According to online reports, South African runner Caster Semenya is a hermaphrodite with both male and female organs.
As we originally thought, 18-year-old Semenya has no uterus or ovaries. Her vagina is a pouch that leads nowhere and she has internal testicles that never descended, but which continue to produce testosterone that gives her secondary male sex characteristics such as facial hair, masculine physique and a deep voice.
Last week, Semenya was given a makeover by the magazine YOU. Semenya laughed off the controversy about her gender and called the sex testing “a joke.”
But a source with the track & field world organizing body, IAAF, was today quoted as saying: “There certainly is evidence now that Semenya is a hermaphrodite. So what they do now is they do everything, and then they can say look, not only has she got this, she’s got that and the other.”
It was the IAAF that originally ordered a battery of tests to determine Semenya’s gender after the South Africans refused a request to do it.
Athletics South Africa president Leonard Chuene said his organization is ignoring the claims. “We cannot get involved in gossip of this sort,” he said in a statement. “She is at university at the moment. She must concentrate on her studies. We stand fully behind her as our athlete.”
Semenya’s uncle Lesiba Rammabi, 51, said her relatives were ‘very humiliated’ by the reports. He said: “I believe Caster is normal, inside and out. What does it matter whether she can have babies or not? Many people cannot have children, why else do parents adopt? Are those women not women also?”
