In this essay, I will be discussing the core arguments made in an article about the South African female athlete Caster Semenya and the crises she has faced over the years in society and in the world of athletics because of her gender.
This article is one of many that goes to show prejudices held towards people who do not conform to the acceptable roles of society that have been labelled as such. People who fall outside of what is generally seen as normal are not treated the same as others and they are seen as a threat. Those who go public about their gender identities are slammed harder than those who keep quiet because as more people decide to come out to the rest of society and live their lives, it somewhat creates a disturbance because then the world is not truly black and white as one would like to think. The fact that not everyone’s personal identity and gender will correspond with their birth sex is somewhat a hard pill to swallow in a society that has held this belief across generations.
In a sociological perspective, gender is a social construct because it is something that society has created and enforced. (Connell, 2005) argues that gender is a social structure that is shaped by how reproductive distinctions between different bodies are incorporated into social processes. This means that a boy or a girl is born they will be raised in ways that will portray their sex and they are expected to behave in a way that is associated with their sex. Cisgender is a gender description for when a person’s birth sex corresponds with their gender identity. These are the people who make up the majority of the world’s population and they are also the people who are considered to be privileged because they are spared from the judgemental looks and eyes of scrutiny.
People who identify as cisgender have privileges that they benefit from everyday unknowingly whereas the people who do not have to face many challenges throughout their day. An example could be how difficult it is for a transgender to find a public restroom that they can use without the fear of being harassed. Often, a transgender will be attacked in a restroom by someone who identifies as cisgender because they do not understand. A reason for this could be that even when discussions on gender and gender inequality are introduced, more often than not, they focus mostly on gender inequality on cisgender men and women. When a topic like this one escalates, it tends to go towards the topic of race and hardly ever about the fact that there is more than one gender. When people like Caster Semenya speak out and choose to live their lives the way they want, it is as if a taboo has been breached and when all these different media platforms tell their stories or people start demonstrating in hopes of being heard and ending gender inequality the world seems to wake up because now people are speaking up about the injustices that they have faced because of their gender. It is like how when you have been denying a bad experience of some sort by refusing to acknowledge it but then one day you have to say it out loud and then you realise just how bad that experience was because now you are admitting to its existence.
The process whereby children learn that there are different expectations for girls and boys is called gender socialization and it teaches people to behave according to social norms (Little, 2014). It happens through the influence of family, friends and the media and recurring exposure to such eventually makes you believe that the role you are in is a natural thing. Society normalised heterosexuality and anything outside of that was obviously abnormal. In the previous decades, homosexuality was not considered as a form of sexual orientation but an illness that people at that time believed could be cured. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatrists in the South African Defence Force Military Hospital partook in human rights abuse by utilising aversion therapy , hormone therapy, sex change operations and barbiturates on young white homosexual men as a means to ‘cure’ them from their homosexual ‘disease’ (Jones, 2008).
Had it been that society never normalised things over others and accepted people’s differences from the beginning, most of the issues that the world is still facing concerning gender would perhaps be resolved and there would be fewer hate crimes. People who face gender discrimination are often vulnerable because you are the minority and help in situations like these is often difficult to come across. People feel alone and as if the entire world is against them and this can lead to health issues of all kinds such as depression and a possible suicide. When individuals or groups who do not ‘fit’ established gender norms they face stigma, discriminatory practices or social exclusion-all of which adversely affect health (Anon., ).
Many people have found themselves in situations that may have been like that of Caster Semenya. The world has not exactly been an easy place for people who faced circumstances like hers and society tried to change people like Caster Semenya through inhumane medical practices and when that did not work their existence was somehow shadowed. It is said that no human being is better than the other and that we are all equal but moments when stories like Caster Semenya’s and other individuals who face inequality daily, it is clear that other people are seen as not worthy. If equality were truly a thing, everyone would be living their own life with ease and nobody would be fighting for equal rights or fighting so that the rest of the world acknowledges their existence and accepts it. Nobody would be demonstrating on the streets for any acknowledgement if society had not chosen ignorance in hopes that if you ignore it will go away.
References
- Anon., . WHO: World Health Organization. [Online] Available at: http://www.who.int/gender/genderandhealth/en/
[Accessed 9 5 2019]. - Connell, R., 2005. The Sociological Organization of Masculinity.
- Jones, T. F., 2008. Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of ‘Homosexuality’ in 1960s South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, , 34(2), pp. 397-410.
- Little, W., 2014. Introduction to Sociology-1st Canadien Edition, s.l.: BC campus.
- https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology/chapter/chapter12-gender-sex-and-sexuality/
- https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-aversion-therapy-2796001
- https://www.pride.com/lgbt/2016/3/21/11-cisgender-privileges-you-didnt-know-you-had
