The Social Incrimination of Intergender Athletes

I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be Santhi Soundarajan. Soundarajan is an athlete, who competed in the 800 meter dash for India until she was disqualified and banned from competing when she failed a gender test. The same thing is happening right now with Caster Semenya from South Africa. Neither of the two have external male parts, but it has been discovered that they both have XY chromosomes. During an interview with BBC News, Soundarajan shared her feelings of bitterness and mortification. She has been shunned from her society and has to think twice about going to her local grocery story. She is labeled as "the woman who failed her gender test." A couple weeks ago, I heard some DJs on a radio station crack jokes about Caster Semenya. The whole situation is truly bizarre, to be sure, but listening to Soundarajan's replies to the prying questions about the tests she underwent and the embarrassment she has endured was truly heart-breaking. I ran cross-country in high school--which is a big difference from running internationally or for the Olympics--but I do know how much pain and endurance it takes to be good. I put sweat, blood and tears into my high school running career. It was exhausting emotionally as well as physically, and I was devastated my senior year when I was knocked off varsity; a bunch of 60-pound freshman girls cropped up and picked off our fastest runners (including myself), one by one. I cannot even fathom the disappointment, and perhaps, the sense of a life thus-far wasted, that Soundarajan and Semenya experienced with the failed gender tests.
Aside from the sympathy I have for their athleticism, I disdain the mockery that is occurring. The issue of "intergender" is a new concept. I do not believe that it is quite understood, and it has certainly not been taken into consideration for the qualifications of professional athletic competition. Soundarajan admitted that she never experience puberty and has never had a period. Semenya has muscle packed onto her body like a male. This is all very strange, but we need to remember that they are human beings and have every right exist and live out their dreams as anybody else. Soundarajan spoke of other women who never received their period and who never had children, but were valued, still, as women in society.
I don't have a solution, necessarily, to this controversy. Are Semenya and Soundarajan mostly male or mostly female? Which category would it be more appropriate for them to compete in? In any case, my heart goes out to these women and the strangeness of the social incrimination they are forced to bear.