CASTER SEMENYA, in case you wondered and still do, has a vagina!
Thus rendering the South African double gold Olympian, a, in her own words, girl – albeit a biologically different one from the billions of females in the past and present to ever populate planet Earth!
For starters, she was born sans a uterus (a womb) – thus rendering her to be incapable of carrying a child! And it is this biological anomaly about her which brought, not only the athletics world’s, the world’s attention to a then aspirant teenage runner from Ga-Masehlong – a backwater village located 83 kilometers from Polokwane in Limpopo Province.
Just as the rare gender condition, referred to as, DSD (difference in sex development) was to become the source of personal persecution – reminiscent of the heartbreaking degradation the 19th century Khoikhoi woman, Saartjie Baartman, was subjected to – meted out to her, by the powers which be, throughout more than a decade of her otherwise stellar track career!
It all began unravelling for the then naïve bumpkin in August 2009 when, whilst a teenager of 18, she romped to victory in the 800-m race at the World Championships in Berlin. The reaction, apathetic and insulting, to her achievement wasn’t what she would had bargained for – but led to her discovering her biological makeup as being different to those of her fellow competitors and womankind!
Being just a child still under the guardianship of her parents, she couldn’t fathom what the brouhaha from athletics governing body (IAAF), the media, scientists and experts, as well as disapproving competitors, was all about. In her young mind, she deemed it strange that her triumph didn’t induce celebration – but rather, the opposite!
Unbeknownst to her, the 2009 firestorm was to herald a career-long ordeal which would culminate in her being banned from running in her preferred 800-m distance by the International Association of Athletics Federation in 2019 – all because of a biological condition she happened to be born with!
The above introductory background is contained in the recently released tome, Caster Semenya: The Race To Be Myself – a no holds barred memoir authored by “one of the greatest track & field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance” (in her own words), which offers astonishing insight into what she had to endure because of her love of running.
Hers is a recollection of how it felt like to effectively be reduced to a guinea pig – all in the quest of expressing her talent and the need to provide for her family!
The ‘guinea pig’ treatment of Semenya stemmed from her body having been discovered to produce an elevated amount of testosterone deemed, by the authorities, to give her on-track advantage over fellow female runners – thus, in their reasoning, necessitating for her to be subjected to a countermeasure. In her case, a systemic intake of estrogen, geared to suppressing the testosterone output.
An up to then unproven measure which her medical team proposed as a dealmaker between herself and the IAAF intended to allow her to continue participating in the federation’s sanctioned events. It has to be noted here that owing to her desperation to salvage her running career – Semenya was effectively co-opting herself into a medically, pharmaceutically and scientifically unchartered realm! One with consequences, in the form of side effects, she was to physically suffer immediately upon the drug being introduced to her system.
In a chapter in the paperback titled, Hope, she mentions having to come to terms with bouts of feeling bloated, muscles feeling heavy, always feeling tired, a hurting head, nausea, constant sweating, unquenchable thirst and protracted hunger which abided alongside an ever urge to vomit!
In her account of the off-track events which overshadowed her on-track feats (which commendably comprise of the garnering of two gold medals at two Olympics; Commonwealth Games victories; a trio of World Championships triumphs and a slew of the financially lucrative Diamond League meets, et cetera) Semenya unabashedly takes the reader into a behind-the-scenes world of unending gender tests entailing gynaecologists, mostly total strangers, laying her on tables with legs splayed on stirrups whilst peeping into her private parts in efforts to ascertain that she indeed wasn’t a boy; repeated blood tests; being labelled a hermaphrodite; considered ‘intersex’; ‘superhuman’ – among myriad insults directed her way from rural South Africa to prestigious arenas of the European Union.
An incident which reverberatingly demonstrated an obstinate stance for her principles was her refusal to undergo a gonadectomise operation proposed by the IAAF to remove the organs responsible for the production of the testosterone in her.
In fact, she took her protracted feud with the IAAF personally – especially regarding its honcho, Sebastian Coe. So much so that after being offered a team of solicitors who represented her pro bono, she spent a substantial part of her career embroiled in litigatory cases against the federation.
Dedicating her recollections ‘to those who are born different and feel they don’t belong in this world’ – not only do they depict an embattled national sporting heroine to whose defense the ilk of then president Jacob Zuma, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Julius Malema, had to rally, but also a young barefooted girl who initially became immersed in running whilst hunting for rabbits, warthogs and springboks alongside boys in a wilderness located far away from her nondescript rural village; one who was plucked from oblivion upon securing a scholarship to the University of Pretoria which would lead to her transforming into a burgeoning world class athlete; the first female sportsperson endorsed by Nike; encounters with Paralympian, Oscar Pistorius and Olympian, Mbulaeni Mulaudzi – inter alia.
A segment in the read also relates how Semenya met her now partner and mother of her two daughters, Violet Raseboya, in a locker-room pending a routine drug test.
Raseboya, a fellow runner, had initially mistaken her for a boy!
Produced by Jonathan Ball Publishers and distributed across South Africa and beyond, Caster Semenya: The Race To Be Myself, is available at reputable bookstores countrywide.
Image supplied (Caster Semenya’s tome ‘Caster Semenya- The Race to be Myself’ is now available).
