Paper Presentation VII:
The Gendered Body
Sunday, April 11, 10.00–11.30

Kutte Jönsson
Dept. of Sport Sciences, Malmö University

One of the most debated athletes during 2009 was the 18-year old South African runner Caster Semenya. Her winning the gold medal at 800 metres for women at the athletics World Championships in Berlin led to ugly controversies regarding her gender. The International Association of Athletics Federations (the IAAF) suspected that biologically, she was a man, not a woman. Or, in others words, that she was a “gender cheater”. Evidently, for that reason alone she was forced to undergo a degrading gender test. (The result has not been published, and it will stay unpublished if Semenya does not want to announce it.)

The case of Semenya showed how strong the gender norms in sport really are. Obviously, sport society shows very little understanding of athletes who transcend the culturally given gender barriers.

Now, Semenya is not the first in sports history to be accused of “gender cheating”. Most likely, she will not be the last either as long as sport society elaborates with the concept of gender.

But clearly, there seems to be an obsession of organizing competitive sports in gender classes. The most common reason for this order is that it serves gender equality. I doubt that, though. In fact, I believe we have reason to think that the gender equality-argument is counterproductive in terms of fairness in sports.

In my paper I will argue that gender segregation in sports is not only unfair; it also jeopardizes the moral legitimacy of competitive sports in general, as it constructs models of the categories men and women as essentially different.