Professional Sport and Compulsory Heterosexuality

"Extensive physical examinations of Semenya, who is just 18 and from a remote village in the country's far north, has shown the athlete is technically a hermaphrodite. Medical reports indicate she has no ovaries, but rather has internal male testes, which are producing large amounts of testosterone...

The presence of both male and female characteristics will come as a devastating blow to Semenya, who has fought off snide remarks about her masculine appearance for much of her life."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/09/11/1252519599453.html

It's amazing how professional sport works to secure compulsory heterosexuality, which is constitutive of the social. Medicical discipline plays a crucial role, rendering the uncanny, into coded form. Medical knowledge labels Semenya as 'technically a hermaphrodite' and she has no place in professional sport, no more. The Semanya event, if we may name the whole thing as such, shows how professional sport requires bodies to be classifiable in heterosexual categories. It was her outlook which first troubled the global sport scence now are the test results.