Last week 18 year old South African Caster Semenya took the gold medal in the women's 800 meter at the world athletics championships in Berlin. But she was not able enjoy her gold without accompanying public humilation. Why? Because Semenya has a "masculine appearance" - larger muscles, facial features and hair and deep voice- and she run so fast that many people believe she can't possibly be "all woman". So in front of the world, she is now being subjected to complex and invasive tests to check for any chromosomal or genetic variations that may make her more masculine and give her an "unfair advantage".

I'm being liberal with my use of quotation marks because I think that this whole thing is unfair and ridiculous. A silver lining is possibly a true discussion of what it means to be a man or a woman, and what it means to be an athlete. One on side of the debate are some of Semenya's competitors, who identify her masculine features as proof she should not be allowed to compete as a woman, while on the other side are Semenya's fierce defenders in South Africa, who are outraged that being "too good" somehow suddenly makes her ineligible.

The first thing that annoyed me about this story is that Semenya is being forced to go through this now, after winning the gold and the spotlight, in public. Then I got annoyed that so many media outlets are reporting this as "gender testing" and an issue of "gender". Sorry for the caps, but THIS IS NOT AN ISSUE OF GENDER. Semenya identifies as a woman, she lives in our society as a woman- this is her gender. Biological makeup such as chromosomes and genetics do not define one's gender- this is sex. The least media outlets can do is use words correctly.

Now, getting past my initial annoyance at the way Semenya's amazing win is being handled, this whole thing brings up a very interesting issue to me: What happens if Semenya does end up having a genetic variation? What if Semenya is intersex? Does this mean she would no longer be able to compete with women, so that she doesn't have an unfair advantage?

Michael Phelps has an unusual body as well, made perfectly for the swimming he competes in, but he has unusually long arms and torso and short legs. This is a genetic variation that gives him an unfair advantage over the swimmers he competes with, but since he passed his drug tests (as did Semenya), no one has tried to suggest that there is some reason he should be ineligible to compete. In fact, at the level of world class athletes, most of the competitors have some sort of biological contributor that makes them better at what they do than the rest of us. If Semenya is found to have something that gives her an unfair advantage, where is the line that makes it somehow different?

And if she was disqualified from competing with women, would she be allowed to and chose to compete with men even though she identifies as a woman? Would she be barred from competition altogether?

The public way in which Caster Semenya's victory has been questioned is insulting and embarrassing, but maybe it will force people to talk and think about what is means to be a man or a woman, particularly in a field that is entirely about the performance of the body. Meanwhile, I hope Semenya is allowed to enjoy her gold- regardless of her sex, she earned it the way all athletes do, through a combination of hard work and good genes.