'd identity by my body" and "Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are" existed, which suggests that there must have been some sort of thought or discussion about the the body and how the ways in which bodies are perceived by others mark how people label each other. Both of these lines remind me of the way infants are immediately identified by their doctors as "male" or "female" when they are born, and this identification influences the way the infant lives the rest of its (his or her) life, and the problems people are now facing because of this practice because no one has the opportunity to decide their gender for themselves.