Does the name Shi Pei Pu mean anything to you? It’s not an unreasonable question: last month newspapers the world over published this person’s obituary. Shi was a beautiful Chinese opera singer — but also a spy who in the 1960s honeytrapped Bernard Boursicot, an official working at the French embassy in Beijing.

Even after Boursicot was moved from China, he continued to see and pass documents to Shi when they were able to meet. At one such meeting he was delighted to see the son whom Shi had produced, Shi Du Du, whose looks seemed only partially Chinese.

In 1982 Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du came to live in Paris on a three-month “cultural visa”, at which point the clandestine and subversive nature of the relationship with Boursicot was discovered by French counterintelligence. Once arrested, Shi Pei Pu was given a thorough medical examination by the French authorities — which Shi resisted hysterically.

The reason for this became immediately clear: it revealed that Shi was a man. Indeed, as the French investigators stated with a marvellous Gallic mixture of astonishment and salaciousness: “not only a man, but unequivocally and emphatically a man”.

As for the couple’s “baby”, it was a Uighur child purchased for Shi Pei Pu by the Chinese authorities to add verisimilitude to his claim to be a woman. Poor Boursicot slit his throat when he realised the extent of his deception, but survived to get over the bizarre affair, reportedly saying: “When I believed it, it was a beautiful story.”

Old-fashioned common sense — or even a grasp of elementary biology — might have saved Boursicot from taking part in Shi’s exotic charade; but in a sense they were both subscribing to the modern interpretation of sexual identity, which demands that we ascribe to individuals the gender they believe they are, or want to be, even when it conflicts with that assigned to them by their genes. This is why it is socially correct at drinks parties or other public events to treat a pre-operative transsexual as a woman, even if you are all too aware of the five-o’clock shadow under the foundation and of hands that look capable of twisting the tops off the most recalcitrant bottles.

This attitude has, in its own peculiar way, attached itself to the field of athletics, although here the problem has been not so much transgender as what has become known as “intersex” — individuals previously grouped under the misleading term hermaphrodite. In 1968 gender tests were made compulsory at Olympic events, following the alleged discovery that Ewa Klobukowska, the gold and bronze medal-winning Polish sprinter, possessed the male chromosome. Klobukowska was stripped of all her medals.

Later, more sophisticated chromosomal tests showed Klobukowska had been the victim of a terrible injustice: her “rogue” sex chromosome was revealed to be not the male XY but a genetic mutation, XXY, which among other things meant that she was, unlike Shi Pei Pu, able to produce a child in the conventional manner.

Perhaps as a result of its dawning realisation of the full extent of genetic and sexual anomalies, the Olympic movement in 1999 dropped the requirement for mandatory “gender determination” tests. This has left the sporting world in a difficult and highly unsatisfactory position, in which questions are raised and tests carried out only when women athletes start to say about one of their all-too-successful competitors: “Call that a woman? Does it look like us?”

That is the sad and undignified fate of the 18-year-old South African Caster Semenya, who last week in Berlin obliterated the field to take first place in the women’s 800-metre world championship final. Elisa Piccione, an Italian rival, called Semenya “a man”. Mariya Savinova, the Russian, agreed. “Just look at her,” she said, somewhat paradoxically.

Well, Semenya in athletics gear doesn’t look like anything other than a very strong young man, it is true; and the voice that emerges is one you would not associate with a woman, either. Yet Leonard Chuene, president of Athletics South Africa, hit back furiously at the international critics of his nation’s brightest athletics star: “This girl has been castigated from day one, based on what? There’s no scientific evidence. You denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? If you did that to my child, I'd shoot you.”

If you read between the lines of the more delicately worded reports, it seems as though the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had attempted (unsuccessfully) to persuade the South Africans to drop Semenya from their team before the world championships. Only now that Semenya has won their title are they insisting on a complex battery of gender tests. These will be immensely distressing to the athlete, especially as they might well reveal that, despite the absence of any observable male genitalia, Semenya is genetically a man.

Semenya’s chosen event has long been blighted by this particular form of controversy. The 800 metres women’s world record is the longest lasting of all; the astonishing time of 1min 53.28sec was set in 1983 by the Czech, Jarmila Kratochvilova. She, too, was denounced as “not really female” and a US doctor said at the time: “This is not a normal physiological female body. I've treated Olympic female athletes in 34 countries but I’ve never seen a body like that.” A very unscientific remark, but anyone who recalls seeing Kratochvilova run will know what he meant; the fact remains that the Czech phenomenon passed the chromosome tests then required by the International Olympic Committee.

In the spirit of diplomacy and fair play, let this column offer a solution to these embarrassing difficulties which continue to vex the Olympic movement and the IAAF, an action which will cut the Gordian knot of ambiguous sexual identity. Let there be no male or female athletics championships, divided with all the rigidity of South Africa’s former apartheid laws.

Instead, let men and women — and all those anomalously and uncomfortably perched in the middle — compete against each other in a single championship. There would be no requirement for undignified and distressing genetic testing — only cheats who use drugs to change their bodies would need to fear the men in white coats.

This solution came to me as a result of appearing on the BBC’s The One Show, during a recent discussion of the relative lack of television coverage given to the achievements of the England women’s cricket team, compared with the countless hours accorded their less successful male colleagues. I argued that this was rational rather than merely prejudiced: women’s cricket was inherently inferior to men’s cricket, since they were unable to propel the ball at extreme pace. The actress Maureen Lipman thought this was an outrageous slur. “Who is this man?” she declared of me.

After the programme was aired, I realised what I should have said was that if women truly wanted to be treated equally as cricketers, they should compete not just against each other but in open combat against and alongside the allegedly over-favoured men. I suppose there would have to be separate showers and changing rooms, but that is a matter of modesty rather than discrimination.

When I mentioned my radical solution to a feminist colleague she said I had not understood the phrase “separate but equal”. Actually that was the self-serving slogan of the segregationists of the US Deep South, designed to perpetuate different schools for whites and blacks.

Away with this sporting sexual apartheid, I say, and may the best person win.

Times Recommends

• Fundamentalist brew: faith and power
• Big guns wheeled out for the marginals
• Wanted: new merchants of light