Monday, September 14, 2009

There are four types of sex for each person

There is your phenotype, which is what you look like, your psychological sex, which is what you feel like and which usually the same as your phenotype and related to how you have been brought up.

There is also your gonadal sex which is whether you have ovaries or testicles and your chromosomal sex which is what combination of x or y chromosomes you have.

I have been following the Caster Semenya story, she's an 18-year-old "female"  world champion in 800m from South Africa, the woman (or man?) has improved dramatically in only few months and wins by a big difference, she also looks like a man, which led many people to think she's a man in disguise, however, her mom swears that she has been born a girl!

Anyway, the IAAF decided to run gender tests on her, and upon the results, i.e. if she's male, she will be disqualified. So the results won't be in for another couple of weeks.

You can read more here.
 

2 comments:

  1. I had been following this too. I wonder though how she and her family are coping with all of this. Do you know what her gender turned out to be?

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  2. nothing definitive yet, we wait for the IAAF a coupla more weeks

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