Essentialism, gender and Caster Semenya

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/09/14/essentialism-gender-and-caster-semenya/
Gracie Remington
9/14/09

After hearing that Caster Semenya has gone into hiding and is receiving trauma counseling in the wake of the firestorm of publicity surrounding her gender verification tests, Peggy Orenstein's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine seems much more immediate and intriguing. In an article titled "What Makes a Woman A Woman?," Orenstein details her own struggle with the concept of femininity when faced with the prospect of a double masectomy and the removal of her ovaries due to a genetic predisposition to reproductive cancers, tying it to the current hubbub surrounding Semenya's gender. Orenstein talks candidly about her experience, recalling various moments of uncertainty regarding her gender following her diagnosis: "I began to fret: without breasts or hormone-producing ovaries, what would the difference be, say, between myself and a pre-op female-to-male transsexual? That seemed an awfully thin straw on which to base my entire sense of womanhood. What, precisely, made me a girl anyway? Who got to decide? How much did it matter?"