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BERLIN — As an 18-year-old runner from a village in South Africa received her gold medal in Olympic Stadium on Thursday night, activity away from the track had put her at the center of an international dispute: doctors here and in her home country were examining test results to determine whether she has too many male characteristics to compete as a woman.
The case of Caster Semenya, who has burst to prominence this season, touched off a debate over whether she should be allowed to keep her medal and, more broadly, how sports officials are supposed to discern the fuzzy biological line between male and female.
Medical experts said assigning sex was hardly as easy as sizing someone up visually. Even rigorous examinations can result in ambiguous findings. Some conditions that give women male characteristics can be discovered only through intrusive physical examinations, and others require genetic analysis.
“We can get quite philosophical here — what does it mean to be male or female?” said Dr. Richard Auchus, a specialist in disorders of sexual differentiation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
“For 99 percent of the population it’s easy to determine,” he added. “But one percent of the population have conditions that make it not so straightforward.”
Some of Semenya’s competitors in the 800 meters considered the issue straightforward after Semenya romped to a commanding victory at the world championships Wednesday. “Just look at her,” said Mariya Savinova of Russia, who finished fifth. Elisa Cusma of Italy, who was sixth, told Italian journalists: “These kind of people should not run with us. For me, she’s not a woman. She’s a man.”
But the matter is anything but simple. The testing done on Semenya, at the behest of the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s world governing body, takes weeks to complete. It requires a physical medical evaluation, and includes reports from a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist, an internal medicine specialist and an expert on gender. The effort, coordinated by Dr. Harold Adams, a South African on the I.A.A.F. medical panel, is being conducted at hospitals in Berlin and South Africa.
It is unclear what the exact threshold is, in the eyes of the I.A.A.F., for a female athlete being ineligible to compete as a woman......
The power of the human mind to create more complications...
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