[This is an expanded version of a comment prompted by this insightful post from Prof. Sussuro.]
Caster Semenya won the women’s 800-meter race by 2.45 seconds over her nearest rival. I want to start with that fact, because that win is amazing. She is amazing. And this being lost in all these rumors and speculations about Semenya’s sex, gender tests, and possible disqualification.
By now, a number of Pinoys have noted similarities between Semenya and Nancy Navalta, a Pinay teenager whose gender came under scrutiny when she started setting track records in the Philippines in the early 1990s. For both Semenya and Navalta, it was their appearance—their well-muscled physiques and flat, powerful chests—that was used to question their femaleness. Both women departed radically from the standards of beauty and softness often associated with womanhood.
Professor Sussuro discusses the racialized standards of femaleness and what gets considered as gender transgressions among black female bodies in the diaspora. Her analysis brings to mind the violence with which colonizers imposed Eurocentric male-female binaries. In many non-Western societies, there is at least recognition of different sex categories. The hijras in India and Pakistan, for example, and the kathoey in Thailand.
And in the Philippines as well. In the pre-colonial Philippines, the bayougin were people with male genitalia who identified and were accepted as female. Some bayougin even led religious ceremonies, a task usually reserved for the female babaylan and catalonan. PinayTG has a great discussion of pre-colonial gender variance in the Philippines. There is evidence that pre-colonial societies in the Philippines and neighboring countries had much broader categories of sex and gender.
The recognition does not translate to tolerance or equality today, however, as people who live outside strict male-female gender boundaries are very much marginalized. In the Philippines, centuries of Spanish colonialism followed by a few decades of US rule have firmly enshrined a male-female binary. While bakla/gay people are tolerated in very narrow spheres, there remains in place a very Eurocentric model of male/masculine and female/feminine to which people largely adhere.
In the 1990s, Nancy Navalta was forced to undergo gender determination tests, which said that she was “genetically male.” The Philippine Sports Commission instructed Navalta to compete as a male or to undergo “corrective measures.” The ruling effectively ended Navalta’s competitive career.
The Commission’s decision was not a surprise. It was impossible for Pinoy society to see Nancy beyond the strict male-female Eurocentric binary. Not after centuries of colonialism had all but erased people like the bayoguin from the collective Filipino memory.