Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a man?

Another summer is gone, oh dear, well, at least here in good old England we did have a summer at last. Climate change is finally working but, blimey, it will take a while before matching Brazil or Thailand!

Anyway, summer is all about sport.

England has won the Ashes, apparently. I don’t know anything about cricket, or what some kind of ashes have to do with a sport competition, but it seems like the trophy was a cool thing to bring home. In tennis, Roger Federer has won Wimbledon (again) and Andy Murray still hasn’t managed to win a bloody Grand Slam title. However, the main sporting attraction of the summer was a sportswoman (or sportsman) under the name of Caster Semenya.

Well, as you probably know, Caster Semenya has won the Women's 800 metres of the World Championship of Athletics by a mile. Nothing wrong with that, if it wasn’t that, well… she looks A LOT like a man… I mean much more than Ann Widdecombe does! And she talks like a man, with a pitch of voice that she could be performing as a decent tenor. I could get hold only of an interview of her/him (what the hell) in the web, but the way she/he looks, talks and moves is unquestionably manly, and many people I talked to seem to agree.

The questioning about Semenya’s real gender has been growing for a while, and increasingly so since her stunning victory in the final that IAAF (the International Association of Athletics Federations) has forced Semenya to take a gender test. By that, I don’t mean just checking what she looks like naked, but a thorough examination of her body, internally as well as externally.

The story has obviously created, since the start, a lot of controversy. Not only the issue is rather intriguing, but political and racial ingredients are playing part in the story, and many commentators and members of the public are willing to read into the story other “conspiracy” meanings.

There is, in fact, the customary talking of “raaaacism” by some usual forever-guilty white liberals and from some over-sensitive members of black community who believe all this talking of Semenya’s gender issue has to do with the fact that she is black. Bloody hell, this has nothing to do with race but with gender! In athletics, differences between man and women are huge. I was myself an 800 metres runner back in the ‘90s and with my record (1’ 57” 6) I could have been easily running in the Women's Olympic Final, but as a man I could barely manage to reach the semi-final of a regional event.

The other issue is that the athlete is South African, and this story has apparently been created to discredit a black person from a country guilty in the past of apartheid. Should we then all pretend nothing is happening until we will find a white woman with the same conditions?

Last, let’s not forget, South Africa is hosting the next World Cup of football, and the country is trying to keep a good appearance on the international stage, and a sex scandal, as every US President wannabe knows, is not welcomed.

But now, finally, the test is coming through, and it seems like Semenya is a hermaphrodite after all, in other words not a woman and not a man, but more a man than she and all her supporters and “raaaacist” idiots wanted us to think.

Now what the IAAF is going to do? Strip Semenya of the gold medal? And who is she going to run the next race with… Lily Savage?