London Review Blog

Wise Distinctions

2009-11-20T21:50:19Z

I was glad to see in today’s press that it was decided to separate the question of what sex Caster Semenya really is from the questions of whether she could keep her medal or compete in women’s sports. It seemed to me that the drive to publish the results of the sex determination tests was always sensationalist and intrusive, and that it missed the important points at issue in this situation. Yesterday’s decision by the IAFF goes part of the way to honour the complexity and vulnerability of the person here, but also to affirm the way her gender is bound up with cultural and familial modes of belonging and recognition. In fact, I wonder why we feel compelled to determine sex in a definite way, given that sex can be ambiguous (and is for at least 10 per cent of the population, and much more if you take ‘psychological factors’ into account), and the standards that we use to ‘determine’ it are clearly shifting and not always consistent with one another (chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, to name a few). In fact, the negotiated agreement with Semenya is not based on the ‘facts’ of sex, but on a consensus achieved among the various parties to the case about how to proceed. Let’s applaud this distinction.

After all, the question of whether she should be allowed to keep her medal or to participate in women’s athletics is different from the question of what sex she really is – and should remain so. Given that so many people do not conform to the standards that establish univocal sex, we have to find other ways to decide the question of who can compete under what category. That is not an easy decision, but it is important to keep in mind that we can invoke certain standards for admission to compete under a particular gender category without deciding whether or not the person unequivocally ‘is’ that category. If the standard turns out to be, for instance, hormone levels, and it is decided that one cannot exceed certain levels of testosterone to play in women’s sports, then a competitor could still be a ‘woman’ in a cultural and social sense and, indeed, in some biological senses as well, but she would not qualify to compete under those standards. Conversely a ‘man’ in a cultural sense may not qualify to compete in men’s sports according to the same standard, but does qualify for women’s sports – why should that be a problem? In both cases, we would not have to first decide the sex to establish qualifications for competition under a particular gender category. I’m not saying that this should be the standard, but am only using it as an example in order to show how standards for qualification do not have to be the same as final decisions about sex, and these can certainly be distinct from larger and overlapping questions of gender. Similarly, the decision that Semenya can retain the title is a separate issue from what the scientific findings are – this is the wise distinction encoded in the agreement between the sports ministry and those representing Semenya in this proceeding.

It is important to remember why in 1999 sex testing was ruled out for world sports competitions. I gather it kept making ‘errors’ and that there was no agreement on results. Let’s remember as well that results of such tests always have to be interpreted, and that is the place where gender norms frame and pervade scientific findings (see Helen Longino’s excellent work on this topic).

I confess to being amused and interested by two propositions put forward by this morning’s New York Times article. The first comes from the South African sports minister: ‘Caster Semenya can decide to run as a woman, which she is.’ It would seem that if she can decide, then her gender is, to some extent, a matter of decision. But if she ‘is’ a woman, then it would seem not to be a decision. The statement contains two different standards for what we think about sex-determination, and it also belies a certain confusion between sex-determination and gender identity. The second claim is: ‘it is unclear what the exact threshold is, in the eyes of the IAFF, for a female athlete’s being ineligible to compete as a woman.’ One would think that if she is a female athlete, she can compete as a woman, but obviously the NY Times is making a certain sex/gender distinction. In fact, the sports association works backwards, trying to decide whether or not the athlete is ‘female’ at all. And yet, if we consider that this act of ‘sex determination’ was supposed to be collaboratively arrived at by a panel that included ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender’ (why wasn’t I called!?), then the assumption is that cultural and psychological factors are part of sex-determination, and that no one of these ‘experts’ could come up with a definitive finding on his or her own (presuming that binary gender holds). This co-operative venture suggests as well that sex-determination is decided by consensus and, conversely, where there is no consensus, there is no determination of sex. Is this not a presumption that sex is a social negotiation of some kind? And are we, in fact, witnessing in this case a massive effort to socially negotiate the sex of Semenya, with the media included as a party to the deliberations?

The whole debate also elides the condition of intersex. We might say as well that the institution of world sports rests upon a certain denial of intersex as a persistent dimension of human morphology, genetics and endocrinology. What would happen if the IAFF or any other world sports organisation decided that it needed to come up with a policy on how those with an intersex condition might participate in competitive sports? If they refuse to come up with such a policy, then we could say that they have preemptively excluded intersexed peoples from competition, making discrete sex determination into a prerequisite for entering competitions. This would not only be blatantly discriminatory, it would make the ideal of sexual dimorphism into a prerequisite for participation. So rather than try and find out what sex Semenya or anyone else really ‘is’, why don’t we think instead about standards for participation under gender categories that have the aim of being both egalitarian and inclusive? Only then might we finally cease the sensationalist witch hunt antics of finding anyone’s ‘true sex’ and open sports to the complexly constituted species of human animals to which we belong.

Come Back Karl

2009-11-20T11:05:32Z

Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that capitalism would need to get redder in tooth and claw before it was undermined by its internal contradictions. The Russian Revolution however had not occurred in the most advanced capitalist country, which is why, by my way of thinking, it could only be kept alive by tyranny – a premature baby in an incubator was the metaphor I liked to use. In the West it had been shown that enlightened capitalist societies could smooth away their own roughest edges, by taking on board social democracy, the welfare state, decolonisation and the like. All this seemed to put the kibosh on the old man’s gloomy prognostication of capitalism’s needing to get worse before it exploded, releasing us into a brave new socialist world that not even Marx could describe in detail (consistently with his belief that it was the material base that determined intellectual superstructures), and that I, for one, was not at all confident that I would come to like. Happy days.

Then came Thatcher, Reagan and 1989; smashing the incubator that was the only thing keeping the Communist weakling alive, and reversing the social democratic ‘advances’, as we had seen them, of fifty years. All this really did seem to be driven by underlying economic imperatives. (Thatcher and Reagan were only riding them.) Since then events have followed Marx’s closer predictions almost uncannily: globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, the undermining of democracy, the triumph of a capitalist discourse (railway ‘customers’ rather than ‘passengers’), the decline of socialist ideology, and a succession of capitalist crises, each worse than the last – but none of them as yet showing any sign of being the last. Come back Karl; all is forgiven. You were right. (Up to ‘the revolution’, that is.)

I imagine that others must have had thoughts such as these, but I’ve not seen much sign of them in the triumphalism that has greeted the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

Tales of Diplomacy: The Great Wall

2009-11-19T23:53:58Z

Richard Nixon, visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972, said: ‘I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.’

Ronald Reagan, visiting the Wall in 1984, said: ‘What can you say except it’s awe-inspiring? It is one of the great wonders of the world.’ Asked if he would like to build his own Great Wall, Reagan drew a circle in the air and said: ‘Around the White House.’

Bill Clinton, visiting the Wall in 1998, said: ‘So if we had a couple of hours, we could walk 10 kilometres, and we’d hit the steepest incline, and we’d all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we’d be finished. It was a good workout. It was great.’

George W. Bush, visiting the Wall in 2002, signed the guest book and said: ‘Let’s go home.’ He made no other comments.

Barack Obama, visiting the Wall on Wednesday, said: ‘It’s majestic. It’s magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history, and that our time here on Earth is not that long, so we better make the best of it.’ During Obama’s visit, the Starbucks and KFC at the base of the Wall were closed.

On Tiptoe

2009-11-19T13:05:42Z

During his first visit to China, Barack Obama reportedly addressed a range of contentious issues with his hosts, in private: Iran, North Korea, climate change, the yuan and its impact on the global financial crisis. But, whether in public or in private, the US president tiptoed very lightly when talking about China’s human rights record. At a town hall meeting in Shanghai with young Chinese, Obama deflected the chance to criticise Beijing’s censorship of the internet, for example, talking only about universal rights in the vaguest terms. At a scripted ‘press conference’ – neither he nor the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, actually took any questions – Obama walked the same line, telling Hu that the US is committed to universal rights, but refusing to mention any of China’s specific failings.

This is part of a new US strategy towards repressive regimes. The Obama administration hopes that showing it’s willing to talk may possibly produce some real change, and will certainly demonstrate a clear break from the Bush administration, which divided the world into enemies and friends and simply refused to talk to its enemies. ‘There’s nothing wrong with talking – talking to anyone,’ one State Department official told me.

But if the Bush administration went too far in one direction, Obama risks going too far the other way. The Bush and Clinton administrations showed that China responds to a harder line. Both presidents were able to use the bully pulpit to highlight rights abuses in China, and it had an effect: according to Human Rights Watch, there has been a significant decline in human rights in China during Obama’s presidency, with crackdowns on human-rights lawyers and other activists. Even now, with Beijing possessing more leverage than in the past because of its massive holdings of American debt, China is far from the omnipotent global colossus it’s sometimes portrayed as in the media (its GDP per capita is about the same as Angola’s). Obama needs to realise that it’s possible to be both critical and co-operative at the same time.

Prophetic Deer

2009-11-18T14:58:23Z

Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena

Jacques Audiard’s new film, A Prophet (which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and best film at the London Film Festival), is a prison thriller, yes, but an odd one. In the best scene our hero, Malik, is handcuffed in a car, being taken by a rival gang through the countryside near Marseille to the beach for negotiations (he’s on day release). The rival gang’s leader, Lattrache, isn’t sure of him: why is an Arab working for the Corsicans? Unsatisfactory answers bring Lattrache’s gun closer to Malik’s neck. Lattrache asks about a friend of his who died in prison (at our hero’s hands) – does Malik know anything about it? Who did it? Just as Malik is on the point of incriminating himself, he shouts ‘Animal!’ and a deer crashes into the windscreen. The camera follows the spinning body in slow motion as it arcs to the ground. Lattrache can’t believe it: ‘Are you a prophet or what?’

In Anne Carson’s poem ‘Deer (not a play)’, published in the LRB in 2007, the deer really is a sort of prophet. We are in the English countryside, and Jimi Hendrix is chatting to his limo driver on the way to Heathrow. This deer ‘can see/310/degrees around every lick’.

‘What is it about deer?’ the limo driver says.

‘…’ Jimi says, quite rightly.

The deer come from nowhere to change everything. They are meant to be mysteries. Or lunch (these are French gangs, after all): after Lattrache and his men uncuff our hero, they turn their guns on the deer and put its corpse in the boot instead of Malik’s. At the coast, with the rival gangs reconciled and ready to do some business about a casino, Lattrache’s mother washes Malik’s bloody shirt (it will not come clean) and Lattrache washes the side of venison in the sea and hangs it to dry on a hook.