2009: Queer Year in Review

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Activists just won same-sex marriage in the megalopolis of Mexico City, giving equal rights to a couple of million lesbians and gay men. When the bill passed 39-20, supporters reportedly yelled, "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!"

It seems almost like a taunt considering U.S. queers that voted for Obama and the audacity of hope are stuck with mendacity and, "Oh no. Not at all the right time. Couldn't possibly. Nope." We get stonewalled even when issues don't require congressional votes or signatures.

Just in the last couple of months, Obama remained silent when LGBT activists fought to preserve same-sex marriage in New Hampshire. He ignored a proposed bill in Uganda giving the death penalty to queers until the Miami Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had already spoken out, and even the homophobe Rick Warren had condemned the measure.

We should have known what was coming. He campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as Bush during Democratic primaries, and then installed Warren at his inauguration, despite the reverend's years of destroying AIDS programs in Africa by preaching abstinence and hatred of lesbians and gay men.

Almost first thing, Obama set up his Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Office instead of rescinding Bush's executive order allowing discrimination in faith-based programs which meant LGBT people could be summarily fired, and clearly not hired.

In February, when two different rulings extended the federal benefits of marriage to two gay couples, and hinted at huge weaknesses in the Defense of Marriage Act, Obama missed the chance to repeal the act as an unjust denial of rights to gay citizens. Instead, his people aggressively defended DOMA in June, using Bush administration arguments claiming gay marriage was bad for the federal budget, and encouraged incest and the marriage of underage children.

In a general attack on civil liberties, Obama's Justice Department also used Bush arguments in cases of torture, rendition, and spying. The first case was as early as last February, and in October, pressed to release a report on the "suicides" in Guantanamo, the administration went almost beyond Bush, according to The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, "insisting that there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States, and that victims of torture and abuse and their survivors have no right to compensation or even an acknowledgment of what occurred."

That's a year under Obama. Disenchanted American queers looking for leadership should forget the federal level and look to the states, or even abroad, for models of activism and signs of hope. Because we have had bright spots this year.

The phenomenal Welsh rugby player, Gareth Thomas, struck a blow against homophobia in sports last week by coming out at the age of thirty-five. In rugby, he's as much a legend as Derek Jeter in baseball, but with more influence since rugby is far more popular worldwide.

Likewise, this week's victory for same-sex marriage in Mexico City has a huge impact. Since the population of Greater Mexico City includes almost 21 million people, a stroke of a pen gives civil rights to a couple million queers.

Lesbian and gay couples in Colombia saw progress earlier in the year when a series of High Court rulings extended the rights of civil unions, giving same-sex partners almost the same benefits as heterosexuals, notably excluding those related to adoption.

Just two weeks ago, Houston, Texas became the largest city in the U.S. to elect an openly gay candidate. Annise Parker, running on a pro-neighborhood, tough on crime platform, found herself attacked as a dyke by her African American opponent Gene Locke who tried to create an unholy alliance of homophobic black pastors and white evangelical Christians. He failed, in part, because turnout was light, and strong support from the African American community didn't materialize. I'd like to think it was because his hateful message wasn't persuasive, though it may also have been because voters don't like the rain.

In November, it was nice to see Klaus Wowereit, a gay mayor of a much larger city, Berlin, get almost as much attention as German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mayor since 2001, he's rumored to have his eye on higher things.

He wouldn't be the first gay head of state. In January, that trail was blazed when open lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir, Social Affairs Minister, was asked to serve as interim Prime Minister of Iceland after the coalition of the conservative government collapsed. A few months later she was officially made Prime Minister when her party won the election.

And in Iran, where there are neither entirely free elections nor open lesbians, and gay men are executed even in the midst of civil turmoil, we disillusioned Americans have the example of LGBT activists at work in university campuses, daring to demand their human rights alongside everyone else as Iranians push for change. That is audacity. That is hope.

Queers Aren't the Only Targets in Cuba

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

After years of largely uncritical support for the Castro regime, the African American intelligentsia has finally been nudged into looking at the racial legacy of the revolution. The result is the "Declaration of African American Support for the Civil Rights Struggle in Cuba."

Signed last week by sixty African Americans including Cornel West, Ruby Dee Davis, Melvin Van Peebles, and Jeremiah Wright, the Declaration asked the government for the release of Dr. Darsi Ferrer, an anti-racism advocate ostensibly jailed for the illegal possession of -- two sacks of cement. "[W]e cannot sit idly by and allow for decent, peaceful and dedicated civil rights activists in Cuba, and the black population as a whole, to be treated with callous disregard for their rights as citizens and as the most marginalized people on the island."

About time. Black and mixed-race Cubans make up as much as 62 percent of the total population (11 million), but most of the country's civil leadership is white. At the top, the twenty-one member Political Bureau of Cuba's Communist Party has only four black faces, and the all important thirty-nine member Council of Ministers a mere two, the composition of which can be blamed neither on the U.S. embargo nor the CIA.

Additionally, seventy-three percent of scientists and technicians, and eighty percent of the professors at the University of Havana are white. In 2005, 65.8 percent of able-bodied black Cubans were unemployed, twice the rate of white unemployment (nearly 30 percent). Conversely, the prison population is now estimated to be 85 percent black, with prisoners averaging in age between 18 – 28 years.

Because eighty-five percent of Cuban immigrants are white, remittances sent back home to their families worsen financial disparities. It's worth noting, however, that while white Cubans may be relatively better off, they aren't doing particularly well either. The country is bankrupt, and food and housing shortages are acute.

Probably the only real racial parity on the island is in the area of dissent. Many of the Cuba's best known political prisoners have been people of color, like librarian Omar Pernet Hernández, mason Orlando Zapata Tamayo and physicians Darsi Ferrer, the inspiration for the Declaration, and Oscar Elias Biscet who was sentenced to 27 years for, among other things, organizing a seminar on Martin Luther King and forms of non-violent protest.

The only problem with the Declaration is that it implies that this "unprovoked violence, State intimidation and imprisonment" is somehow new for black activists.

You have to pick through the accompanying press release to find the acknowledgment that the roots of the problem were actually early in the revolution. While you, my queer reader, may have heard the regime sent a whole generation of fags and dykes into UMAP concentration camps, mental hospitals, and exile, the government was also busy hunting down advocates of "Black Power," and banning related organizations.

One of the most notable victims was Walterio Carbonell, a black intellectual and admirer of the French Negritude movement. Author of "Cómo surgió la cultura nacional" (How the National Culture Emerged) (1961), he exhumed the role of Afro-Cubans in the development of the Cuban nation, going far beyond a nod at musical contributions. He was silenced by his time in jail.

From the beginning, Afro-Cubans, like poor whites and peasants, were supposed to shut up and be grateful for what they'd gotten. The troublesome part of Black Power wasn't just the "Black," but the "Power," and a government determined not to share it.

For most of the dissidents I've cited earlier, race probably wasn't the determining factor in their arrest. Omar Pernet Hernández, released in 2008, wasn't even focused on anti-racism work. He was picked up with dozens of others in the March 2003 crackdown for opposing the regime and running an independent library from his house.

Anybody at all that opens their mouths, or steps outside the lines is liable for arrest in Cuba. White, working class blogger Yoani Sanchez (and her husband) have both been harassed, and beaten up. Jail is probably on the horizon. In August, cops stormed a meeting of the LGBT group Fundación Cuba that was trying to organize, not the overthrow of the government, but Mr. Gay Cuba. The event was planned for a public place to give some visibility to the LGBT community. For their trouble, the eleven were beaten, two were arrested and their computers seized.

Now, the regime seems to be preparing for another crackdown, warning the population that Obama plans to bomb or invade the island. A few weeks ago they ran a military exercise called "Bastion 2009" part of the "War of the Whole People" which included a practice run for rounding up dissidents and putting down riots.

It's increasingly obvious that you can't fight racism -- or homophobia, misogyny or poverty -- in Cuba, without fighting for basic civil rights, and that dirty word, democracy.

Beth Ditto, Rocks for Dykes in Paris

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It being very nearly Thanksgiving, let me lift a glass in gratitude to Beth Ditto, probably the most famous lesbian in Paris. She turns up nekkid on the cover of magazines, plays fashion shows, and gets interviewed for hip culture rags.

A couple nights ago when I was channel surfing I saw her on the show Taratata. The crowd gave her a standing ovation when she walked on stage, and yells and screams after her group Gossip rocked the house with a couple of songs.

A video montage about Gossip's history and influences used the "L" word first, when the host and narrator, Nagui Fam, announced that their breakthrough song, "Standing in the Way of Control" was "a manifesto that turned Gossip and Beth Ditto into a spokeswoman for the lesbian community, fat women and feminists, all at the same time."

After that, Nagui and Beth pronounced the word "lesbian" more times in fifteen minutes than I've heard in four years in France, and never with as much joy.

Here, broadcasters seem to deaden their faces when they announce LGBT pride, or the latest round in the court battle to let a nameless same-sex couple adopt a child. A few dyke politicians are out in the provinces, but by and large in France the curtain comes down on private lives which are defined as sacrosanct until it comes to hetero politicians getting snapped with women on their yachts, hetero kids swapping spit on the subway, hetero women popping kids on the hospital, taking kids for flu shots, as characters in movies, in art.

For weeks, the story headlining French papers has been the escape and eventual recapture of Jean Pierre Treiber accused of murdering two women who are usually defined as "friends," occasionally as a couple, never lesbians. Dead and alive, all that famous French discretion is for us.

For a moment, I thought it would be the same with Beth Ditto. When Nagui asked how she'd always been different, she went on to talk about being brought up on Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Patsy Cline, and how her young mother taught pro-choice values and self-confidence. "In fact, I thought other people were weird. Me weird? No, it's you guys."

About being a lesbian, nothing. And I thought, oh no. Not again. Another coy dyke. More silence. More invisibility. God, she seemed so sweet, and I thought she was more out! It broke my heart.

But like I said, I had it all wrong. A moment later Taratata did a public service giving an overview of Gossip and their influences featuring the Riot Grrl movement and lesbian musicians from Bikini Kill to K.D. Lang and some hip hop lesbian group that has a video where somebody wears an enormous pink pussy suit outside a hotdog stand. "Better lick it right, better touch it, better touch it right, better kiss it..."

Then Beth Ditto and Nagui led the audience in a chorus of "Une femme avec une femme" A woman with a woman, before he announced in solidarity, "Everybody's a lesbian here."

Then Nagui got all serious, looked her in the eye and said, like they always do in France, and the States, and every fucking where else. "Tell me, you've done your coming out. You've said, "I'm big, I'm a lesbian." There's nonstop kidding about that. Don't you think you've gotten to the point now where you should, perhaps, stop it?"

Only this time, it was obviously a set-up question for Beth who gave the question both barrels. No, I can't. "...Because we're not yet to the point in our culture and society where it's not a big deal. And until people stop getting beaten up for being gay, until people stop losing friends for being gay, until people stop being made fun of for being fat. Or told they're not going to be a singer when they grow up because they're not pretty enough. (Who fucking cares?) Until that is over, I have to make it a point so other girls, boys, queers, homos, drag queens, lizards, lesbians, dogs, cats, so they can grow up to be singers and say it doesn't matter anymore. But right now it matters a lot. It's not time. It's not time to put the torch down."

And if I quote the whole thing it's because I'm tired of saying it myself. Invisible, we are alone, and lonely and vulnerable. We have no allies. Even worse is only seeing queers when they're dead. Visibility may not be some magic wand to defeat homophobic assholes, but it plays a powerful role. Beth Ditto out in the world, and unashamed, makes space for the rest of us, speaks for me when she tells a hater to kiss her ass. Helps kids come out. Yup, I'm plenty thankful for that.

Breaking Down Walls

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Every time I watch the images of the crowds streaming through Berlin's Cold War gates it's magic. God, what joy. What exhilaration when that wall you'd lived with for twenty-eight years just crumbles, and along with it the paranoia and surveillance and fear, the degradations and mutual betrayal of friends, all the lies you had to tell to others and yourself just to survive.

Afterwards, but before young Sarkozy and other tourists came for their photo ops, there were the guys with sledgehammers concentrating on each swing with a kind of unparalleled, single-minded fury. I could be them. I feel I am them, throwing my body and my life not just against the physical imprisoning restraints, but against all those barriers standing between me and freedom.

I can hear your silent sneer. "She's taken the metaphor too far once again. How the dyke exaggerates, now, when the LGBT community is making progress. You have to take the long view. Make a donation. Relax. Celebrate the federal hate crimes bill."

In fact, queers have taken one loss after another for the last twelve months from the loss of same-sex in California to the installation of anti-gay Rick Warren in Obama's inauguration to his administration's energetic defense of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Most recent is the repeal of same-sex marriage in Maine, which should remind us not only that same-sex marriage is not legal except in two or three states, but that it is explicitly banned in most.

LGBT people are condemned not just in America's laws, but in America's streets and hearts as second class citizens, children, criminals, pedophiles and child molesters. In many eyes, we are not even human finally, but worms, garbage and filth. We get beaten up in the street. Our younger selves are harassed in schools. We don't get decent health care even if we can afford it because our doctors are enemies to whom we tell nothing.

I don't understand the little shrug, the mere wince, or grimace when your face should be red with rage. Did the vast majority of queers in the United States enter into some kind of pact to be nice and polite, so as to not frighten the straights? Did you promise to knock softly on doors instead of battering them down? To speak sweetly in your phone banks instead of returning the filth they shower us with every day? To stay off the streets believing if you're good enough, kind enough, earnest enough, united, and homogenous enough change will come?

After all, the end of a generation only took one magic phrase from Ronald Reagan who ordered Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall." It had nothing to do with a disintegrating Soviet Union, a reformer in charge in Moscow who warned East Germans that Russia wouldn't arrive this time with tanks to back them up. The destruction of the wall had nothing to do with years of dissent, or vast demonstrations for reform that left border guards terrified when faced with a crowd that had been mistakenly told the border was opening up "immediately." It was a few words by an American president, and the magic of a good cause.

I'm less distressed by the legal reverses than our seeming stoicism in the face of them, and the same kind of egotistical and magical thinking many Americans used to interpret the fall of the Berlin wall. At a recent New York City march protesting the savage beating of a gay man, one councilmember actually said, "The one thing that has to happen is marriage equality so that people see that gays and lesbians are equal to everyone."

Actually, no. While same-sex marriage will make life easier for an enormous amount of gay people, marriage won't bring down the wall, homophobia, which divides us from straights in every aspect our lives: schoolrooms, churches, jobs, streets, families, and yes, courts.

In that respect, the Councilmember Tony Avella was more on target when he went on to admit that the city also needed a "deputy mayor for Human Rights to educate kids." I agree completely, and predict the fight to include lesbian, gay and transgender lives in the curriculum will be much more bitter than any same-sex marriage campaign. Which is perhaps why we have confined our efforts to asserting legal equality, and increasingly shut our eyes to the cultural and religious hate.

These days we build our own walls from the inside out, blocking the neighboring eyesores, and training ourselves not to see all the petty humiliations, the great wrongs that have nothing to do with us locked as we are behind mortar and stone. Are we in prison if we have the key?

I watch the images over and over. People streaming through the gates, destroying walls. I remember when we wanted more than equality, when we wanted to be free.

Herta Müller Is A Hero

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

It should have gone to Philip Roth. Philip Roth, or maybe Joyce Carol Oates. That was the consensus on the American side of the pond after Herta Müller was named the latest winner of the Nobel prize in literature.

In a Washington Post article, Mary Jordan asked, "Herta who?" and quoted that luminary Harold Bloom announcing he had, "Nothing to talk about because I have never heard of this writer." Jordan likewise featured a German bookstore owner characterizing Müller as popular only "with a minority of intellectuals." Finally, an unnamed but "prominent editor and writer in New York" confirmed Müllar's insignificance declaring that the 18-member Nobel jury was "in some other universe." Which is absolutely true.

In this other universe that does not have America as its heart, we're celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. From Europe, the world seems bigger than from New York, and the stakes higher. Many countries of the former Soviet bloc are struggling with their totalitarian pasts, while established democracies are struggling to balance their mandate for civil liberties with the so-called exigencies of fighting terrorism.

And in this other universe where literature is still a battleground of ideas and not some popularity contest, Herta Müller was the perfect choice. Through more than twenty books, and a string of Europe's top prizes, she's obsessively and brilliantly considered the legacy of Communism in Romania, especially the spying, betrayal, hatred, and loss.

Born into a German-speaking minority in the Romanian countryside in 1953, her peasant mother suffered several years in a Ukrainian gulag, sent there like many other ethnic Germans by the Soviets that briefly occupied Romania after World War II.

During the war, her father was in the SS. "My father hated working in the fields and when he returned from the SS in 1945, he became a lorry driver and alcoholic. The combination is possible in the countryside. My mother was and remained a peasant in the corn and sunflower fields. Corn for me is the socialist plant par excellence: it displays its colours, grows in colonies, blocks the view and cuts your hands with its leaves while you're working."

She herded cows as a child and worked on the farm. After studying literature in college, she found work as a translator in a factory. To keep her job, she had to agree to spy for Ceausescu's secret police. When she refused twice, the functionary told her, "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river." Instead, he denounced her to the other workers as a spy and made her a pariah. Shortly afterwards she lost her job.

Like other uncooperative writers, her work was censored, and she was under constant surveillance. She was repeatedly interrogated and humiliated. Her house was bugged. They threatened her. Even in 1987 when she finally was able to move with her husband to Berlin, there were traces of the secret police.

In her essay, "Securitate in all but name," which appeared this July in the German weekly Die Zeit, she wrote that despite the execution of Ceausescu, the fall of the Berlin wall, and an innocuous new name, the Romanian Information Service, the secret police continues largely intact. "According to their own figures, 40% of the staff was taken on from the Securitate. The real percentage is probably much higher." The rest are retired, or "the new architects of the market economy."

In her novels, those implications are translated into human terms. After thirty years under a dictatorship she's an expert on the damage we do to ourselves with each complicit act, not just the active betrayals, but the times we turn our eyes away. When we accept. Or forget. And go silent.

We are lucky when writers like Müller refuse. There's a certain amount of courage you have to have. A certain amount of mulishness. A sense of self-preservation that extends beyond the body. We get a glimpse of that in her 1991 "Der Teufel Sitzt im Spiegel" (The devil sits in the mirror) quoted in Verena Auffermann's biographical essay about the writer:

"Writing is always the last thing, the only thing that I can (still) do, have to do, when there's nothing else I can do. When I write, it is always at the point where I can no longer deal with myself (and that also means the things that surround me). When I can no longer endure my senses. When I can no long endure thinking. When everything has become so complicated that I no longer know where the external things begin or end. Whether they are inside me or the other way round."

Word by word, our best writers pull back the curtains and show us the truth of the world. Müller does that in her novels and her life. One of her first acts as a laureate was to support embattled Chinese writers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Why We March

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

There are only a couple reasons to march, and plenty not to. Prior to the Sunday March for Equality in Washington, D.C., the compromised politicos of the Human Rights Campaign ilk expressed their preference that we queers sit in the closet with some gags on our mouths until 2017, so as not to embarrass the Promiser-In-Chief Barack Obama.

Some lefty queers were also refusing to go implying the march was morally bankrupt because it didn't emerge spontaneously from the grassroots movements, like children from the head of Zeus. Instead of piggybacking on the situation to get out their own messages by fielding raucous contingents, or marching on different routes, they encouraged people to put up their feet and settle in for self-righteous naps.

Meanwhile, journalist Gabriel Arana dismissed the march as irrelevant, explaining that visibility for equality just wasn't necessary. Most of America knew we were here and queer, and already supported civil unions or gay marriage in large numbers. What we needed was a protest against a dithering Obama refusing to set timelines for change.

There was also the host of more usual impediments: transportation, hotel rooms, time off, and ingrown toenails and stubbed toes that we really shouldn't put pressure on. I myself had the runs and a desire to stay near a toilet. Still, on Sunday morning I dragged myself out of the house. Not to D.C., but in a celebration of activism itself, to watch a small but earnest march in Paris sponsored by the "Comité de la jupe" (Skirt Committee). The group describes themselves as citizen Catholics, which I thought would be worth seeing because they could only have emerged in Republican France.

They met at the Arènes de Lutèce, a first century Gallo-Roman amphitheater where gladiators and slaves used to combat wild animals, and now kids play soccer, and old guys and dykes play boules in the dirty sand. It took me a minute to get the symbolism of ordinary Christians up against the lions of Rome, maybe because they reversed the order of things, meeting for lunch and inspiration inside the arena, before marching to the Roman lions outside in the Paris streets.

It's hard to imagine easier prey than this Skirt Committee organized on the internet by two women after a French Cardinal sneered at female participation in the Church declaring that his opposition "wasn't that they wore skirts, but a matter of having something inside their heads." This group headed by female Catholics is not only up against the outright hate multiplying in Rome but a virulent misogyny combined with the secularism of France.

Nevertheless, they're doing okay. They have about five hundred members united around the ambitious goal of making the Catholic Church more egalitarian and democratic, plus the peculiar idea that Christians should focus more on the values of Christ, including love, compassion, and courage.

While I'd like to sneer, I actually found the speech and manifesto really moving. What's not to like about equality and kindness, and commitment neither to leave your home territory nor shut up? The religious stuff aside, HRC and gay Democrats could learn a lot from these citizen Catholics who believe speaking out and criticizing from within is a serious moral imperative.

The crowd bubbled with a kind of anarchic joy when they filed down onto the sands to arrange themselves in groups. I could tell from their faces some had never marched before. Or for that matter, been to the big city of Paris. They were nervous and excited. They were inspired. Even if in practical terms you could say the march part was a flop.

What's the point of taking to the streets, when all you have are a few signs identifying far off places like Alsace and Bordeaux? Besides that, nothing. No placards, no five word message. They didn't even have a leading banner. I imagined passersby wondering who the heck were these people with the red bags and umbrellas? Tourists, probably. You had to get really close to read the fine print.

And yet, and yet. Marches always mean something. Even if the New York Times buries the story, as they did with the Equality March, or you only have a couple hundred feet on the pavement. You see each other. For an hour or two you own a chunk of public space. You exist in a way you don't at home alone. Your voice and your life are amplified in unimaginable ways.

And that's my point. We don't just march for them -- for media outlets, and passersby, and to pressure the powers that be on specific issues. We march for ourselves. It's a declaration of independence, of power, of democracy. Maybe even hope.

Redeeming Caster Semenya

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I saw the women's 800 meters in Berlin. This young thing was facing the cameras before the race started, pretending to brush a few specks of dust off her shoulders because that's what the other runners were to her, just dust she was gonna leave behind. She wasn't in the lead at first, but pretty soon she broke out and that was the end of it.

Afterwards, the French announcer said, there were two races, Caster Semenya's and the one everybody else was in. She didn't crack a smile. Just brushed off her shoulders again, that young woman from South Africa. Somebody handed her a flag and told her to take a victory lap. She did it sternly. A dyke, I figured. Stone butch and eighteen, with a lot to prove. More than I knew at the time.

It turns out she was waiting for the results of gender testing after complaints from some of the other runners and coaches about her sudden improvement, big muscles, deep voice when she came out of nowhere to win the African Junior Championship.

Plenty of writers blame the complaints on racism and misogyny. And it is always tough for black female athletes. Blogger Monica Roberts wasn't the only one to comment, "I know from my time on planet Earth, if an African descended female athlete excels in spectacular fashion, we get accused of cheating or have 'that's a man' shade hurled at us."

Like many others, she went on to talk about the Williams sisters whose complete dominance of the women's tennis circuit has brought on a lot of the same complaints. "They're too big, too strong. They're not real women." She also reminded us that Olympic champion Maria Mutola of Mozambique faced the same kind of accusations despite passing test after test.

Masculine women, and dykes, of course, get that nonsense all the time, no matter what their race. Martina Navratilova was in the hot seat for her muscley arms and total control of women's tennis a generation before the Williams sisters. For the rest of us, our girlness started getting called into question when we were little and beat boys in games.

All that makes a black, butch woman with wings on her feet fair game. And the medical juries are in. At least the information was leaked. Caster Semenya wasn't doping. But she is a "hermaphrodite" as they wrote in some headlines. Intersexed from those that wanted to be polite. No external male organs but reportedly testes hidden up in there.

I can't imagine what she thought, finding out in the morning paper, and looking down at a body that's suddenly foreign. Worrying everybody thinks she's a freak. Wondering if they'll let her compete again. If she can stand to.

The only good that's come out of the mess is that it gave birth to a couple of interesting articles about biological complexity explaining there are far more gender variations than we acknowledge both on the hormonal, biological and genetic levels. Hell, X's and Y's are scattered around like party favors.

Unfortunately, few of the articles went so far as to demand Semenya be accepted as an athlete, no question, by clarifying what matters most to her, that in terms of performance, most intersexed females with testes don't get enough of a handy hormonal spike to get any kind of advantage.

In fact, women with "normal" sex organs can produce unusually high levels of testosterone. What are we going to do about them? The only fair thing would be to test all the "female" athletes and establish one set of rules for everyone. Maybe even enforce them by administering hormones until they're all at exactly the same levels. Perhaps the tall ones should be shortened and the short ones stretched.

According to Peggy Orenstine, the Olympic Games quit gender-verifying female athletes in 1999 because it was proven the few women with atypical sex development didn't actually get a competitive edge. Worse, "it served only to humiliate them." Given that, it's hard to understand why the International Association of Athletics Federations continues to go after Caster Semenya.

The only challenge to Caster should be the field of runners. Unfortunately, besides the IAAF, there's now the emotional obstacle of stepping back into a stadium, and competing in front of a crowd when plenty of them are thinking she's a freak of nature, and not just because she blew away the world champion by almost two and a half seconds.

After the news broke, she withdrew from her next race and apparently began trauma counseling. I only hope it's coming from somebody kind and open-minded who won't stuff her into dresses, or try to extract her difference with a knife. I can't wait to see her run again. That beautiful burst of speed and defiance. Leaving all the other girls in the dust.