I can't claim to know what it's like to win a world championship and have my gender questioned before a global audience, or to have news articles devoted to the subject of my genitalia, or my figure evaluated by a cross-section of fellow athletes, but on the other hand I did go to a Cardiff comprehensive school. And if you think the Sun can be cruel, hang out with teenagers from Tongwynlais sometime.

Because yes, gentle reader, I had a Caster Semenya moment of my own. I shall gloss over the details, but will mention that it involved a physics lesson and a student teacher who couldn't be arsed to learn our names. His solution was to refer to us as either "young lady" or "young gentleman". Can you spot where this is going?

If only I had. "Let's ask the young gentleman over there!" roared the teacher. I'll just say that it's the last time I had short hair. My fellow classmates politely corrected him and offered me cheering messages of goodwill.

Or something like that. Even without the attendant horrors of Mark Lawson studying HD footage of me in my Lycra shorts (as he described doing to Semenya in Friday's Guardian) or the tabloids writing headlines about my lunchbox, I can remember enough of the experience a decade and a half on to state categorically that the International Association of Athletics Federations' treatment of Caster Semenya has been nothing short of barbaric.

It admits the investigation has been prompted by "gossip", the timing of the announcement before her race a bad joke, the likely impact on Semenya entirely unconsidered. Sport is one area of modern life where women's appearance isn't supposed to matter. Where notions of what is and isn't appropriately feminine behaviour are temporarily put aside. Where all that is important is simply running faster, jumping higher or throwing further. Unless the IAAF thinks you don't look quite right.

Might Semenya have a rogue Y chromosome lurking in her cells? Who knows? We'll have to wait to find out and cross our fingers that the result isn't the same as the Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan's, who attempted suicide after "failing" a gender test and was stripped of her Asian Games silver medal. Born a girl, and raised a girl, she discovered that she wasn't XX but XY. How is this a "failure"? And so what?

So what if Semenya does turn out to have a genetic anomaly? We're all genetic anomalies, but none more so than elite athletes. They're the outliers, the freaks of nature, the ones who drew a winning ticket in the genetic lottery. If it's not fair that a woman with a hidden Y chromosome should compete against other women, because of a genetic advantage, then where does this logic end? Should sprinters of West African ancestry, who dominate the medal boards, compete in a different class to sprinters of other racial origin? Should the Kenyan and Ethiopian long-distance runners be siphoned off into a league of their own?

Sport is a spectacle of glorious freaks, a bravura performance of what the human body is capable of. Is it meaningful to pitch one sort of genetic inheritance against another? Probably not. What does it prove? Nothing very much. You can train, but you can't overcome your basic biology. It accounts for the lack of a world-class pygmy Indian basketball team and of a sprinting Masai team.

It's still fun to watch and meaningful to compete in. But it makes no logical or taxonomical sense. Why not a welterweight 100 metres? Or a six foot-plus swimming category? What it isn't is an excuse for the persecution of a South African teenager by an institution that should be doing its utmost to protect her. Semenya, the daughter of poor parents in a poor country in the poorest continent on earth, is an example of what makes sport great: that it's for everybody from anywhere. And the hopeless insensitivity of the IAAF sums up everything that's wrong with it and makes it corrupting and ugly and diminishing to watch. Sexuality is not a "test" which you can pass or fail and sport has to be for everybody or for no one at all.

First expenses, now holidays. MPs never learn

This is the nature of what we commonly refer to as "jobs", namely that one is paid in accordance to the work one does. How naive we are. I've just met an MP, an ex-minister, in the full throes of his summer hols, hopping from one festival to another

He'd also recently taken up a new outside consultancy position and so, in the cause of full, if anonymous reporting, I will relay the relevant portion of our conversation: "Congratulations on the new job, although I thought you already had one."

"I do. But it only takes two days a week." Crikey, no wonder Esther Rantzen's so keen. That's two days a week for £64,776, not to mention those expenses we know so much about. And to top it off, 10 weeks' summer holiday a year.

It's not just school's that out for summer. It's the entire British legislative process. This is presumably because nothing happens in the summer, the economy stops, the recession takes off for a couple of months of sunning itself in Tuscany, the global financial crisis can be found on a round-the-world cruise.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that it's during the school holidays that working-class kids fall behind. They're not being dragged around museums; they're playing football in the streets and forgetting their sums.

And Britain, in this scenario, is the working-class kid. We need to work harder for longer just to stay even. And that includes our MPs.

We're supposed to believe that the expenses scandal is over; it'd be nice to think that the holidays one is just beginning.

The X Factor and the low price of fame

How reassuring when a news story comes along which has the moral clarity and sophisticated narrative structure of an episode of The Bill. On the one side are the forces of law and order striving to maintain justice. On the other there's Simon Cowell.

Because as the runaway train that is The X Factor left reality station complete with statements to the press ("No one is allowed to touch Cowell's hair – he insists on blow-drying it himself", "Louis and Dannii don't have veneers; Simon and Cheryl do"), the actors' union Equity accused programme makers of "exploiting" contestants and demanded that they be paid.

It's already persuaded the BBC to pay finalists in shows such as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? but The X Factor is made of sterner stuff. True, Simon Cowell's £7 million fee for the series is a bagatelle compared to the £21.5 million that Fox pay him for American Idol, but no matter. "Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor are talent competitions. They are not employment in their own right and Equity rates do not apply," said a spokesman for Talkback Thames.

Absolutely. Being driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown, à la Susan Boyle, is fun. It's sitting in that judge's chair making sarcastic remarks that constitutes work. In fact, Equity aren't proposing contestants are paid their rates, just the minimum wage, £5.73 an hour for the over 22s, £4.77 for the under 22s and £3.53 for the little tinkers. Still, it's the principle which counts.