My Name is Hannibal
4th June 2015
Richard Fernandez isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.
Yahoo says a petition in change.org asking the International Olympic Committee to take back the gold medal Caitlyn Jenner won in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games has raised the issue of “how to differentiate men and women”. The petition reads:
It has recently come to light that gold medalist Bruce Jenner is in fact transgender, and therefore, identifies as a woman. We congratulate Ms. Jenner on these new developments and wish her the best. However, this creates somewhat of a problem as Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore, was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men’s sports and vice versa. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that we must ask whether or not it is proper that Ms. Jenner should retain her olympic records in light of this, as we must now either claim that Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner are two entirely different people (which we know is not true), or that Bruce Jenner was, in fact, a woman participating in a men’s event.
But it’s worse than that. The problem it raises is whether we can draw a correspondence between what a person is and the body he/she/it inhabits. Now it used to be worrisome when one found oneself in earnest discussion with group pretending to consist of Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. To join in was itself a sign that you had lost a few marbles recently. But assuming that both the Yahoo article and petition were written in sober seriousness, then society is now seriously talking on Jenner’s terms. After all, Jenner’s on the the cover of Vanity Fair and on the headlines of all the major news outlets so it must be serious.