With the media spectacle around world beating athlete Caster Semenya gaining fever pitch, South African newspaper “The Cape Times” sacrificed one of its reporters working tirelessly on inequality in South Africa, to find out how common “intersexuality” is:
“True hermaphroditism is more common in South Africa than anywhere else in the world. And specialists who deal with intersexed people in Gauteng say they’re seeing a new patient every four to six weeks – less than 10 percent of the condition’s estimated incidence in the province….This week Dr David Segal, a paediatric endocrinologist at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, said there was a greater incidence of true hermaphroditism, medically referred to as ovatesticular disorder of sex development, here than anywhere else in the world. Segal, who also works at Wits University’s Donald Gordon Medi-Clinic, explained this hermaphroditism meant a person was born with both testicular and ovarian tissue. This results in there not being enough testosterone to form a normal boy and too much for a girl. But what many people do not realise, Segal said, is that other conditions can lead to intersexuality.”
As my friend Dan Moshenberg (who forwarded it to me) remarked: Maybe, we could start, again, by having the medical profession not term every alternative `disorder’ or `deviance’. “A normal boy … a girl.”
