I like it when people write articles so I don't have to

This article from The Nation captures almost everything I wanted to write about the Caster Semenya clusterfuck at the time, except that it doesn't use the case (as you could) to question the foundations of the male-female binary (as used for example in segregated sports and in general in almost every other social context). Excerpts:

The notion that there is an enormous physical gulf between men and women's athletic abilities is rarely questioned. No male athletes are tested to see if they are intersex because maleness is considered the physical gold standard against which women must be judged. Silly details like what happens when attempts are made at leveling the playing field between the sexes are ignored. For example, the 1988 Olympic record in the women's 400-meter freestyle swim would have beaten all men's times before the 1972 Olympics. In cross-country skiing, where endurance, strength and agility are key, the women's Olympic record of the fifteen-kilometer race in 1994 would have beaten all men's before 1992. In the thirty-kilometer race, the women's Olympic time in 1992 would have beaten all men's times in previous 30-kilometer races, according to the Women's Sports Foundation.

....These accomplishments, and many others like them, are even more incredible considering the inferior expectations and pervasive unequal social conditioning of female athletes. Gender bias in sports has been studied in children's T-ball where boys hitting off a T are coached and corrected, while girls are largely ignored--poor athletic performance is expected and goes uncorrected. The attacks on Semenya reveal just how key a role sport plays not in reflecting real physical differences between men and women in strength, speed and endurance but in constructing and maintaining gender and sex norms. Under the current set-up, we can only conjecture about the physical competitiveness of men and women in a society where all things were truly equal.