In the wake of Caster Semenya's victory in the women's 800m track event at the world championships in Berlin recently, debate has erupted with a velocity that would leave the runner herself in the dust: is she a man or is she a woman?
Conversations have bristled with aspersions and slander. Could a womanly being ever be housed within that rippling, muscular carapace? Was it really a female that hurtled bullet-like towards the finish line, leaving the crowd gasping for breath before it found its voice and began booing the unknown 18-year-old South African runner? Is it fair that an athlete who clearly fails to comply with the prototype of a real woman — she doesn't even possess breasts! — be allowed to compete against those who have obediently ticked all the aesthetic boxes?
These urgent interrogations will be laid to rest by the results of gender verification tests. But the pressing issue is not whether Semenya is male, hyper-androgynous, or, as she claims, 'entirely female', and hence entitled to her gold medal. More burdensome by far is the ferocious public response to a predicament that clearly called for maturity and restraint.
Like participants in a ghastly Milgram torture experiment, onlookers treated Semenya with predictable cruelty, thoughtlessly following the leader as they heaped contempt upon the vulnerable young woman caught unwittingly in the headlights.
It was only when she arrived home to a large and impassioned crowd of supporters that Semenya finally tasted the glory that had failed to materialise in Berlin.
But even here, common sense had been abandoned, this time in favour of nationalistic fervour and the predictable claim that the controversy was the result of racism. (The fact that the black-skinned Usain Bolt had thrilled the same Berlin crowd with his own brand of athletic prowess was conveniently ignored.)
And even before Semenya had stepped off the plane, supporters were laying claim to her hotly contested gender, with placards insisting that 'Caster is 100 per cent woman'.
In an abstract sense, the public humiliation of Caster Semenya is tainted by politics. After all, she represents a nation of people that, having once held a high curiosity value amongst imperial interlopers, are now politically irrelevant and easily dismissed.
But beyond the relative fatuity of politics, the debacle touches a nerve inflamed less by race than human dignity and the conditional way in which we apply