FEATURE ARTICLE

Dr. Robert SandaSunday, September 13, 2009
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Alberta, Canada

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CASTER SEMENYA AND THE RELATIVITY OF TRUTH

�The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend� - Henri Bergson (1859-1941, French philosopher and Nobel Literature Laureate in 1927)

�A person hears only what they understand� - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832, German philosopher and scientist)


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few weeks ago I wrote a piece titled Gender Identity Crisis in Sports: Caster Semenya�s dilemma in which I highlighted the plight of the young South African 800 meter race gold medalist at the recently concluded competition of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in Berlin. The controversy surrounding her gender was followed with interest around the world with a query in the Google search engine returning more than six million hits. While the results of the medical tests to determine her gender were being keenly awaited, a number of interesting developments have occurred. First, the IAAF announced that regardless of the outcome of the result, the athlete would be allowed to keep her medal (and I presume her record) quite unlike the fate of athletes that were recently convicted of doping such as the sprinter Marion Jones and were subsequently not only stripped of their medals but also had the record expunged from the archives. One is made to wonder whether the decision of the IAAF was motivated by compassion or by political contingencies and considerations. South Africa is due to play host to the world in a major sporting event, the FIFA Soccer World Cup, next year. It is not expedient to offend your own host at such a crucial moment. That decision by IAAF allowing Caster Semenya to keep her medal regardless of the gender test result will, however, have its own critics who can point to the Indian silver medalist of the same event during the Asian Games in Qatar who was stripped of �her� prize for not being female. Caster should be similarly treated in the interest of fairness or in the alternative the Indian runner should keep �hers� too.

On the other hand, Semenya�s compatriots have gone on the offensive to convince the world that the youngster is, indeed, a female. Her mother and her uncle volunteered interviews in which they expressed shock that anyone would doubt their child�s gender. To buttress their point they even showed reporters the original copy of Caster�s birth certificate which assigned her gender at birth to the female category. They wouldn�t stop there. Their latest effort saw her undergo beauty treatment and posted her smiling glossy photograph on the cover of the You Magazine of September 14, 2009 edition with the titillating caption, Wow, Look at Caster.

Today, the Associated Press quoting the Sydney Morning Herald reported that they know the results of the medical tests on Caster Semenya and that she is a hermaphrodite. The IAAF, on its part, admitted that they have received the results from Germany but declined to reveal its content or to make any statements about it until the IAAF council meeting in Monaco between November 20 and 21. This, to me, is another unfortunate decision by IAAF for choosing to remain silent over this matter for another two months. The result should be made public with a view to turn away attention and energy presently being expended over arguing on hearsay towards the process of healing and restoration for the poor youngster that is at the center of this staggering revelation.

In my previous article I mentioned the possibility that Caster may be the victim of Testicular Feminization Syndrome (TFS). Did I get it wrong? Not according to the Australian paper that has made this revelation. First off, the paper reports, rather incorrectly, that the results indicate that Caster Semenya has both male and female sexual organs. This is unlikely unless I missed where the athlete was subjected to an operation to remove part of the internal organs to test. Going by eye-witness accounts of the mother of the child and the doctor that assigned gender to the child at birth, it is immediately realizable that Caster did not have male external sexual organs with which she could be said to have both organs. It, therefore, seems likely that the IAAF medics collected blood from her veins or cells from her mouth to test in addition to doing imaging tests like ultrasonography and a genital exam by a gynaecologist with or without a urologist. It is possible, but unnecessary, for the tests to include the Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scan or a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). These last mentioned tests can identify a pair of internal structures that could be testes or ovaries and will rule on the presence or absence of the uterus and connecting structures which in a normal male would have shrank while the baby was only a few weeks old during pregnancy. However, the same information could be obtained by ultrasonography. In true hermaphrodites, both the uterus, ovaries (internally), testes, scrota and penis (externally) would be evident. If the term is to be applied here, however, it is likely that �pseudo-hermaphrodite� will be more appropriate as I shall explain below.

Hermaphroditism is a lay word for a number of medical conditions of which TFS is one. While hermaphroditism can be categorized into pseudo-hermaphrodites and true hermaphrodites, it is only in the second case that the existence of both the masculine and femine sex organs exists. TFS would fall in the first category, pseudo-hermaphroditism. The Sydney Morning Herald actually gave further details in the ensuing paragraph and stated, �extensive physical examinations show Semenya has no ovaries but does possess internal male testes, which are producing large amounts of testosterone�. If this report is true then Caster Semenya is conclusively a male regardless of what gender was assigned to her at birth, what her mother thinks and what her compatriots believe. But the truth will remain somewhere between what we know in medical science and what Semenya�s supporters choose to believe depending on who you are talking to. That she is female is a truth that the die-hard supporters of Caster will hold regardless of what medical opinion says.

The announcement by the Sydney Morning Herald was predictably greeted with scorn and derision in South Africa. South Africa�s minister of sports, the Reverend Makhenkesi Stofile, has declared, �Caster is a woman, she remains our heroine. We must protect her�. The matter didn�t end with the minister there. Asked by the BBC what would happen if she was barred from future competition as a woman, Stofile said: �I think it would be the third world war�we would go to the highest levels in contesting such a decision. I think it would be totally unfair and totally unjust. Neither Caster nor her family deserves this humiliation�We have referred the matter to our lawyers to see how best her rights and interests can be protected�. This reaction is the reason I am writing this follow-up article.

Is Caster under threat? Why does the Reverend describe the revelation as a �humiliation�? This is where the problem really is. Caster is not being reassembled. She is, for the lack of a better term, the victim of the errors of nature. Nature is full of such errors and man, contrary to popular belief, is not made perfectly hence the need for the medical profession. Blame it on original sin, the Devil or God, if you must, but man is subject to so many anomalies of nature like this. Let me illustrate this type of natural errors with a common disease in Nigeria that my readers will understand, Sickle Cell Anemia. But first a consideration of some basics.

The cells in humans that are capable of dividing to reproduce themselves and those that two people use to reproduce another person (sperms and ova) contain genetic codes inside a structure called the nucleus that contain detailed instructions that determines the characteristics of the new cell being reproduced or the new offspring. Inside the nucleus of human cells are 23 pairs (or 46 individually) of structures called chromosomes but in the sperm and the ovum these are not pairs but individual chromosomes of 23. Inside these chromosomes are genes which are areas on the chromosome that carry particular information. These codes are stored in a protein called the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Another protein called RNA (ribonucleic acid) is the one that is responsible for reading off the information and passing the instructions to the cell. Simply you can regard the DNA as a book (or a building manual or draft) written by an architect and the RNA as the person who interprets the book (or the building engineer) and tell the workers (construction gang) how construct the building (the body or the new child). In fact the RNA comprises of several individual proteins called transfer RNA (the one that actually reads the information), messenger RNA (the one that carries the information to the builders at the construction site), and so on. Whereas in situations such as the healing process the body copies the design of the individual and tries to repair it with the previous structure that was destroyed, say, skin. But in reproduction the building engineer (the RNA) is dealing with two books (alternating pages from the male and the female) that have been bound together at fertilization. It is like two architects working separately submitted two different designs for a building that should be fused into one.

In humans as well as other animals and plants, the codes are arranged in very simple pairing of five nucleic acids comprising of two purines (adenine {A} and guanine {G}) and pyrimidines (cytosine {C}, thymine {T} and uridine {U}). On the DNA Adenine always pairs with Thymine while Guanine can pair with Cytosine or Uridine. So the structures are always AG, GC or GU. But the information stored is read in a codon or triples. For example AAA, AGC, CGA, GGG and UUU represent the amino acids Lysine, Serine, Arginine, Glycine, and Phenylalanine, respectively.

In the case of sickle cell anemia some time in our history as West Africans inside somebody�s DNA an error occurred wherein on the gene that encodes for haemoglobin rather than having the codon GAG that instructs the synthesis of the amino acid glutamine at position 6 on the haemoglobin chain, the codon encrypted was GUG which instructs for the synthesis of the amino acid valine. So the only difference between the haemoglobin of sicklers and normal people is that of the more than 140 amino acids that make up each of the four haemoglobin chains in one of them the substitution of one (glutamine) with another (valine) introduce a physicochemical property that changed the whole haemoglobin and the way it reacts to stress.

This error in sickle cell anemia is an error of nature like the error that is introduced in people with Testicular Feminization Syndrome who are males locked up in the body of females. This is no fault of theirs and there is no reason why anyone should blame them or their parents for their fate. It is due to the fact that nature is not perfect just as the wrong permutation of codes in the computer such as 001001 if substituted with 001010 means a different thing to the computer and an error of such magnitude can result the computer crashing.

What Caster needs now is psychological support to help her through this difficult period to make her decision whether to undergo gender change surgery to emerge as a male or to continue as a female. There is nothing shameful about that and certainly neither the IAAF members nor the medics who conducted the tests have desires to humiliate her and her family. I guess by offering to �protect her�, the Reverend is implying that Caster should be protected from reality and, therefore, the truth.

The world is full of the Reverend Makhenkesi Stofile. A very simple situation has been twisted into such complexity it is threatening to throw the world into the third world war (at least in the clergyman�s mind) which nuclear weapons were created to prevent. God, in His infinite wisdom did not make the Reverend and Caster North Koreans otherwise by the time you are reading this the Japanese and the South Koreans would be picking up the pieces of what North Korean nuclear missiles have not destroyed. South Africa is noted for producing renown medical expertise over the years. The first human heart transplantation was done by Dr. Christian Bernard of South Africa in 1967. A logical approach is to subject Caster Semenya to another round of tests in South Africa to prove the earlier tests wrong. Then lawyers can come in and present their finding to the IAAF council. If, in spite of proof to the contrary, the IAAF chooses to bar Caster Semenya from contesting in future athletic events as a female then an appeal to the United Nations Human Rights Council can be made to adjudicate. Failing this, South Africa can now declare the Third World War officially opened.

Pontius Pilate famously asked Jesus of Nazareth: �What is truth?� We don�t know if Jesus answered the question because the gospel writers didn�t tell us. So permit me to ask, is truth an absolute or relative concept? Is it abstract or concrete? Pose this question to a sample of humanity in the many different cultures we know and you are likely to come up with an overwhelming support for truth as an absolute and concrete concept. If truth is concrete, can we put a finger to it and say this is the truth? Christians even believe in truth personified: Jesus declared, �I am the Truth�. But is the truth really an absolute and concrete (therefore, measurable) concept? Bring together representatives of Christian fundamentalists, Jewish Ultra-orthodoxy, Muslim radicals, Hindu nationalists, and pious Buddhist monks and put this question to them. They will unanimously agree that truth is absolute. That is as far as their unanimity will go. Beyond this point truth is what who says it is.

Is the truth absolute or relative? Ask a pupil in primary school what is the answer to 1+1. His/her answer would be 2. This is the same answer that 99.9% of the members of the human species would give. Ask a person in Abuja to point to the direction to the Island of Samoa. If he has studied geography he would probably point in a direction roughly East of South-East passing through a town like Yola towards the Indian Ocean across to the Pacific Ocean and declare that as the direction of Samoa.

Let�s look at the answers to these two hypothetical questions. One plus one is two only if you are using the decimal system of counting. The processor in your computer uses the binary number system for its logic. Although the calculator that comes with your Windows Operating system or any of the numerous versions available will say 1+1=2, the brain of the same computer (the processor) uses the binary system in which 1+1=10. Furthermore, consider this: 1+1+1=3 and 1+1+1+1=4 (decimal system) whereas 1+1+1=11 and 1+1+1+1=100 (binary system). In each instance these are correct answers but they are not the same. So the answer to 1+1 depends on which numerical system you are using. The person who answers 1+1=2 and the person who says 1+1=10 are both correct provided you do not assume that the calculation is based on any one numerical system.

What about the direction of Samoa from Abuja? There are innumerable directions to go to Samoa from Abuja. If you send out one hundred planes to set off from Abuja and fly in a perfect straight line they would all end up in Samoa at different times. But there are three logical directions by which to go to Samoa from Abuja that I will use. By plane you could leave Abuja and fly east and, say, stop for refuelling at Mombassa in Kenya and again at Darwin in Australia and from there make the final leg of your journey to Apia in Samoa. This distance is approximately 19,965 km. If, however, you are on a chartered flight on a plane that does not need refuelling stops and the pilot chooses to fly the shortest route over the surface of the earth, his journey would see him flying from Abuja due south entering the Bight of Biafra west of Port Harcourt and eventually make it to Samoa passing between the South Pole and the Southern tip of Argentina. By this route the pilot will reduce the distance in the previous direction by approximately 544 km. However, to make it to Samoa by the shortest route possible from Abuja, dig a well straight down in your compound and follow it as the distance will only be 12,681 km. So the direction to Samoa depends on whether you perceive the world as flat or round. Assuming that the shortest distance is a straight line, the correct direction the man in Abuja should point to is towards his feet (assuming he was standing when the question was pose) because Samoa is vertically downward through the center of the earth by the shortest distance.

As Albert Einstein�s general theory of relativity shows matter and energy are interchangeable. My 100 kg body frame is made of a very large number of atoms (matter) that can be converted to energy (heat, light, sound, electricity, electromagnetism, etc.) under appropriate circumstances. Maybe that is what religions mean by spirit that would go on to live after I am dead. This whole idea should actually complement theologians and philosophers in understanding the origin and relationship of man and the universe. The problem is that too often the truth is what we want it to be. I really wish clergymen of all religions would study biology, geology, physics and then study the work of Charles Darwin on evolution with open minds. If they did they would come closer to understanding God than they do today. The Christian church has not learnt its lessons for imprisoning Galileo Gallilei for suggesting that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system. In fact the sun itself is off center in the Milky Way galaxy which contains several billions of stars like our sun in cosmos. It was not an argument that religion could win but it is only recently that the Vatican City found the courage and decency to apologise for the injustice committed against Galileo. Maybe the writer of the biblical story of creation did not intend his work to be taken too literarily. There is too much similarity between understanding good and evil in theology versus matter and energy in cosmos. Because religious practitioners have shut out such liberal interpretation of life, reality and reason, they are stuck with a tunnel view of perception. As long as truth remains an absolute concept, wars will be fought between different adherents of religions until in the end one man is left standing.

Too often you hear a person being described as a wealthy man. Compared to whom? And, in reference to what? A person peeping into my bank account would describe me as a poor man or a millionaire depending on whether he is counting my money in Kuwaiti dinar or in the Zimbabwean dollars. It all depends on what is your reference point.

The same people who describe a political candidate as a good man will in the end describe him as a bad president. In the Nigerian context I think Alhaji Shehu Shagari fits the description. I am a firm believer in the goodness of Shagari as a person but as President, Shagari was anything but good. It is too early to judge Umaru Yar Adua but many have already reached that conclusion. The lesson here is that a good man does not necessarily make a good leader because leadership and social interaction are based on different values. Many will describe Jerry Rawlins as a good president but would cringe to know the abuses of human rights he carried out in exterminating those he regarded as corrupt. His presidency would be hailed as good in Ghana but would he be so described if he was the president of the USA and did the same thing there?

It is obvious by now that the truth is not an absolute term. Before the law, the truth is what the evidence says it is. If a person against whom witnessing testified under oath as the culprit of murder and on whose testimony a conviction was reached, the same person would be acquitted and freed if new evidence emerges and suggests his innocence whether or not he confesses to the crime. Failure to understand this fact is why legal practitioners are generally considered as men and women who do not care about the truth. Solomon, the King of Israel, is regarded by many as a wise man. He may be so. A case in point is the biblical account in which he reportedly settled a dispute between two women who were laying claim to the parentage of a baby. He famously offered to split the baby into two to let each woman have a piece but one of the women stopped him by saying if that was the only way to settle it she would surrender the baby to the other woman. He let this woman have the baby believing she is the mother. Many people regard this as the supreme manifestation of Solomon�s wisdom in arriving at the truth. Did he? The event described does not prove that the woman who felt for the child was the mother of that child. Why so? Because the other woman who did not make such an offer may not have heard or understood the King�s decision (probably because she was standing farther away from the king or she had hearing difficulties) before the other woman spoke. Besides, the same woman who remained silent may have been mentally ill and, therefore, showed apathy to the child and the decision. This is, in fact, a frequent obstetric event when new mothers suffer from depression and show no affection to their child. Couldn�t she have been suffering from postpartum depression? Did the king make a good decision? Yes (in the interest of the child). Did he prove that the woman who eventually got the baby was the actual mother of the child? No.

Caster Semenya�s compatriot are not comfortable with the outcome of the medical tests that would ridicule their public affirmation of her female gender and justify the make-over they made her undertake to prove that she is a woman. They were prepared for anything but the eventual result that is being rumoured. If Caster is a victim of TFS then her gender, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. Some of Caster�s family, friends and supporters will eventually overcome their denial and let the truth sink in and accept the reality. Others, like the minister of sports, will forever remain convinced that she is a girl the way Al-Qaeda and the Taliban will remain adamant that America is the Great Satan and, therefore, that their war and hostile rhetoric against America is a holy war or a justifiable cause.

Ultimately, the truth is a relative term. If the generality of humans and their leaders will accept this standpoint conflicts between people and countries will be much less likely in the future. Countries like Nigeria where religious intolerance and inter-tribal distrust have continued to fuel violence and motivate the zealots that perpetrate them will only change if we understand that truth is not an absolute concept but a relative one. Things are rarely black or white. The shade of grey between the two extremes is the nexus where we need to assemble to understand each other and to make compromise. A successful and lasting marriage is often the one in which both parties do not insist in having their way but by making sacrifices and amends two people can live together to raise a family. This is a fundamental principle on which greatness is built.

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