Is she a he, or isn’t she?

Nazi cover-ups, sexually ambiguous sprinters and tell-tale five o’clock shadows

Is she a he, or isn’t she? A South African 800 metre runner’s gender has been questioned after she stormed to victory in the World Championships in Berlin yesterday. Below see top 10 gender benders in sport. And - a word of warning - be prepared to stomach phases like, ahem, 'ambigious genitalia', 'transitioning’ and 'gender reassignment'.

1. Physically imposing middle-distance sensation Caster Semenya, 18, was at the centre of an inquiry on Tuesday due to concerns over whether she is really a bloke or lass.

Weeks before the race the International Association of Athletics Federations made Semenya take a gender verification test, the results of which are not yet known.

Below shows her storming to victory in Berlin yesterday:



Strong running, you must agree. Make up your own mind about Semenya.
Here she is speaking after her semi-final win.



2. Poor Caster could lose her (his?) medal if the IAAF determine she is actually a he – and it would not be the first time an athlete has been stripped of a medal … not to mention their dignity.

Three years ago Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan had to hand back her 800m silver medal after failing a gender test at the Asian Games in Doha. Sadly, feeling publicly humiliated, Soundarajan (below) later attempted suicide.

3. Back in 2005 a judge in Zimbabwe sentenced a leading youth athlete to four years in prison for competing in female events, after Samukeliso Sithole was caught with his pants down and found to be a man.

The 18-year-old, who earlier claimed to be a hermaphrodite, notched up seven gold medals in women's competitions in 2004.

After six witnesses - including two doctors – confirmed that Sithole was a man, she / he confessed and then was locked up.

4. Stanisława Walasiewicz (later Stella Walsh) won Olympic gold for Poland in the 100 metres at the 1932 Los Angles Games. Four years later she won silver in the same event.

So popular was Walasiewicz in her homeland that she was named Polish sportsperson of the year in 1930 and from 1932-4 while in her career she set over 100 national and world records, including 51 Polish records, 18 world records, and eight European records.

And she would have gone down as one of the greatest sportswomen in history if she had not been caught up in an armed robbery in 1980. Walasiewicz was a bystander in the heist in Cleveland, Ohio, and was shot dead. An autopsy revealed that she possessed male genitalia.

5. In 2004 Australian golfer, and former man, Mianna Bagger qualified for the Ladies European Tour, becoming the first transsexual in history to do so. The LET had previously stated all entrants must be “female at birth”, but the rules were changed for Bagger following a ruling by the International Olympic Committee.

6. American Richard Raskind was a pretty good tennis player – in 1972 he reached the final of the national championships for those 35-and-over. Later, as Renee Richards, he would go as high as 20th in the women’s world rankings.

In the 1960s Raskind travelled to Europe to seek out a famous gynaecologist in the hope that he would make him a woman. However the lady was for turning and shelved that idea to return to the states to marry and father a child.

But Raskind’s longings would not go away and in 1975 he underwent sex reassignment surgery. As Richards she gained notoriety for initially being denied entry into the 1976 US Open by the United States Tennis Association, who citied an unprecedented women-born-women policy. Renee disputed the ban, and the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favour a year later. New balls please!

7. German pole vaulter Yvonne Buschbaum, 29, was crowned world junior champion in 1999 and went on to finish sixth at the Sydney Olympic Games the following year. She also won Bronze at the European Championships in 2002, making her the second best female German pole vaulter in history … and then things went a little bit strange.

In 2007 Buschbaum retired from the sport and began gender reassignment and demanded to be called ‘Balian’, after the blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven.

8. Canadian cyclist Kristen Worley, a former man, very nearly competed at last year’s Olympic Games in Beijing. She would have been 40, but her gender ‘transitioning’ began in 1996.

Years of hormone injections followed and while she claimed that she could achieve the Olympic qualifying time for the 3,000m pursuit, the Canadian Olympic committee brought an end to her dream, stating that the times had not been achieved in correct circumstances.

If she had have gone to Beijing, she would have been the first openly transitioned athlete to compete at an Olympic Games.

9. Ewa Klobukowska was the first Olympic athlete to fail a gender test. In 1967 she was found to have ‘one chromosome too many’. Three years earlier she had stormed to prominence at the Tokyo Olympics having won gold in the women's 4x100 m relay and the bronze medal in women's 100 metres.

In Prague a year later Klobukowska ran the 100m in 11.1 seconds – then a world record. Further, in 1966, at the European Championships in Budapest she won two gold medals in 100 m sprint and 4x100 m relay and the silver medal in 200m sprint.

10. World record breaking high jumper Hermann Ratjen was forced by the Nazis in Germany to pretend to be a woman at the Berlin Games in 1936. The Nazis wanted to ensure that Germany won much more medals than they had done the previous Games – and many more than the dominant Americans – and Ratjen, or Dora, as he became known, missed out on a medal that year – he / she came fourth in the high jump.

But he won the European Championships in Vienna in 1938, setting a world record for the ladies high jump with a 5 feet 5.75 inches leap.

Ratjen was only found out while travelling back from the European Championships. Although Ratjen was wearing a skirt, two women spotted him with a five o'clock shadow at a train station and a doctor was summoned and his sex revealed.

Though Ratjen never competed again, because of his ‘ambiguous genitalia’, in 1957 he had been made to disguise himself as a woman “for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany”. He added: “For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull.”