This isn’t the only insult to the poppy appeal to be made publically this week — a bunch of idiotic Muslims held a demo in London on Armistice Day (last Thursday) in which a giant poppy was burned and banners reading “British soldiers, burn in Hell” and “Afghanistan, graveyard of empires” were held up, and the two-minute silence was deliberately broken. Of course, this was the one that got media coverage even though it was the usual handful of idiots (no doubt known to those who shouted slogans as Roshonara Choudhary was sentenced last week, if they’re not the same people).

This week it was announced that Mr Justice (David) Eady, is being replaced as head of the Queen’s bench jury and non-jury lists, which made him responsible for a lot of the UK’s libel trials and allowed him to pass judgements which effectively gave the UK a privacy law based on the Human Rights Act. He was known for giving injunctions banning publication of material which invaded the privacy of various famous people; his replacement, Mr Justice (Michael G) Tugendhat, is regarded as being more media-friendly, having lifted an injunction banning publication of details of the footballer John Terry’s indiscretions. The above article argues that current application of the right to privacy is aimed at protecting men who harm women.

Gill Phillips explains:

There is a much deeper moral danger about these orders and that is that the courts in granting them are allowing men to treat women like chattels – they are not just condoning these celebrities’ conduct but also creating the impression that it is acceptable to behave like this and not to tell your wife or partner what you have been up to. This is where the real vice lies. It is not about stopping the tabloids exposing sexual misconduct – I have no desire to read about Wayne Rooney’s latest infidelity – it’s about perpetuating and protecting a view of society where men can behave like Neanderthals and then be told by a court of law that it is absolutely fine to treat women like lumps of meat. The real harm of these orders is not that they gag the press – it is that they stop the wives, partners and families from finding out about the bit on the side.

In 2009, some of these orders appear to have been obtained by men who were seeking to cover up a variety of affairs. Guardian News & Media was notified on 10 occasions of injunctions granted to individuals whose identity was protected by anonymity, and eight orders so far this year. It is also of concern to me that the vast majority of the orders are given by male judges in cases where these male celebrities are represented by male barristers. I worry we are missing a really serious issue – little or no regard appears to be given to the rights of women in these cases, whether the “other woman” or the wounded wife or partner.

The effect of the court’s willingness to grant these orders is that they seem to condone the treatment of women by these celebrities – a woman can gratuitously be called a tart and a slag without any opportunity to defend herself publicly, and all credit in that regard to Vanessa Perroncel for speaking out.

She goes on to observe that much has been said about how distressing it must have been for Rooney’s wife Colleen to find out about his infidelity in the papers, when Rooney could have saved her that by not playing away in the first place; after all, ordinary people cannot use the courts to stop them finding out. The problem is that the newspapers are not interested in what ordinary people do behind their wives’ (or husbands’) backs; they are only interested in Wayne Rooney because he is famous. It’s unreasonable to expect that a person should just accept that their private lives become public property as soon as they become well-known, and we are talking about men who cheat on their wives here — not men beating up or raping women.

It just so happens that the cases we know about involve men — men who cheat on their wives or engage in titillating sexual behaviour involving prostitutes who fake German accents. If it were a woman being discovered playing away, doubtless Gail Phillips would be railing against the “slut-shaming” she might receive in the Daily Mail, and any attempt she made to prevent the details getting out would be supported. A few years ago, the Canadian singer Loreena McKennit won a legal action to prevent publication of a book by a former member of her entourage which “covered personal and sexual relationships, McKennitt’s feelings about her fiancé, who drowned in 1998, as well as details of her health and diet, her emotional vulnerability, and information on a property dispute” (see here and here).

Some might say that wives have a right to know in case their husband infects them with some illness, but they are not thinking of the wives’ feelings or health, after all — they are doing it just to make money. The papers are generally not all that scrupulous about making sure that what they print is accurate, often circulating claims by “close friends” or similar who actually do not exist. Any law which limits this kind of intrusive journalism must be welcome.

* * *

Boys will be boys, some say — the British TV presenter Chris Tarrant, after his wife found out about his affair a few years ago through a private investigator and dumped him post haste, insisted that “playing away” was something that boys do. There is a school of thought that insists that men and women are somehow hard-wired to do certain things or behave in certain ways, or can’t do certain things or behave in certain ways, and that there’s really nothing we can do about it. This nonsense has been common currency for years now — the “Venus and Mars” books and “Why Women Can’t Read Maps and Men Don’t Iron” — but I got referred to this photo-essay by Louann Brizendine, author of pop psychology books “The Male Brain” and “The Female Brain”, which contains one outrageous generalisation after another.

“The male brain is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine”.

“He thrives under competition and is driven to improve his rank in whatever hierarchy he’s in. His bravery is fed in his teen years when a massive increase in testosterone makes him perceive other people’s faces as more aggressive than friendly. And as he matures, he’s wired to let his guard down a little and show his softer side more often.”

“He can’t read your face well enough to see the tears coming. He’s not wired for it, so cut him some slack.”

“He goes zero to fist fight in an instant. Don’t feed into his angry rants. Yelling back at him or taunting him when he’s already angry is like whacking a bee hive with a bat.”

I heard someone on the Vanessa Feltz show call this stuff “neuro-trash” (a pun on Euro-trash, for my American readers), and the first I heard of Louann Brizendine was in Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, which refers to other scientific evidence which exposes Brizendine’s theories as pseudo-science which rings true with the public because it matches (some of) people’s personal experience. The “zero to fist fight in an instant” is particularly offensive. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it said that “boys will be boys” and that this includes violence, and that we can’t do anything to change it, and shouldn’t try.

It’s nonsense. Men that fly into a rage in an instant are men who have problems with their temper or are bullies, and if a woman notices it she should really be concerned. For that matter, the same should be true if a female friend behaves in this fashion. Nobody should tolerate “angry rants” from any man, especially not his female partner if she is (as is usual) smaller than he is.

Of course, some of the recent determinism is a reaction to past attempts to smooth out the differences between the sexes, particularly by “encouraging” boys to play in a less masculine fashion with less gun-play and more of what their female carers think is constructive and co-operative. Perhaps even that was over-stated in the caricatures peddled by the corporate press, but in my opinion anyway, young boys playing cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers doesn’t lead to boys turning into thugs later on — let’s face it, when men or teenagers fight, they don’t point two fingers at each other and say “bang bang, you’re dead”.

Considering that men and women are individuals and that each individual is shaped by his own or her upbringing and circumstance, and has his or her own individual characteristics, has become unfashionable: it’s all boys are this way and girls are that way, to the extent that toys are often far more firmly aimed at one sex or another than they were before, with products aimed at girls seemingly designed to turn them into ready consumers of fashion. (Of course, dolls have always been much more of a girls’ toy along with fashion toys and the such like, but there is no real reason why Lego should be aimed firmly at boys.)

If a woman can’t read a map, it’s just because she’s a woman, and not because she has never bothered to sit down and learn. If a man doesn’t iron, it’s just in his chromosomes, not just because his Mum always did it for him and his wife does now. (In my family, my Dad does most of the ironing and when I was younger, I used to as well, using it as an opportunity to listen to a record or watch TV, so that’s that theory out of the window.) If a man doesn’t listen, it must be just because he’s a man and men’s brains are somehow wired differently — not because he’s used to other people listening to him and to getting his own way, or because he wasn’t brought up to particularly value women’s opinions, or because he’s so sold on this particular idea that he isn’t up to listening to anyone. And if a professional (male) footballer just can’t resist “playing away” when he plays away, it must be his testosterone and not the fact that he’s ill brought-up, or doesn’t love his wife enough to be faithful, or isn’t minded to resist when he’s egged on by his mates in the bar, or is immoral … there are quite a few explanations, actually. After all, we all have hormones and we don’t all behave in the manner described above.

All this pop psychology simply justifies the worst kind of lazy, conservative thinking and behaviour. It absolves us of examining the way we deal with things and making an effort to change our behaviour, or to challenge others’ behaviour, if necessary. Nobody is suggesting that there are simply no broad differences between male and female behaviour and thinking, but it’s not an excuse any more than one’s genes or one’s horoscope, and it’s not beyond individuals’ power to change it.

It’s not as if Tiger Woods is a priest or someone else who makes his living preaching about such matters. He plays golf for a living, and while golf may be known as a “gentleman’s sport” without tolerance for the boorish antics other sports are notorious for, golf is notorious as the sport of the rich and privileged, of those very so-called gentlemen. In some places, golf courses are known for environmental damage, for being built on stolen land and for using scarce water. A few years ago George Monbiot wrote these two articles ([1], [2]) about the involvement of Gary Player, a renowned South African golfer, in a golf development in Myanmar (Burma) and in other countries in the Far East where golf is the sport of corrupt and oppressive elites.

I’m not sure what reputation sportsmen have in America; in this country, footballers in particular are rapidly acquiring a reputation for being overpaid, unsportsmanlike prima donnas. But when one has a domestic crisis, whether it’s his or her fault or not, I don’t see why they should have to retire from public view and then make a grovelling apology to the public. Unless (as with the recent John Terry scandal) it may affect his relationship with his team-mates, it’s got nothing to do with sport.

I submitted a comment to this effect to this post at Shakesville, and for some reason (and no, the “prima donnas” bit wasn’t in it) it got deleted although my comment list at Disqus still lists it.

Football is not inherently the most violent of sports; unlike boxing, it does not reward players for damaging their opponents’ brains, and unlike rugby, you don’t have these ridiculous scrums which have been known to collapse and leave players with broken necks, paralysed and sometimes on ventilators for life. Still, at least those victims are players, not bystanders or people who happen to come from the same town or country as the team which had the temerity to beat another team, which is what both were trying to do.

I have no idea, and don’t much care, who started the violence in Egypt (and Sudan, and Algeria). What I care about is the fact that Muslims are so exercised about a game of football that people have been beaten up, that people have been killed, that offices have been raided, that people are being told to stay indoors if they are (or look) Algerian and are in Egypt (or vice versa), and that countries are recalling their ambassadors and talking about war. This is just a game. Why can people not see that? I cannot understand why Muslims watch it anyway, given that men usually dress in less than they are actually required to in Islam. Many of them would not let their wives or daughters out of the house without a hijab on, so why do they watch men running around with their thighs exposed?

I find the statements made by the Egyptian president, Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, and crown prince Alaa, to be particularly distasteful. Daddy Mubarak told the country’s Parliament that “the dignity of Egyptians is part of the dignity of Egypt and vowed that Egypt will not tolerate those who insult it’s citizens”, while his son called a TV talk show and “delivered a 40-minute rant”, which included:

“It is impossible that we as Egyptians take this. We have to stand up and say, ‘Enough,’” he said. “When you insult my dignity … I will beat you on the head.”

The National, published in the Emirates, quoted him as saying this:

“There is nothing called Arab nationalism or brotherhood, this is just talk, that doesn’t mean anything in reality,” said Mr Mubarak. “When Algerians learn how to speak Arabic they can then come and say that they are Arabs.”

This rather gives the impression that Egyptian politics thrives on the need for a hated outsider. In the past, that has been the Jews or Israelis, and Tantawi himself has been accused of giving sermons which call the Jews “sons of apes and pigs”. Still, the Algerians are a softer target, as they are further away and don’t have nuclear weapons, and Algerian-bashing won’t win them any enemies or bad press in the West. Just as long as the Egyptian people have things to focus their anger on, other than lack of freedom of speech and assembly, poverty, bureaucracy and corruption. I read today that Colonel Qaddafi had proposed to mediate between the two sides, but if the game was won or lost fair and square, there need be no mediation (least of all by Qaddafi); what needs to happen is that the people responsible for the violence should be punished and the devious politicians stop trying to stoke hostility when there is no reason for it.

This programme features an interview with Jade Bracey, a young woman who suffered a head injury after being hit by a car on her 15th birthday. She had to have part of her right frontal lobe removed; this is the part of the brain which deals with memory and personality, and it resulted in substantial memory loss and changes to her personality, as can be imagined, but she has made a remarkable recovery and plans to marry the man who was her boyfriend at the time. (We have a family friend who suffered a similar injury in the late 1990s, and while I don’t think she had the same surgery, she also had a drastic personality change and a lengthy recovery, although she went to college, with help.) The interview with Bracey starts just after 32 minutes, 30 seconds.

Also, over the weekend I found an article by a former wheelchair tennis player about Serena Williams’s outburst, which led to her getting a $10,000 fine after threatening to shove a ball down a line judge’s throat (you can insert the F words yourself):

The rules are there for a reason. Behavior that is not allowed on the court is usually distracting to an opponent and falls under the category of unsportsmanlike behavior. It is also true that it can be distracting to officials or make their jobs impossible to do. A tennis match requires that officials maintain control.

Why? Because as a former player, I can tell you that the game of tennis isn’t just physically demanding. It requires the ability to think, to strategize. Having no parameters on behavior would be like trying to play chess with your opponent jumping up and down and cursing after a move. It’s both distracting and unfair. Worse yet, such antics are used intentionally by some players to regain control of a match when things don’t go their way. I’ve seen it time and time again in matches where officials didn’t make calls they should have. I once had an opponent disappear for a half hour leaving me in the 90 degree heat on a court (note: the author has a high-level spinal cord injury and such people often have trouble regulating their body temperature). The official didn’t call my opponent on her long bathroom break and wouldn’t allow me to get into the shade. Although I was ahead by a set, I was almost unable to play due to overheating when she returned and lost the match. I found out later she was sitting most of the time in front of a cooling fan inside the building by a ladies’ room.

The Sunday evening radio, which from 8pm to 2am on BBC London is given over to black interest programmes, also discussed the incident; a guy called Dotun Adebayo has a two-hour show, and the Williams affair wasn’t the only ugly incident involving a sportsperson who happened to be black; the footballer Emanuel Adebayor pulled some kind of stunt in which he gloated at the fans of his former club (Arsenal) after he scored for his new club, Manchester City. Adebayo invited his fans to speculate that the nasty behaviour of two players who happen to be black might reflect badly on all black people, in terms like “do black sportspeople have the right to act up”, because it would make white people in general judge all black people by them.

Well, some might, but the fact is that most white people do know better than to judge all black people by one or two sporting figures. But I really hate his tendency to make a race issue out of everything that happens to involve a black person, to stoke anger among his listeners, and to indulge the paranoid rantings of some of his callers. The last wouldn’t bug me so much if Muslims who voice fears of discrimination weren’t told things like “don’t blow up trains then”. The tone of parts of the Sunday-evening “black slots” reminds me of the worst excesses of post-9/11 Muslim denialism, but that wasn’t funded by BBC licence fee money.

Yesterday evening, just before 7pm, a lady called Hilary Lister completed a round-Britain sailing trip. She had to do it in two bursts, as weather conditions broke the electronics on her boat the first time round in the summer of 2008. If you wonder why a sailing boat needs electronics, Hilary is paralysed from the neck down, crippled by a degenerative disease, reflex sympathetic dystrophy (RSD), also known as complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) which has affected her since she was 11; she has been in a wheelchair since she was 15 and lost the use of her arms in her mid-20s (she is 37 now). You can read an interview with her from May 2009 here. (More: Shakespeare’s Sister.)

This makes her the first female quadriplegic to make this particular trip. Actually, I don’t see why they have to call her the first female quadriplegic, because she is the first person who is anything like this disabled to do it. A male ‘quad’ called Geoff Holt has also sailed round the British Isles, but Holt, who sailed round the Outer Hebrides and the north coast of Scotland rather through the Caledonian Canal as Hilary Lister did, has a spinal cord injury which clearly affords him some use of his arms (quadriplegic means all four limbs are affected, not necessarily totally paralysed), while Lister has a neuro-degenerative disease and has been left with none. Let’s face it, one mentions that this is the first female to do this or that when it’s a matter of personal physical strength, but take a man’s legs and arms out of the equation and he is no stronger than a similarly disabled woman.

I really wanted to be down in Dover to see her in, but being on the dole and needing to get both a blog entry (which still isn’t published as I write this) and some job applications done, I could not in the end justify the cost of the fuel, which is a shame as it could well be her last big trip as her condition is worsening and there is a real possibility that she will not live another year; the possibility of her dying on this voyage was openly raised, and her support crew were under orders not to resuscitate her if she stopped breathing for more than five minutes. She said she would prefer to die at sea than at home, where she spends long periods on the sofa, alone and in pain, although her breathing problems are less likely to hit when she’s at sea. The sailing is therapeutic for her; even without being in control, her pain abates drastically, and she has said that she has a sense of control when sailing that she doesn’t when on the sofa or being pushed in a wheelchair; she is, to rewrite the Ani Difranco quote above, admiral of her own one-woman navy. One has some sense of this when watching interviews with her; in one recent BBC interview, she had a distinctly halting, almost staccato way of speaking, while those taken on or near the sea tend to have her speaking fluently and calmly. Any picture of her sailing shows her looking rather youthful, calm and happy.

One of Lister’s other projects has been to establish a charity, Hilary’s Dream Trust (also here), whose purpose is to “facilitate the sailing dreams of those with disabilities or significant disadvantages”. At this point I wonder “why just sailing?”, as many disabled people harbour dreams regarding sport or other personal achievement besides sailing. A few weeks ago I came across some videos and some blogs by a quadriplegic woman, who has also been blind since birth, in Canada whose dreams of wheelchair racing have been continually frustrated by people thinking she couldn’t do it, as well as financial difficulties.

Both women suffered an onset of paralysis which spread from their lower legs to their whole body; Lister’s took hold gradually over sixteen years. Kimberley Robbins’s took hold in a matter of hours one night in October 2004; she tells the story here and in these two videos ([1], [2]). Her condition was transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord which leaves about a third of its sufferers permanently paralysed, another third mildly so, while another third recover (some also die). Readers of a certain age might remember the illness from the book Not Dressed Like That, You Don’t or its sequel, Everybody Else Does, Why Can’t I?, a fictionalised diary of a teenage girl and her mother written by Yvonne Coppard. The character involved is the girl’s best friend, who emerges from hospital in a wheelchair, although she eventually recovers.

She spent eight months in hospital and rehab, and unlike Lister’s, her paralysis receded, but it left her with a C6 spinal cord injury and roughly the same level of disability as Geoff Holt (updated: actually, Holt’s injury is at C5 and he has much less mobility than Robbins has; he describes it here). Her dream of being a wheelchair racer took hold while she was still in rehab, after she watched coverage of the sport on TV while in the hospital:

I remember discovering wheelchair racing on TV at my step dad’s brother’s house when I was younger. I stopped at the channel just long enough to think about how powerful the athletes must be and mull it over in my head for a few seconds before skipping to the next channel in search of cartoons. That’s the only time I ever remembered even hearing about wheelchair racing until I got a little older and started watching the Olympics on TV. I never paid attention through a whole race before though. It was interesting, but not enough to keep paying attention.

At that moment however things were different. I was one of these people. Part of the group of wheelchair users. I didn’t know any of them, but I felt like we were all connected somehow. Not just through our use of wheelchairs but all of the other things you have to deal with after a spinal cord injury. I knew from that instant that that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to race!

However, after leaving rehab, she found that people were not willing to help because of her blindness:

When I was discharged from the hospital I asked various organizations that deal with different disabilities about racing and how I would get the equipment I needed to start.

The consensus from these organizations seemed to be the same. Don’t even bother to try wheelchair racing because you are blind and there’s no point in even trying! I was laughed at, talked down to, humiliated and told by numerous people who were also disabled to “try sailing” because there was a disabled sailing group in the area. I asked them if they had any advice about fund raising ideas and was either turned away, ignored or brushed off.

So, sailing is not the dream of every person with a disability. Hilary Lister has told that, after a few sessions as a passenger on the lake, she found she was the only person on the lake who was not learning to sail; how likely is it that Robbins would have got out of that position? Even if she had, she would not have achieved the distinction that Lister has and might not have got the same level of enjoyment out of it if she had (although there is a blind female sailor who has a record of being the first such person to circumnavigate the Isle of Wight). Perhaps it would not have answered the same therapeutic needs as it undoubtedly has done for Lister; even if it had, though, it was not her ambition. Lister made the point that the activities which are readily available to children with disabilities, including sailing trips, suddenly cease when you reach 17; but the same is true of other activities besides sailing! Anyway, reading of Lister’s success and her plans to help others made me wonder if the same people who sponsored her couldn’t help Kim Robbins out, or perhaps they could join forces.

There is a second, more disturbing aspect to this story, which concerns her situation before she started sailing, which was described in this article in the Sunday Telegraph last April; she was left alone for several hours a day in between visits from carers with nothing much to do except look out of the window. I have a sister who is the same age now as she was then, and it is distressing to think of someone like her abandoned on her own for hours, with nothing much to do and in intense pain. Lister herself prefers not to dwell on the past, as she wrote after the story was published, but someone has to as there are probably others in a similar situation. A few years ago, I worked for two weeks driving mentally disabled people around New Malden to their activities centre, to the park and to the pub; most of those I drove around were in group and nursing homes and the idea of them being left in such a miserable state would have been unthinkable. Perhaps it’s a difference between local authorities, and no doubt those activities would not all have been suitable for a well-educated but physically disabled person.

Not that being paralysed to that degree isn’t difficult enough anyway — have a read of this blog, whose author writes of being unable to do the most basic things for herself and of a lack of privacy — but this combination of loneliness, pain and enforced idleness is beyond horrific. Is there an organisation which provides companionship for people in this situation when nobody else can, or will? I don’t mean basic care, because that is already provided, but company and entertainment on the appropriate level. If there isn’t one, perhaps there should be? I thought of the name “Quads’ Company”, after Kids Company, the centre for deprived children and teenagers in London, but perhaps the ambiguity of that name defeats it (the term isn’t that well-known over here, and if I were to say to anyone I knew “this is my friend Kim/Jenni/Hilary and she’s a quad”, they would assume she had three siblings born the same day — in Jenni’s case, even after seeing her ventilator!), and probably not all those who might need this kind of service are quadriplegics anyway.

After all, not all severely disabled people have such ambitions with regard to sailing or other sport, but they still need things to do to occupy them and, if necessary, take their mind off their pain: to sit and talk or read to them, take them out and do things which interest them, whatever that may be. Is there such an organisation? Perhaps one could be set up while Lister’s achievement is still fresh in people’s minds.

I got the title for this post from a friend’s remark on Facebook: “if it looks like a bloke, if it talks like a bloke and if it runs like a bloke - it probably is a bloke!”. However, women’s voices sounding a bit like men’s, with or without any gender abnormality, is rare but it exists. I remember hearing Maya Angelou on Radio 4 (on Book Club, if I remember rightly) and noticing how masculine her voice sounded; I remember a phonecall from my sister’s female boss many years ago, and when she said who she was, I didn’t believe it because it sounded like a male voice. I even said to my sister, “this is some bloke saying he’s your boss!”, and the woman said, “oh, people always think I’m a fella on the phone” and at that point I knew she was who (and what) she said she was.

Of the many gender abnormalities or “intersex” conditions which may be at play here, the two best-known are androgen insensitivity syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperplasia. AIS is when a body is resistant to testosterone, and even if a baby has XY (i.e. male) chromosomes, the testosterone has no effect. Testosterone has a role in forming the male body in the womb as well as in developing the boy’s body into an adult male one, as well as in retaining energy and a man-like bearing later on. A “male” person with AIS ends up with a superficially feminine body, albeit usually without a womb (and therefore infertile), and will often look very feminine because the oestrogen they do produce can work without the influence of testosterone. There are complete and partial versions of AIS, with those affected with the latter becoming more likely to have ambiguous genitalia and slightly more masculine features.

CAH is a defect of the adrenal glands which sometimes produces masculinisation of a female body, and sometimes a girl with this condition will be raised as a boy until the mistake is realised later (this is less common than it used to be as identifying a baby’s real sex at birth when there is ambiguity is much easier now; the case of Lady Colin Campbell may be one of CAH and you may find a similar story here). If this is the case here, it may give her a competitive advantage as girls with CAH may be more masculine, more physical and more aggressive than other women. Unlike other women with intersex conditions, their reproductive organs are unmistakeably female and they usually have periods.

The tone of some of the coverage has suggested that there is much tittilation about this episode: Mark Lawson, in an otherwise well-informed opinion piece in last Friday’s Guardian, opined that “without being too indelicate about this, lycra running shorts and slow-mo HD television pictures show that if Semenya is a man, she is clearly no Linford Christie”. Other articles have suggested that women with intersex conditions have male and female reproductive organs, which they don’t — they have genitals that resemble one sex and reproductive organs (often rudimentary) of the other, or none.

Then there was Germaine Greer in last Friday’s Guardian who, it should be pointed out, has “form” when it comes to ill-informed attitudes towards intersex conditions and particularly AIS: a number of individuals associated with the AIS Support Group have corresponded with her about a section in her book, The Whole Woman, reproduced here in which she asserts that women with AIS develop “a masculine figure — broad shoulders, narrow hips, no waist, short legs — and progressive baldness and heavy facial hair”, none of which actually develops in the case of complete AIS. Greer’s position is (or at least was) that a woman is someone with XX chromosomes and nothing else, even though those with complete or most forms of partial AIS are always identified as female at birth, are brought up as female, could never resemble anything other than a female in body appearance or voice because of their resistance to testosterone, and don’t realise that they are anything other than a normal woman until they try to have sex or to have children.

In last Friday’s Guardian, Greer makes one of her usual side-swipes at transsexuals and then acknowledges that chromosome-based gender tests for athletes didn’t pick up a single case of a male athlete disguising himself as a woman in years, but did pick up abnormalities in women who didn’t know they had them, in at least one case disqualifying a woman unfairly (presumably Santhi Soundarajan). However, she ends her piece by suggesting that “people who don’t ovulate or menstruate will probably always physically outperform people who do”, apparently ignorant of the fact that some female athletes simply stop menstruating. Additionally, some women with high-level spinal cord injuries take medication to stop their periods because they cause dysreflexia, a potentially fatal blood pressure disorder which many people with such injuries are prone to, so perhaps this could be considered an unfair advantage in the wheelchair races. Greer does not suggest that such people be disqualified, as she grudgingly admits that such competitive advantages, even in people who are “mentally female and physically male”, are just a fact of life.

Those who knew her in South Africa, as already stated, are in no doubt that Semenya is female. Many think the controversy absurd, with one woman in her village saying, “she played with my girl. I’ve got no doubts. She wears panties”. She played football in an otherwise all-male team, and her team-mates remember that she would change away from the men on the team. Nobody disputes that she was a tomboy, that she never wore skirts after a certain age, and that she failed to develop breasts, which does suggest that there are medical reasons behind her masculine appearance.

Still, I find the race row that some have tried to make of this to be somewhat convenient and ridiculous also. This has nothing to do with white people judging a black woman based on white standards of femininity; anyone who looks at Caster Semenya and then at any image of a black African woman, such as those accompanying the above BBC article, will easily see that, regardless of her identity and upbringing, she does not look anything like them. There may be a stereotype of black women, particularly Afro-American women, being somewhat masculine compared to “dainty” white women (the author of What Tami Said notes that questions about the femininity of black women are nothing new, although as Mark Lawson pointed out, such questions about powerful white women are not uncommon either), but they always acted and dressed like women and to anyone not blinded by prejudice, their femininity was obvious. These days, you find many white women in the UK, particularly of the older generation, who have short hair and a somewhat boyish dress sense (and I am talking straight women here) who never wear a dress except when it’s too hot for trousers or on special occasions, something which is rare in Africa.

But you won’t convince someone determined to grandstand about race that this isn’t about race. However, this issue could perhaps have been dealt with rather more sensitively in South Africa, where perhaps any medical condition she has could have been treated before she went to Berlin, where she has faced the humiliation of questions about her sex and seeing the most intimate details about her life become a topic for worldwide discussion.

However, I do object to the extent to which this government goes to appease the Chinese authorities. Last weekend, the torch was accompanied by a set of Chinese guards in blue, and the point of the Chinese presence was that they spoke Chinese - presumably so that they could identify protesters with the wrong Chinese slogans. When the country’s president, Jiang Zemin, visited a few years ago, this government also bent over backwards to make sure that he didn’t see too much of the demonstration, including (according to one letter in the Guardian) making sure the police cleared protesters off a bridge over Jiang’s route. Clearly it wouldn’t impress a quasi-dictator to see a demonstrator against him on a foreign visit, even to a country he knew to be a democracy, but what are they going to do - stop selling us computer parts or (perish the thought) zips for our trousers?

One other thought: I was wondering why the torch wasn’t taken out to Shropshire as well, given that the original Olympics of modern times were, and still are, held in the village of Much Wenlock in that county. Perhaps it was down to time (although the Chinese are apparently finding time to get a torch - albeit not the torch, but one lit from the same flame - up Mount Everest), but surely they will make time for this in 2012, when the modern Olympics, like football in 1996, “come home”?

To be honest, I don’t care about football much and the fact that next year there will be nobody sitting screaming in front of the telly at footballers who cannot hear them doesn’t make me lose any sleep. The problem is, though, that the age of big-money football has brought about a Premiership which no longer nurtures native talent. Many of the major Premiership teams rely heavily on imported players, often from countries where football is a route out of the slums. Season ticket prices have been driven up and up, “coincidentally” with the rise in player salaries, making it more difficult for the supporters to regularly see matches; tickets for matches at high-profile clubs cost over £20 (in the case of Premiership clubs, good seats cost much more). (Arsenal, a stone’s throw from the City, is notoriously popular with moneyed City types and their ground is known as the Highbury Library, because they are not exactly boisterous supporters; its tickets are sold to registered supporters only.)

Why is this? Could it be the fact that school playing fields are being sold off and that schools are supposedly placing less emphasis on team sports? Or is it that the traditional working-class support base of the game itself is being shut out of it by high ticket prices? It is not just football, though - the England cricket team is not the best of performers on the international stage, famously only winning the Ashes from Australia in 2005 when it had an Australian coach (and I remember the notorious defeat to the semi-professional Zimbabwe team in the mid-1990s). I would call myself a “by-default” cricket man, meaning that it’s the only major sport I haven’t detested since my school days when both it and football were compulsory, not that I’ve played it in years or that I’ve ever been to the Oval for a game, and like most people, I suspect that I really only think about the game when the team wins or, more commonly, loses a big international match. I think both games need to reconnect with their popular base if the national teams are to become winners again.