August 2009 — Caster Semenya: Gold Medals, Gender Verification Tests, and Her Journey Since Then, South Africa

Gold Medals and Gender Verification Tests

In August 2009, the 18-year-old South African track athlete Caster Semenya became world famous as she won the 800m World Championships in Berlin, Germany and simultaneously came under public scrutiny over her eligibility to compete in women’s sports.

She improved on her 800m and 1500m records achieved at the 2008 World Junior Championships. The International Amateur Athletic Federation and International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), now known as World Athletics, asserted that it felt compelled to carry out investigations on Semenya’s performance and sex after she improved her record by 25 seconds in the 1500m track event, and by 7 seconds in the 800m track race. They claimed that “this sort of dramatic breakthrough usually aroused the suspicion of drug use.”

Semenya was suspended from all competitions pending the results of the drug and gender verification tests. The outcome of the tests showed that the athlete had elevated levels of testosterone and as a result, the IAAF changed their policies to prevent female athletes with with differences of sexual development (DSD) from being allowed to compete unless they use testosterone-inhibiting medication.

The incident in Berlin in caused a public outcry in South Africa with controversy surrounding the athlete, her achievements and the sex verification process she was required to endure.

Later in the same month activists spoke out when Intersex South Africa (ISSA)’s Sally Gross, U.S. academic Amanda Lock Swarr, and Gender DynamiX (GDX)’s Liesl Theron co-authored a critical think piece that was published in the Fall edition of the Feminist Studies Journal. The piece, “South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya’s Impact and Import”, looks at the public responses from ISSA and GDX to the public debate that erupted around Caster Semenya

In the years since her win in Berlin and the outcome of the IAAF gender verification test, Caster Semenya has remained locked in a cycle of court cases and appeals and yet she has cemented herself as one of the best 800m athletes in history and achieved various accolades, sometimes while being sick as a result of side effects produced by taking the testosterone-inhibiting medication. The most notable being two gold Olympic medals, three World Championships and two Commonwealth Games gold medals.

Caster Semenya Releases Her Book, ‘The Race to be Myself’

Caster focused on her training and remained largely silent in the media until June 2023 when she publicly announced 31 October 2023 would be the date she would finally tell her own story when she planned to release her memoirs:

“I am happy to announce that my memoir, THE RACE TO BE MYSELF will be published this year on the 31st of October. It will be a simultaneous release in the US, UK and SA. It is my hope that by finally telling my truth, I will inspire others to be bold, unafraid and most importantly to love and accept themselves as they are. This is my offering from me to you. Stay winning, love Mokgadi.”

Our Review of ‘The Race To Be Myself‘ by Amanda Lock Swarr

Amanda Lock Swarr has collaborated with LGBTQI+ activists in South Africa since 1997. As a professor in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, USA, her work is concerned with queer, trans, and intersex studies, medical inequities, and feminist politics in South Africa and the U.S.  Amanda Lock Swarr is a regular contributor to the Trans Intersex History Africa website.

In 2009, the world was introduced to Caster Semenya as she won the 800m World Championships in Berlin, Germany and simultaneously came under public scrutiny over her eligibility to compete in women’s sport.  Since this time, her body has been the subject of debate about the borders of gender — a discourse with global importance.  But these were objectifying discussions about Semenya and not a dialogue with her.  Now, Semenya’s long-awaited memoir finally centres her own voice, confronting her objectification and correcting years of speculations.  The Race to Be Myself is her own story, told on her terms.  

Semenya starts this memoir with her childhood in Limpopo, sharing details about her early passion and talent for sport.  She leads the reader from the origins of her career to her many public successes — including winning Olympic gold medals and spearheading groundbreaking court cases.  In this memoir we also learn about the emotions, strategies, and conversations that took place outside of the public eye.  Semenya exposes her struggles and the sources of her strength, especially her relationship with her wife, Violet, and her family.  In so doing, she reveals the pain of the ordeal she has endured and the strength and pride she has embodied. 

Semenya’s self-confidence has been integral to her success and propelled her difficult decision to stand up to regulators from the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) — now known as World Athletics.  The support she has received from South Africans has also been essential.  As she puts it,

“I accept and love myself just the way I am. I always have and I always will. God made me. I am fortunate to have a family who never tried to change me, and a country that wrapped its arms around me and fought for my right to run.”  

Soon after the formal end to apartheid, Nelson Mandela famously stated that sport has the power to change the world, to unite, and to inspire.  She recalls these historical reflections and recounts that when her public interrogation began, Mandela told her that she had made him and South Africa proud, asserting, “You are strong, Caster.  I believe in you.  You must believe in yourself.”  Semenya took this advice to heart as she became a national icon and proudly represented South Africa as its flag bearer at the 2018 Olympics. 

But this memoir is not a sentimental glossing of national history.  Semenya describes complicated feelings when she returned home to South Africa to a hero’s welcome in 2009.  Meeting famous politicians was inspirational but, she remembers, her enjoyment of the moment was undermined by a nagging feeling that she was not fully there.  

“I knew this was a celebration but nothing seemed right to me,” she writes. “I’d won gold, but the celebration seemed to be about something other than my actual win.” 

In this memoir, Semenya explores this moment and many others, sharing the alienation she felt when the furore that surrounded her was about what she represented to others.

Racist and colonial histories have always been at the forefront of Semenya’s thinking and her role as a representative of South Africa on the global stage.  Throughout her career she has been compared to beloved ancestor Saartjie Baartman, a comparison she embraces.  Semenya reflects on their similar objectification, recalling that Baartman was “a fellow South African brought to Europe where she was put on display in circus-like exhibits for a paying audience in the 1800s”, and whose genitals were cut from her body and displayed.  Racist pathologisation of physical differences motivated the interrogations they both endured, and, as Semenya puts it,

“I am aware that Black women’s bodies in general have been objectified and treated as spectacles.”  

She also points out that suspicion of her body didn’t emerge from uniform sex testing but from an arbitrary policy of investigating anonymous reports of suspicions from anyone, including envious coaches or athletes.  For Semenya, this suspicion led to a battery of invasive psychological, gynaecological, and endocrinal tests and so-called treatments that were medically unnecessary and harmful.

One of the most important interventions of this memoir is the way that it definitively ends false speculations that have surrounded Semenya for years.  She provides important clarification about the timing of her interrogations and what information was shared with and kept from her.  Semenya candidly expresses how she felt about the invasive exams she endured.  She also reveals the extent of the experimental treatments she withstood in order to compete under constantly tightening regulations.  Semenya rejected IAAF/World Athletics’ efforts to coerce her into unnecessary surgery but took experimental doses of hormones for years.  These drugs made her constantly ill with side effects including fatigue, night sweats, extreme hunger and thirst, bloating, panic, and nausea.  

Then, in 2015, Indian sprinter Dutte Chand won a landmark case in which the Court of Arbitration in Sport found lack of evidence that testosterone increases female athletic performance.  This ruling meant that the policies requiring Semenya to take hormones for four long years were suddenly lifted, and she felt a huge sense of relief.  This was the end of Semenya’s experimental treatment.  She had been a guinea pig for IAAF/World Athletics’ drug trials and writes,

“as far as I know or as far as the IAAF will allow us to know, I am the first and one of the only athletes who has ever taken the drug to compete.  Whatever research they have is coming from my body and the way I took the pills from 2009 to 2015.” 

No one can predict the long-term effects of these drugs, as they are not medically advisable. Tthey are known to weaken bones, make people more prone to injury, and cause blood clots, among other effects.  Her concerns about the effects of taking unnecessary drugs at experimental levels remain: “I think of the price sometimes, even though I don’t like to dwell on negative things.  For years, I took drugs I didn’t need to take.  I don’t know what the long-term effects will be on my health.”   

Another speculation that Semenya confronts in this memoir is that she cheated or intentionally threw races.  If she was able to win more races, she would have received financial bonuses and endorsements and secured a bigger legacy.  She candidly reflects on how unreasonable such claims have been, stating,

“Let me be clear.  I cannot run any faster than I have.  If I could, why wouldn’t I go out there and break the world record when I knew the IAAF was going to find a way to ban me?”  

Semenya also points out that while suspicion was allegedly predicated on her success, her race times were always well within the times expected in the women’s category.  She reflects,

“No matter what they say, I push my body to the limit and beyond on every run and training session. I’m just better than a lot of the women I was running against. And that was the problem for the IAAF and whatever notions of femaleness they have.”  

She is also explicit that she has never taken illicit substances, unlike many of her competitors.  Her assertions refute years of false accusations of her cheating.  As Semenya clarifies, IAAF/World Athletics officials “were the ones who had cheated me. They had cheated me out of my young adulthood; They had almost cheated me out of my own sanity, my mental and physical well-being.” 

Throughout The Race to Be Myself, Semenya clearly asserts her womanhood.  As she explains, “Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes.  I’m a different kind of woman, I know.  But I’m still a woman.”  Semenya also rejects labels that have been imposed on her and does not identify as intersex or as lesbian.  She explains,

“Even though I understand that those in the medical community call me an ‘intersex’ person because of the way my internal organs are structured, I do not call myself ‘intersex.’  That identity doesn’t fit me, it doesn’t fit my soul. Even calling myself a ‘lesbian’ doesn’t fit my soul. I think of myself as a woman who loves another woman. I have always resisted categorizations.”  

She contends that efforts to define her as having a disorder or difference of sex development (DSD) or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) are pathologising.  For her, attempts to exclude her from womanhood are a personal affront. She writes, “Imagine you are told one day that because of some medical this or that, you are actually not a woman.  Think about it. In the eyes of the entire world, you are now something other than what you know yourself to be.  And the entire world will not stop talking about you.  Ever.” 

When Semenya was first put under scrutiny, Sally Gross, Liesl Theron, and I (Amanda Swarr) wrote together about what her experiences would mean for intersex folks, and this history is relevant here.  An article we wrote for the journal Feminist Studies in Fall 2009 addressed the invisibility and hypervisibility that faced intersex folks in South Africa at the time.  In this piece — “South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya’s Impact and Import” — we explored how debates surrounding Semenya affected intersex, gender variant and gender non-conforming people.  We focused especially on Intersex South Africa, the organisation Gross founded in 2000, and Gender DynamiX (GDX), founded by Theron in 2005.  Like Semenya, Gross was diagnosed as intersex and experienced discrimination and violence throughout her life.  Gross similarly reflected on her erasure and denial as a person, writing, “It’s somewhat disconcerting to be told that one does not exist!”  

In our 2009 writings, Gross explained how the furore surrounding Semenya offered her the opportunity to publicise important legislative gains protecting intersex rights in a newspaper article she wrote, titled “Intersex and the Law.”  Legal shifts protecting intersex South Africans brought about by Gross and other activists were not widely known before Gross’s publication.  

In our joint article, Theron also wrote about two important media statements released by Gender DynamiX in relation to Semenya’s experiences.  The first connected the treatment of Semenya to gender-based violence targeting those who transgress gender norms, citing the 2008 rape and murder of South African lesbian footballer, Eudy Simelane, as a point of comparison.  The second statement articulated that  being intersex is not as rare as public discourse suggests and asserted Semenya’s rights to privacy and to her self-identification as a woman.  Taken together, political educational initiatives by Intersex South Africa and Gender DynamiX demonstrated the impact of Semenya’s experience, and they increased visibility and sensitivity for intersex South Africans.

Semenya’s refusal to withdraw from elite sport had a strong impact on broader conversations about what it means to be a woman.  While her experience became part of public discourse, she was far from the first athlete to experience the brutality of gender restrictions. Indeed, such restrictions have affected countless athletes over the past century, especially those from the Global South.  It was also widely acknowledged that the IAAF/World Athletics campaign to create restrictions banning Semenya was personal, and since 2009 a series of regulations have been created specifically to exclude her from sport.  She describes the impact of tightening restrictions and that, “I had become the face of this thing […] they wanted to shut me down.”  But Semenya stood up to sporting regulators:

“I’m sure the IAAF thought I would be one of the ones who just went away. They were wrong. It is not in my nature to give up […] I don’t like bullies.”  

Semenya refused to be silenced, and this memoir asserts her agency and cements the importance of her voice on her own terms.  She recounts that in the early years of the controversy, she was strategically quiet: “I was just a young village girl, but I was the master of my own destiny in some ways. I control the narrative, and I did so by not speaking. I had to be smart.”  Now, as Semenya advocates for human rights, she speaks openly and confidently about her relationship with her wife, Violet, her two children, and her career successes and aspirations to protect other athletes from the injustices she has faced.

All athletes race against time, not only in individual competitions but as their bodies age.  As she explains, “Time is the most important thing in an athlete’s life.  You can say we live by the clock.”  Athletes are only competitive for a short period of their lives, and Semenya traces time throughout The Race to Be Myself, discussing the clock hanging over her career, what it meant to live on borrowed time, and how she knew she could never outrun time.  In September 2020, the Swiss Supreme Court ruled against her in a decision that effectively ended her quest to compete again, a blow that she described as mentally and physically destroying.  But, she writes that she had no choice but to make peace with it and also felt a sense of relief: “It was finally over.  The clock hanging over my career had stopped ticking.”  

Her legal struggles continue today but with a focus less on her own role in competitive sport and more on her peers and those who will come after her.  In 2023, Semenya won an important discrimination case in the European Court of Human Rights, and she is currently awaiting an appeal to this same body that she hopes will pave the way for other athletes to compete as she should have been allowed to do.  She concludes her memoir by reflecting poignantly on her life trajectory and on the future:

“I didn’t have a choice about how I was born or how I was raised, I didn’t have a choice but to be a woman. So, I am a different kind of woman […]” The science of gender isn’t set in stone. The more we study, the more we learn. I believe it’s wrong to force women like me into surgery or medication to compete.” 

Semenya’s legacy has already been cemented and her voice will continue to resound as she demands respect and change.

Khaya Dlanga Interviews Caster Semenya During Her Book Launch

On 23 November 2023, best-selling author Khaya Dlanga interviewed Caster Semenya during a launch of ‘The Race To Be Myself’ at Exclusive Books at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. Trans and Intersex History Africa (TIHA)’s Liesl Theron attended the event and shared two videos showing parts of their conversation.

In the interview, Khaya mentions how Caster starts the book in a way that he sees as the ‘most gangster thing’ when she introduces herself with the words: “I am Mokgadi Caster Semenya. I am one of the greatest track and field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance.” Khaya goes on to say: “If that is not the most gangster thing, I don’t know what is. Because what I love about it, is that you’ve earned the right to say that about yourself.”

In the first video, Khaya mentioned reading in the book of Caster’s lack of a sense of fear growing up and how Caster would deal with bullies by making them aware of her presence. Caster explained:

‘If you can hit, my philosophy is to hit back as good as you can. Even if you lose, at least you stood up for yourself. Because there are certain things in life,, like a battle I’m not gonna win. But for me, I want you to feel my presence. If you hit me, I hit harder. So it is the same what I used to do on the track. What I’ve done was to make sure that I leave a mark. Because I knew I was being questioned. They say ‘you look like a boy’ then I will say ‘Ok, You say I look like a boy? I will be that boy for you’. To the people who do hate speech, who try to diminish you, try to take you down, you need to make them feel your presence.”

Watch the video where Caster talks about doing your best and being an activist:

In the video Semenya says she deals with hate speech the same way she deals with athletics — how she fights back and makes her presence felt.

She says:

“Now it’s about me advocating for what is right. These young kids that are coming now, I pave the way and make sure that I fight for what is right.”

In the second video, Caster reminisces about growing up loved and accepted by her family for who she is, and how growing up with the acceptance of her family helped shaped her own self-acceptance from a young age. Khaya asked about a part in the book where Caster’s father bought her a pretty dress and tried to get her to wear it. But Caster quickly asked him to try the dress on first, and said she would only consider it if he would. In doing so she highlighted the striking physical resemblance she has to her father.