Caster Semenya sex row: What makes a woman?
o Germaine Greer
o
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 August 2009 19.56 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/20/germaine-greer-caster-semenyaWhat makes a woman? Are women made? Feminist orthodoxy says yes; feminist fundamentalists hold that biology is a cultural creation. You can see what they mean; biology has traditionally studied the male animal and extrapolated the female as a disembodied set of reproductive organs.
Even though we know that a Y chromosome is only an X that has lost a leg, we still think in terms of male = perfect, female = imperfect. In plainer terms what the academic feminists could be taken to be saying is that (a) you're a woman if you think you are and (b) you're a woman if other people think you are. Unfortunately (b) cannot be made to follow from (a).
