17th September, 2009 Caster Semenya

The controversy surrounding the true gender of Caster Semenya, the South African athlete, has prompted me to write about a horse/pony that I saw last year. I have promised the owner that I will never reveal the identity of the horse - so don't ask. Could have been a horse; could have been a pony, but I shall call it a horse. Anyway, I was working with her and noticed that she was quite nibbly, like a colt. During a break I noticed that she didn't have the normal configuration under her tail - she had a normal vagina but at it's base there was a tiny penis. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing so I said something along the lines of "Er...is your horse alright on the bottom department?". "Ah", they replied, "you noticed". Further discussion revealed that she was a hermaphrodite. Because her external genitalia were overwhelmingly female and she also had mammary tissue, her owners had assumed that she was a mare but her behaviour and later, tests, revealed that she was in fact a he.