Dannie

That summer we moved from the condo with the jungle wallpaper, to the house with ivy climbing its walls. At our new house, I found my best friend the first day. Cheryl’s house is two-doors down and it was the pale green color of mint. I think a short sentence simply naming Cheryl would be a good transition between finding my best friend and seeing her pale green mint of a house. Cheryl and her sisters ruled the block, and felt it was their job to look at the new girl in the corner house with the big oak trees. They road their skateboards over and over, up and down the sidewalk, in front of our house, to establish that they owned the concrete.
I stepped out from behind the lilac bush and collided with Cheryl. We lay on the sidewalk staring at each other. She had an overbite and dusty bare feet. She wore her Catholic school uniform on Saturday, and there was a sticky ring of something red around her mouth. She looked away and asked, “Why are your mom and dad white and you’re not?”

In my life, I have only ever been asked one question.

I was five when they got married, and I got my own ring and a new yellow dress. Bob asked me if he could be my dad. Bob has a big brown beard-- his bright white balding head was sun burned bright red in the summer. The day after my mom married my new dad they drove me all the way to Curtis’ house in Milwaukee. On his front porch, my new dad and Curtis shook hands. Curtis was my father, the biological kind. And this would be our last visit.

Curtis took me to his mother’s house, and I stayed there for many days. I remember my grandma braiding my hair in cornrows. I sat on the floor, hot in between her knees, crying because of the pulling. She wacked me for being tender headed. Later, thinking I looked like my aunties, I stared in a mirror tilting my head from side to side, to examine the lighter white skin between braids. Dannie. Dannie was my name at grandma's house. Erin was some white girl’s name.

She had big hands and a wide chest. Grandma had this amazing smile, warm and mischievous. Rather than looking like her, each of her nine children reflected their own father’s features-- the only consistent feature was that smile. I have it too.

Curtis’ father, Alvin was just one in a long line of men. Curtis learned early, the language to explain his own multiple fathers, absent fathers. His own temporary fathers. When Curtis left our new family alone, I imagine that he used those words: multiple, absent, temporary. When he did not go the last custody court hearing, his absence screamed.
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My new dad chose me and asked me if he could be my dad. Before the wedding, we moved into his condo off Grand Avenue. Its walls covered with huge green leaf wallpaper—it felt like the jungle. The smell of freshly made waffle cones filled the apartment, wafting up from the Grand Ol’ Creamery down the street. The woman upstairs had a dentist chair in her apartment and she let me sit in the chair whenever I visited. A few days before we moved out, Mom spanked me for drawing on the wall with a crayola from the 96 pack that I got for a wedding present.

After the wedding, Curtis was always there in the background. My blackness forcing me to explain that when I said “father,” I meant someone else, I meant my new dad, or my stepdad or my white dad or the dad I live with, because my father was dead.

He was catatonic. He was frozen in 1985-- forever.

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On my eighth birthday, a little gold watch with a pink face came in the mail with a Milwaukee postmark. It was broken when it arrived.

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On the Christmas of my nineteenth year, my maternal grandmother hobbled down the driveway, over the ice, in the dark, to give me the message it took Curtis fifteen years to write, “I have not been doing well, lots of heart problems. I miss you very much. Please write me.” Three sentences folded inside of a Christmas card with a cartoon Santa on the front.

An avalanche came tumbling out. My mother would not stop talking. She was only 22 when she met him: “He was good to us until the drugs, and even after the drugs, he loved you.” And she rambled on and on for days. That year, winter break from my college classes, was an exercise in hiding from her nervousness.

I did not write him back.

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Curtis was a big man, almost seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds. With dark skin and his hair in jheri curls--he was not heavy, just big. There are pictures from an early Christmas that mark the striking difference between his height and hers. Mom says he had to duck in doorways. He had a big car, wide and long, and he would drive with his knees, stretching one long arm over the back of the front seat. The car filled with the smell of cologne, free from the trap of his underarm. He drove to a park, and he put me on his shoulders. I could touch the sky.

When I look at pictures of them from that time, all I see is my mom. She looks so beautiful in those pictures, young and smiley, her long brown hair curly. Her olive skin is light against his. She is always on her toes in the pictures of them together.

I am not a Movement Child-- a blessed symbol of racial progress and an inspiration of a raceless future. I am a Disco Child. I was not born in the sixties, to activist parents but at the end of the seventies, to a disco club bouncer and a cocktail waitress. Theirs was not a political statement or a statement about unity and peace, celebrated in the most intimate way. I am not a movement child unless you are talking about the shake or the electric slide. I am a disco child, born to a soundtrack of Sly and the Family Stone and of the Fifth Dimension. Their split seemed inevitable, their love looked different in the daylight. Party drugs got him, speed and cocaine set his rhythm. The music they made was off beat.

Caster Runs for Me

There is a video circulating the internet, a video of people emerging from the darkness-- some with bright smiles, others more somber, each holding a hand written sign that reads-- Caster Runs for Me. It is a moving 3 minute video of solidarity, images of men and women standing in community with world class runner, Caster Semenya, who now has her most private life on very public display. Shot is Brooklyn, the video's soundtrack is the haunting harmony of Sweet Honey in the Rock's Beatrice Johnson Reagon singing the beatitudes-- blessed are . . . for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, they shall see God, they are the children of God.

There is also a video produced by the Associated Press, a video that is narrated by the reporter Diane Kepley. It begin with a challenge—“Quick man or woman? She, and yes, she claims to be a woman.” Her flippant tone speaks over the images of a young woman, 18 years old, smiling from ear to ear, celebrating a victory. Diane Kepley then issues another test-- “Some say how she looks and sounds is proof enough.” This is then followed by that athletic young woman, nervously explaining that she did not expect to win the 800 meter race at all. This was not proof enough.

Caster Semenya is awaiting the results of a gender verification test, or maybe its more accurate to say gender verification tests. Not simply a chromosomal test or a brief physical evaluation, she was subjected to a series of invasive tests by a gynecologist, a geneticist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an internal medicine physician. These tests were the result of her hard work, suspicion arising from an 8 second faster time. These tests were the result of the ignorance of reality that binary definitions of gender don't work for everyone. These tests are only performed on female athletes.

South Africa, Caster's home, has come out in support of their champion daughter. She was received with celebration and the defense of state officials and the public. After a makeover, She appeared on the cover of South Africa's YOU Magazine, looking very feminine. This is international news as well, ask Diane Kepley.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), amateur sport's governing body, has said that Caster has committed no crime and is not suspected of cheating in the 800 meter race at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics. She won with the time of 1:55.45. IAAF has said it was “obliged to investigate” her gender based upon this improvement. The Sydney Daily Telegraph has printed claims that Caster is a hermaphrodite. The IAAF is yet to confirm this statement, instead saying that it is premature to say.

Hermaphrodite is an outdated term, intersex is more appropriate. Other athletics have lost their medals because they were found to intersex-- the Indian runner, Santhi Soundarajan, lost the Asia Game's silver metal in 2006 and was diagnosed with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome or AIS, a genetic disorder where an person is born with XY chromosomes but is insensitive to androgens, or male hormones. This causes the body to develop testes internally and for the rest of the body to develop as female. There are over 100 steps in gender development in the fetus and there are possibilities at every step for gender abnormalities or disorders. Between 1 and 2 in 100 babies born have some sort of sexual ambiguity, which means that something like 67,000,000 people in the world are intersex. Some of these people are discovered when they are newborns and then they are subjected to years of painful surgeries, others discover at puberty, some when they try to conceive, some may never know.

An athlete competing in the 1936 Olympics, and finishing fourth in the high jump, was later discovered to be a Jewish man in disguise. This was viewed as an act of self preservation as he was hiding from the Nazis. And there is Spanish hurdler Maria Martinez Patino, who was disqualified from a 1985 competition by genetic tests and striped of her medals, she had passed the tests before. She medals were reinstated after she protested the results. Or there is the story of Stella Walsh, whose gender was only uncovered in an autopsy, 48 years after her world record time in the 100m at the 1932 Olympics.

Female Olympic athletes have been examined since the 1930s and the Olympics started using the more invasive gender verification at the Grenoble Games in 1966. Prior to 1966, the gender examination was an all female nude parade in front of the Olympic committee. The Journal of the American Medical Association states that "gender verification tests are difficult, expensive, and potentially inaccurate. Furthermore, these tests fail to exclude all potential impostors, are discriminatory against women with disorders of sexual development, and may have shattering consequences for athletes who 'fail' a test." Because of questions about the tests accuracy, the International Olympic Committee discontinued the practice in 1999. New Olympic rules allow transsexual athletes that undergo gender reassignment surgery and complete 2 years of hormone treatments to compete under their new gender designation.

Caster's excellence challenges the borders we have placed around race, around gender, around sexuality. What do we suffer then we try to maintain a two-sex system, or keep the races “pure” or teach that sexuality is not a spectrum. Many of us come out from the darkness and hold her name like a banner because we ride the fence or we push the borders.

But Caster ran like the wind, and when she threw her hands in the air and wore that South African flag as a cape, she was a champion. If the IAAF chooses to strip her of that golden medallion, she will still be a champion. Caster Semenya runs for me.

Adams, Cecil. "If a man has a sex change, can he compete in the Olympics as a woman?" The Straight Dope. Web. 08 Oct. 2009.

Caster Runs for Me. Http://casterrunsforme.com/. Web. 20 Sept. 2009.

“Dora Ratjen.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.

“Gender Verification in Sports.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.

Kepley, Diane. "She? or He? Is Woman's World Champion." AP Video: Plus. Sept. 2009. She? or He? Is Woman's World Champion. AP Video: Plus, 24 Sept. 2009. Web. .

Peel, Robert. "Maria's Story." Medhelp.org. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG). Web. 08 Oct. 2009.

"Stanislawa Walasiewicz." Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 09 Oct. 2009.