Thomas Rogers of Salon's Broadsheet (9/10/09, ad-viewing required) reports that world champion South African runner Caster Semenya recently "was tested (possibly without her consent) by the International Association of Athletics Federations" and "now the results of her gender testing have leaked, and, if the reports are to be believed, they show that she is, in fact, biologically intersex."

After an informative look at the real biological meaning of the test findings that "led some media outlets to call her a 'hermaphrodite' (and some even more inaccurately calling her 'a woman … and a man')," Rogers writes that, to him,

Caster's story, however, is particularly poignant. She's only 18 years old. She only recently asserted her girly side on the cover of a magazine. More tragically, though, it's likely she had no idea about her sexual condition before today. Many intersex people don't learn about their biological history until well into their life, and the discovery can be predictably traumatic if not destructive. To make things worse, in Semenya's case, her discovery is being played out on an international stage, under the microscope of an ill-informed and often predatory press, while she's being faced with the knowledge that her career is likely to end.

If there’s an upside to the story, it’s that it’s likely to put intersex issues into the spotlight in a way that they’ve rarely been before. Unlike transgendered people (who benefited from films like Transamerica), intersex people haven’t had many great breakthroughs into mainstream culture.

But that's a pretty big if, considering corporate media's record of unenlightened gender reporting; see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Transforming Coverage: Transgender Issues Get Greater Respect—but Anatomy Remains Destiny" (11–12/07) by Julie Hollar.

Eighteen-year-old Caster Semenya, a runner from South Africa, just blew away the competition in the women's 800-meter world championship race. But the news reports yesterday weren't about that--they were about whether she's "really" a woman or not. And supposedly serious outlets like the AP and CNN are sinking to tabloid levels of coverage on the issue.

The AP video of the controversy, posted on the L.A. Times website, kicks off: "Quick! Man--or woman?" The piece includes slow pans over Semenya's body, more tabloidy commentary ("She--and yes, SHE claims to be a woman"), and the offering of her voice as some sort of evidence that she's not what she claims to be. It's what you'd sadly expect to find on E! or some other tabloid show--not the AP, or the L.A. Times' website, for that matter.

CNN's Jack Cafferty's response to the news was: "Story creeps me out. It's weird. Do you think she's a man or a woman?" His colleague Campbell Brown teased the "bizarre story" and promised viewers "a whole lot more on this very strange case coming up a little bit later tonight." CNN's Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill called it "fascinating," "amazing" and "wild."

During her full story on the subject, Brown acknowledged one of the problems with the scrutiny: "I mean, this is a young woman, a young girl. It's a pretty cruel thing for this girl to have to go through emotionally, psychologically presuming it's not a scam." Yes indeed, scrutinizing someone's body and gender presentation (as well as your accomplishments) on television and calling it bizarre and creepy is pretty cruel, as well as unprofessional. Unfortunately, that sort of coverage of people with different gender presentations is not unusual--and awareness of that cruelty didn't stop Brown from feeding into it.