All eyes on London, where the Games have begun. Will the real girls please step this way? Telling the girls from the boys in international sport has been almost as contentious as cracking down on doping and performance enhancing drugs. Assigning gender, however, is way more complex than is popularly believed.
Recently, a retired track athlete living in Kolkata and working as a ticket examiner in the Indian Railways made headlines; not for her athletic prowess, but over whether 'she' was a 'she' at all. Twenty-six-year-old Pinki Pramanik was arrested in mid-June on charges of raping her live-in partner. The case was melodramatic on many counts, involving as it did a talented athlete who had bagged medals in 2006 at both the Doha Asiad Games and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
A female live-in partner alleging rape is rare in itself. But a woman being charged of rape – and being accused of being a man – was the stuff of a Bollywood masala movie, and the Bengali press was particularly lurid in its coverage. Since a private doctor had declared that Pramanik was 'not a woman', male policemen felt free to grope her, manhandle her, and throw her into a cell in a men's jail. Far from proceeding along the established lines of medical and legal investigation in a routine rape inquiry, Pramanik was granted bail only 26 days later, after she was pronounced incapable of rape because she did not have a penis.
What Pramanik underwent is an everyday occurrence within the Indian criminal justice system: violation of human rights, and scant regard for the rights of people under trial. However, the added dimension of 'gender verification' brings to the fore the lack of sensitivity and absence of procedures to deal with gender ambiguity. Historically, Indian society has been more tolerant and accepting of gender ambiguities, and hermaphrodites – or hijras – had an important role to play in most communities. The 'Ardhanarishwar concept', or the notion that every individual has elements of the feminine and masculine, is part of Indian consciousness. But in the 19th century, the British created rigid categories of 'men' and 'women' for purposes of law, criminal law in particular.