Ain't I's a Woman?

A couple of days ago, an Austrailian news outlet broke a story that South African teen track-runner is classified as not quite female or male, but a "hermaphrodite".

Actually, "hermaphrodite" is an archaic word, and identified as a term that is misleading and "dead as wrong" by gender activists. Caster is really, "intersexed" or having a sex that is neither male nor female.

Hermaphrodite means that one has the reproductive organs of both male and female.

Intersexed people have chromosomes that are other than XX or XY, or male and female.

(the above is a photo of intersexed genitalia. as you can see this person has a urethra, clitoris and small vaginal cavity, but no labia [vaginal lips]; and by the swell just below the urethra, testes are probably ingrown)

So where does that lead Caster? Socially, emotionally, and psychologically fucked.

Why?

Since there is no discussion of intersexed people in the West, Caster's body becomes a symbol of monstrosity, a subject of research and surveillance, and a foreign entity that is caste as socially and sexually abnormal.

Mainstream news is biasly justifying her "intersexed" body as being more "masculine" or male than female, thus insinuating that her medals should be confiscated.

This bullshit controversy reminds me of 1woman's and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth who had to bare her breast to show that she was a woman in front of a predominantly white crowd.

Standing over six feet with ripling muscles throughout her body from years of labor, this mother of 13 made everyone that day who was sitting in the audience, rethink womanhood; especially black women as being considered as women.

If you didn't know, back then, black people were seen as animals, or beasts of burden.

Sojourner's story puts me back at my sister Caster Semenya, who is said to be "devastated" by the results of the gender tests.

Semenya is among the millions of people who are born intersexed. According to an online article in Menstuff, "about 1 in 1,500 to one in 2,000 babies are born visibly intersexed. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life."

This ugly little secret is muffled because the parents of infants who show signs of having both male and female organs, insist, often by strong suggestions of their physicians, to make a decision at birth on what "gender" their child would lead their lives.

When many of these children reach puberty, they show signs of the other "gender" that was snipped, and are often embroiled in sexuality issues.

As the case of Caster who seems to have a vulva, vagina, and cervix, but no ovaries, fallopian and endometrium, she also has ingrown testes that could not have seen.

Caster's gender "anomaly" raises the egregious constrictions of not only gender, but the construction of sex, and sex identity. It is an mind-fuck and social atrocity that we are forcing the bodies of babies to be something that they will grow into not being.

Thank you for Caster's parents who left Caster to be her, a female who wore baggy clothes, flexed her muscles and wore cornrows.

So the overall question is, "What is Caster?" She is my sister and she is a woman.

Below is a rough transcript of Sojourner Truth's Speech and below that is a Youtube video of still pictures of a play called, "Sojourner" by Richard LaMonte Pierce. The music is by "Sweet Honey in the Rock". Sojourner's speech was never recorded because there weren't any recorders in those days, but it was transcribed by another women's activist who was present.

That man over there say

a woman needs to be helped into carriages

and lifted over ditches

and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helped me into carriages

or over mud puddles

or gives me a best place. . .

And ain't I a woman?

Look at me

Look at my arm!

I have plowed and planted

and gathered into barns

and no man could head me. . .

And ain't I a woman?

I could work as much

and eat as much as a man--

when I could get to it--

and bear the lash as well

and ain't I a woman?

I have born 13 children

and seen most all sold into slavery

and when I cried out a mother's grief

none but Jesus heard me. . .

and ain't I a woman?

that little man in black there say

a woman can't have as much rights as a man

cause Christ wasn't a woman

Where did your Christ come from?

From God and a woman!

Man had nothing to do with him!

If the first woman God ever made

was strong enough to turn the world

upside down, all alone

together women ought to be able to turn it

rightside up again.