Caster Semenya has done the unthinkable in women’s sports: She has run “like a man.”

Besting her sister runners by a long shot in the 800 meters in the World Championships in Berlin last month, she drew the instant condemnation that females across the decades have drawn whenever they are too smart in class, too forceful in the boardroom, too strong in the gym or too accomplished in the workplace.

From Babe Zaharias to Hillary Clinton, women who refuse to be limited by what-has-been must endure a public that is deeply ambivalent about their trailblazing.

She also stands in a long line of gender-variant people who threaten the very definitions of “man” and “woman” and call into question the ways that we organize our sports, our toy stores and even the pink and blue cribs in our nurseries.

Over and over during this controversy, I have read various commentaries that try to distinguish between “sex,” a supposedly fixed biological fact, and “gender,” which is socially constructed. The Olympic committee, according to this wisdom, must conduct a multilayered examination — physical, psychological and hormonal — to determine if Semenya “objectively” is “biologically” female.

But there is nothing objective about this. Social beings embedded in certain cultures, traditions and scientific eras create the list of “qualifiers” for being biologically female or male. I couldn’t find the all-important “list” in any of the dozens of articles I read.

Semenya submitted herself to a public exam on her “sex,” dimming a moment that should have been a shining celebration of her stunning achievement. In response, the South African government, family and friends stood behind their gender non-conforming daughter. The involvement of the South African government highlighted the long history of racialized sexism in the Olympics: You don’t need to go too far back to discover that an Olympic official at one point tried to make separate categories for white women athletes and black women athletes.

While whispers of high levels of testosterone and ambiguous genitalia light up the blogosphere, why isn’t anyone listening to Caster Semenya? She was raised a girl, has competed as a girl for years before this great victory on the international stage, and most importantly, Semenya identifies as a woman.

If there’s no other lesson that the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights movement has taught the larger culture over the past forty years, it should be this one: The right to self-determination is paramount.

Gender-variant people around the world are watching Semenya’s struggle with a mixture of pride, anxiety and hope. No authority — religious, parental or in this case Olympic — should trump one’s right to self-determination, identity and expression, and one’s right to be free.

Jaime Grant is the Policy Institute director at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.