For much of her early 20s, Caster Semenya felt physically sick. The South African runner had risen to sudden global acclaim in 2009, when she won gold in the 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin at the age of just 18. It was her first major world competition. But her win was marred by questions of her sex and gender. Given her speed, muscular build and husky voice, some quietly asked whether she was a man. The sport’s governing body, the IAAF (known since 2019 as World Athletics), had required Semenya to take gender verification tests the day before the race, with a spokesperson telling the press “the rumours, the gossip was starting to build up”, and needed investigating.
Semenya’s subsequent victory would mark the start of a decade-long story, full of twists and turns that would take her from the top of the world championships podium to the European court of human rights – and would lead to a career-defining battle between the runner and World Athletics about her right to compete, as well as a monitored medical treatment plan that would leave her feeling, as she tells me today, “like the walking dead”.
Two sets of test results were leaked in the months that followed the Berlin championships: blood tests reportedly showed Semenya had three times more testosterone in her system than the average woman. Then the results of her medical examinations were published by Australian papers, suggesting Semenya was a “hermaphrodite” with internal testes and no womb. After 11 months of uncertainty, the IAAF announced in July 2010 that they had agreed on a “process” with Semenya, to allow her to compete at elite level (she hadn’t been able to run a race since August 2009 but had kept her first gold medal).
The process was a course of hormonal contraceptives, which neither she nor the IAAF made public. Instead, Semenya says that she had to secretly start taking the hormones at the end of 2009 to bring her naturally high testosterone levels down to a concentration accepted by the IAAF. And it didn’t go well. “I’d describe [the medication’s effects] like this: you’re living every day with a sore body. Your stomach is burning, you’re having panic attacks, you’re sweating. It … it was crazy.” Semenya first used a gel, before switching to a contraceptive pill.
She tells me this over Zoom, where she can be seen sitting outside on a shaded patio in Johannesburg. In a simple gold chain hanging over a white T-shirt and with her hair braided in her signature cornrows, she looks and sounds relaxed. But she also speaks passionately about what she had to endure early on in her career, shifting quickly from niceties about the photoshoot for this interview to torrents of profanity.
At times, she says, while on the hormones from 2009 to 2015, she felt so low she struggled to get up. As a child in the village of Ga-Masehlong, in the remote stretches of South Africa’s northernmost province, Limpopo, she had been a natural sprinter, with early dreams of playing professional football. Running at speed was intuitive. On the medication, though, she felt unstuck in her own body. But lowering her testosterone became the only acceptable way to appease the IAAF and keep competing.
“I had to sacrifice myself to be the best that I am. There were days when I lived in the dark. Days where I didn’t want to wake up,” she remembers. “Those are the things that people don’t understand when World Athletics says: ‘Take this medication.’ Fuck them. Those motherfuckers must go take the medication themselves, then tell us how they feel.” She names both IAAF/World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, whom she calls “this idiot”, and the organisation’s health and science department director Dr Stéphane Bermon. “They’ll say: ‘Oh, these medications were well supervised.’ Fuck it – they don’t know shit about that.”
She quickly follows these fiery statements with a few peppy lines on how she persevered: “It’s life, at the end of the day. It’s life. I have to face it. I have to lift myself up and face that nonsense and negativity. When people try to take you down, you always rise up.”
When she’s not chuckling at childhood memories of fighting for fun or sharing sharp words about World Athletics, Semenya tends to slip into motivational-Instagram-graphic speak, which also abounds in her new memoir, The Race to Be Myself. She will answer a brief question with a broad, sermon-like delivery, invoking a royal “we” or “you”, rather than speaking specifically in the first person about what happened only to her. But she swats aside the notion that it might have been difficult to open up in the book. About five years ago, Semenya, her partner and her manager “realised we were ready to tell the story. The real story. Not something that people assume based on what’s transpired [in the press]. Something right from the horse’s mouth.”
The scrutiny, ridicule and sometimes abuse she faced is shocking to recall. In 2009, after placing sixth in the race that kickstarted Semenya’s career, her competitor, the Italian runner Elisa Cusma, said: “For me, she’s not a woman.” Then-IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss clumsily said, in July 2010: “She is a woman but maybe not 100%.” After years of deflecting questions about her sex and gender, Semenya wants to make one thing clear: she is a woman.
Semenya is not transgender, and has never claimed to be. She writes in the book of being born with a vagina and growing up as a girl. Sure, as she hit puberty she noticed she wasn’t filling out with the usual softness of women in her family (including four sisters). “In this world, we’re all different. We shouldn’t question how we look, or how we speak” – and soon she’s off on an impassioned sermon. “Once you start questioning yourself, you’ll never get an answer. You’ll never know the reason why you have that huge nose or a big forehead. Those are the things that you’re made with! You should embrace them. But, instead of that, people in our society start questioning what women should look like because they want women to look a certain way. That’s the story that’s going around with me.”
Well, it’s a bit more complex than that. There’s really no way to talk about this without teetering on the edge of what should be part of Semenya’s private medical record, and what ought to be public. Since the test result leaks in 2009, Semenya has been called intersex – someone whose body is typically neither male nor female – by the media and gynaecologists. In 2011, the IAAF categorised her as a woman with hyperandrogenism, where your body naturally produces more testosterone. The idea is that the elevated testosterone crosses over into the male range, giving athletes running from 400m to 1 mile an unfair advantage. Testifying for the IAAF at the court of arbitration for sport (Cas) case, Paula Radcliffe said that competing against women with elevated testosterone levels “makes the competition unequal in a way greater than simple natural talent and dedication”, adding that other athletes shared her views. As of 2018, the IAAF/World Athletics now prefers to use “athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD)”, an umbrella term for conditions that make someone’s sex development atypical.
With that many categorisations flying about, how does Semenya identify? “I don’t fit into those terms,” she says plainly, staring down the lens after I mention both intersex and DSD. “Those are [the media’s] own terms. I’m an African, I’m a woman, I’m a different woman. That’s the only term I can use.” Other labels feel, to her, like a European idea to easily categorise people. “‘This one is intersex, this one is this, this one is that.’ That’s their own belief – it’s not my belief. If I have a ‘disorder’, I don’t give a shit about that. The disorder doesn’t define me as a woman. Disorders don’t make you less of a woman – you’re just different.”
After returning to the racetrack from 2010, Semenya says she had to dig deep to keep going. Living with the side-effects of the hormones, she continued to race – and often to win – at Olympic and world championship level between 2011 and 2015.
“In that time, it wasn’t an easy journey, but I had to make it look easy. I had to learn how to enjoy that, how to live with it, regardless of what it made me feel and how it made my body change. That didn’t matter. What mattered most was me running the race, pissing [the IAAF] off, making sure that I won medals and got all those prizes. Making sure I’ve never failed. They tried to take me down, and I never failed.” And, fair enough, she did win two golds, bumped up from silver medals after the original champion, Russian Mariya Savinova, was stripped of her 800m gold medals at the 2011 world championships and 2012 Olympics, after there emerged “clear evidence” she had been doping.
During those years, Semenya didn’t win everything, and was sometimes accused of throwing races to avoid stirring up more controversy. But that was partially down to how sluggish the medication could make her feel. “Even the average female can’t always live with hormonal contraceptives, which can create blood clots,” she says, referring to a risk flagged by a drug agency to GPs in advice from 2014. By requiring female athletes to take medication, organisations like World Athletics “know what they’re doing … That medication is no good for anyone. It’s no good for anyone’s health. Never.” Plus, even athletes in peak condition can lose – her testosterone doesn’t make her invincible, she says, remembering an early loss in Botswana in 2008 before she was taking contraceptives.
[In response to these claims World Athletics told the Guardian: “The treatment was proposed by the athlete’s treating physician and agreed by IAAF experts. The treating physician was in charge of the clinical and biological monitoring, which was done on a regular basis. The physician was also in regular contact with Dr Bermon and the IAAF experts to report any possible problems or side-effects. No major side-effects (other than the classical withdrawal symptoms – which usually consist of flushes and sweating episodes) were reported at that time by the treating physician.
“The ‘process initiated’ post 2009 was a mutual agreement between the athlete, the athlete’s lawyer, the athlete’s medical team and the IAAF legal and medical team of experts. The whole process, under regular supervision of the athlete’s treating gynaecologist and endocrinologist, was heavily reviewed and scrutinised by both parties.”]
Semenya’s fortunes changed in 2015. A temporary Cas ruling suspended the IAAF’s hyperandrogenism rules for two years. Suddenly, she was unshackled. She picked up an 800m gold at the Rio Olympics in 2016 and a 1500m bronze at the 2017 world championships. Some of her competitors spoke publicly about the ruling, including Team GB’s Lynsey Sharp, who said after the Rio final that the rule change had made things more difficult for her to compete. But Semenya was elated. “I said: ‘OK!’ Then I stopped taking [the hormones]. From that day I was like, you know what, I’m never gonna take this shit again,” and she scoffs. “It’s poisonous, man. I wanna live a good life and it didn’t matter any more. Even if tomorrow they said the rules were going back, I’d never take that shit.” She seemed unstoppable. That feeling wouldn’t last long.
* * *
Semenya was born Mokgadi Caster Semenya in January 1991, in a village she cheerily describes as “dusty” and traditional. Now, it’s modernised (“They have electricity, they have running water”) and teens constantly scroll through social media on their mobile phones. But, as a young girl, she and her siblings – Wenny, Nico, Olga, Murriel and Ishmael – all had to muck in. The girls would gather firewood over which to cook, and would walk miles to collect water. When Caster didn’t feel like doing household chores with her sisters, she’d make them chase her down – she could always outrun them. “We’d plough the fields and prepare our own,” she remembers. “We had no refrigerator, so we’d dig deep in the earth to store food. The fresh meat we’d eat would be whatever chickens or cows we’d slaughter. Or we’d dry our own meat.”
Her sisters could tell she wasn’t quite like them. But they let her get on with it as she spent hours running around with her male cousins rather than cooking and cleaning with the girls. “They understood me, even back then, when they were protective of me.” The same applied when Semenya realised she was attracted to girls rather than boys, as an adolescent. In the book, she writes about her first kiss with a girl she calls R, but when I press for details, she says she can barely remember the “baby kiss”. She’s adamant that she doesn’t have a formative “coming out” story. “I don’t remember myself hiding the person I am. What you see with me is what you get.”
Outside her family, she got used to adults saying she wasn’t a regular girl, years before becoming an athlete. “People might’ve been like: ‘Ah, you, you’re more like a boy.’ And I’d say: ‘Yes, that’s how I am. That’s how I live my life, that’s how I’m gonna be. You take it or leave it.’ If someone would say something, I’d go: ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ Because I am what I am, and I’m not gonna change.” If she needed to, she would defend herself with her fists. She jokes in the book about loving a good fight, and initially learning to speak English with a lot of swear words. It’s just how she was, she insists.
A football coach at school noticed her speed, when she had left Ga-Masehlong as a young teen to live with her paternal grandmother in the small town of Fairlie, about 60km north-west of Limpopo’s capital, Polokwane, and a four-hour drive north-east from Johannesburg. He suggested she start running. By the time she was on the regional youth running circuit, she knew both her prowess and her appearance made her stand out. There, aged 15 or 16, she met a fellow runner called Violet Raseboya. She was five years older than Semenya, and misgendered her on their first encounter in a changing room.
In the book, Semenya writes: “Me and the runner locked eyes. And that’s when she said it. ‘What are you doing in here? What’s a boy doing in here? This is the ladies’ facility,’ she said. Her voice sounded like a loud whisper.” Ten years later, that woman would become her wife. Today, she and Raseboya have two daughters, Oratile, four, and Oarabile, two; they coach young runners at a club they co-founded and live in Pretoria.
At her peak, whether on medication or not, Semenya could make the final stretch of her specialty 800m run look easy. “Because I like exploring, middle distance is that combination of distance, speed, power, and all these things,” she says (give her the time, and she could talk about running at length). “But when I’d run 800 metres, it was easy – it felt like nothing.” The 1500m, which she calls the “thou-five” was more challenging. At 800m, usually run as two laps, “I didn’t really dig deep to understand it, and I didn’t have to work that hard to master it.” As she puts it: “It was one of those events that found me.” Before we speak, I watch clips of her medal-winning races. In video after video, from London in 2012 and Rio in 2016 to the 2017 world championships in London, she often hangs back at the start, breaking into her kick in the final stretch and steaming towards the front with about 100m to go.
But then, in 2018, the IAAF halved the previous testosterone threshold for female athletes with DSD. It commissioned research that it said showed women with hyperandrogenism had an unfair advantage in distances between 400m and 1 mile. Semenya wasn’t surprised by the new rules. She’d known Lord Coe had seen her run at the African National Championships in June 2016 (she had won the 800m, 1500m and as part of the 4x400m relay). And after that he had told the press that the IAAF would “need to go back to Cas” and “will treat this sensitively”. Semenya says: “Remember, I have a legal team so I knew it was coming. The minute Sebastian, in 2016, started making these lousy comments and being dramatic, I told my legal team: ‘There’s a storm coming.’ Sebastian hinted at it, and he made sure to do it. But it’s funny, because he does it in a cheap way. He’s a very cheap man.”
She is withering about the World Athletics president, linking the public discussion about her body to Coe’s own private life. “I don’t know his sex drive, I don’t know his testosterone levels, I don’t know his what.” In any case, the ruling came into immediate effect from 1 November 2018, requiring female athletes with DSD to lower their testosterone to the required level for six months before competing and to maintain it for as long as they wished to run from 400m to 1 mile.
Semenya eventually took the decision to the European court of human rights. She was at the airport in Paris in July when her lawyers called to say she’d won. The court ruled that Semenya had been denied “sufficient institutional and procedural safeguards” to allow her to have her complaints examined effectively.
“At the end of the day, this is a 50/50 thing,” she says. “We walked into that battle knowing those would be the odds: we could win or we could lose.” She felt somewhat vindicated, but not happy. Ultimately, the ECHR ruling is about her human rights being violated, rather than her right to compete. It doesn’t change the World Athletics rules, now endorsed by Cas, and means she hasn’t run in a World Athletics-sanctioned 800m competition since June 2019.
Semenya got a degree in sports management in 2021 when she realised her running career might be curtailed, and she has commitments under a Nike sponsorship alongside the regular demands of raising young children. In her downtime, she loves listening to amapiano, South African deep house and afrobeats, and watching sports on TV. “I’m all about action films, too. Anything about guns, I watch. Anything about heists, I watch.” She’s a fan of the Bourne films, starring Matt Damon, and action blockbusters. “You know, Tom Cruise, The Bourne Legacy – we watch them all. The Fast and the Furiouses,” she says, with her “Hehehe” of a laugh. “I’ll watch Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Van Damme in just about anything. Jackie Chan and Jet Li when it comes to martial arts – I love them!”
Hers has been a strange, if accomplished, career so far. Though her guard is down today, there are still hints of how she has had to steel herself against the way she is perceived. Russia’s Savinova, who came fifth in the 2009 800m in Berlin, told reporters to “just look at her”, gesturing at Semenya’s physique. That race’s bronze winner, Briton Jenny Meadows, later said she had watched her fellow athletes “staring and laughing” at Semenya. Now, the South African frequently says she “doesn’t care” about how she has been treated or how she has been spoken about by fellow athletes whom she has beaten in the past.
And, yet, she still felt compelled to write the book. Surely she hated her confidential medical history being made public without her consent? “I did not care about my medical reports being leaked,” she says. “We know about people who can be born with small hearts, or without a liver,” and she chuckles again. “A woman can be born without an arse. A man can be born with a small dick.”
A pause. “There are people out there who are born with internal testicles. There are people who are born with high testosterone. But they should embrace that. There’s nothing wrong about it.” Other athletes with DSD affected by the 2018 ruling have said as much, including Burundian Francine Niyonsaba, Semenya’s runner-up at Rio, and Kenyan Margaret Nyairera Wambui. In a statement, World Athletics said: “World Athletics (formerly IAAF) has only ever been interested in protecting the female category. If we don’t, then women and young girls will not choose sport. That is, and has always been, the federation’s sole motivation.”
“If you want to hide the person you are, you’re imprisoned,” Semenya says. “You’ll always live your life holding yourself back, going: ‘If people saw this, what would they think?’ No, stuff that – be yourself. It’s OK to talk about how different you are.” Finally, she concedes: “Yes, I’m not happy about how they revealed it with me – I should’ve been the one to do that – but they’ve done me a favour at the end of the day. Yes! They’ve done me a favour.” She smiles. “And now I can live my life without looking back.”
• The Race To Be Myself by Caster Semenya is published by #Merky Books. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
