excerpted from like a whisper’

“The real issue is not that Caster Semenya is butch or buff. Its an old old tale that began with colonist and caucasian ideas that Africans that still exist today. Caster Semenya is the fastest female this year, at a mere 18 years has become our South African Golden girl. Her biggest offense is that he has no breasts, no shapely hips or ‘soft features’. I never imagined being a tomboy could be an international dispute or debate. Infact I fear for my own gender-standards that I may take up face-painting and crude uncomfortable shoes commonly worn by women to accentuate beauty. In a world where most girls suffer from eating disorders and their mothers have liposuction, plastic surgery, botox and implants its no wonder the Western media attacks you for embracing and accepting your natural shape.” – Child of Colour

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And as more people weigh in on the controversy, not only is Semenya navigating the racialized gender horror of being denied womanhood but the most perverse transphobia who has already convicted her as transgressor and hopes to make an example out of her to police trans women everywhere. Comments like Germaine Greer’s at once deny Semenya’s femaleness and trash transgender identity:

‘Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.’ – Germain Greer

The hatred of both women of color and trans women, of women in sport in general, all swirls together with little regard for this young girl’s well-being or for the others caught in this racist body policing world wind. Whatever the outcome, the damage is done. The message is sent, black or transgender your body does not belong here; your flesh is not “ours.”

As a curvy girl who has been thin and thick but never a hard, glistening, powerful bodied girl, I recognize the shared oppression of women/girls who dare to be black and female in a world in which even feminists sometimes deny us the right to be beautiful and free. To try and hide this legacy in transphobic wrapping is inexcusable.