It’s time intersexual people were protected by the law

WHO WILL COME TO YOUNG Caster Semenya’s rescue? The question is crucial given the blitz of negative publicity following revelations that the South African teenager is intersexual — the more acceptable term for hermaphrodite, which is used in medicine.

Radio and TV talk-shows and even print media commentators have been particularly acerbic in their remarks about the runner, who recently stole the limelight on winning gold in the 800-metre race at the IAAF games in Berlin.

The tasteless talk-show banter poses grave questions about our humanness given that Semenya is first and foremost a human being.

As journalists, we have scored dismally against the 2007 Media Act, which requires us to treat all subjects of news coverage with respect, showing particular compassion to victims of tragedy. Her right to privacy is no more.

SEMENYA’S TRAGIC CASE CALLS FOR deep introspection by journalists who have reduced the athlete to an object of ridicule instead of interrogating the socio-cultural and legal issues that have compounded, instead of alleviating, her trauma. (I’ll call her a woman because that’s the identity she has maintained).

Traditional society usually killed intersexuals as taboo kids or hid them away because of the stigma arising from society’s inability to assign to them the male or female identity. It is no different in modern hospitals where doctors and nurses literally stop in their tracks, unable to announce, ‘It’s a girl’ or ‘It’s a boy’.

It doesn’t end there. Before mother and child are discharged from hospital, they should fill the Birth Notification form to kick-start the process of acquiring the birth certificate. The form has to indicate whether the child is male or female for reflection in the birth certificate.

Because birth registration is a requirement in law, the intersexual child is denied legal status from the outset. No wonder Dr Daniel Njai, a paediatrics lecturer at the University of Nairobi, describes the condition as “the most complex neonatal problem doctors have to deal with”.

Corrective surgery is an option, or is it? Technically, the child is being subjected to IGM — intersexual genital mutilation — which is a form of inhuman treatment.

Notwithstanding the operation’s good intentions to assign the child the male or female identity, IGM is simply child abuse, which is why intersexuals in the US have been suing their parents on attaining age 18 for tampering with their God-given nature.

While doctors can plead parents’ informed consent, such permission is panic-driven to avoid stigma especially on the part of the mother, who risks being chased from her matrimonial home, for giving birth to a ‘‘monstrosity’’.

Assuming the parents accept the child, numerous roadblocks lie ahead. Schools admit children as girls or boys, with the birth certificate as a supportive document. Absence of the document technically locks out the intersexual child.

If she slips through the system, does she go to girls’ toilets, where other girls will run away or to the gents where they risk being sexually molested?

The danger of the intersexual child dropping out of school and forfeiting the right to education looms large. My inquiries show that such children rarely go beyond Standard Four. They drop out because of the sheer cruelty of peers.

Dropping out sets the stage for joblessness and chances are high that the child will drift into crime to survive or to hit back at society and the system that has placed roadblocks in its path.