The Race to be Myself

Prologue

I AM MOKGADI CASTER SEMENYA. I AM ONE OF THE greatest track & field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance. I’ve won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships, along with dozens of Diamond League meets, and went unbeaten for almost four years. Unfortunately, it is not what I have achieved on the track that has likely brought me to your attention.

Much has been written about me in virtually every major international outlet in the world since I came into the public’s eye in 2009, and most of it is outright lies or half-truths. I have waited a long time to tell my story. For more than a decade I have preferred to let my running do the talking. After what has happened to me, it felt easier that way.

In 2019, the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) banned me from running my favored 800-m event, along with the 400-m and the 1500-m distances. My last IAAF-sanctioned 800-m race was on June 30, 2019, when I won the Diamond League Prefontaine Classic at Stanford University. I was not banned because I was caught doping or cheating. Rather, I am no longer allowed to run those distances because of a biological condition I was born with and that I refuse to take unnecessary drugs to change.

I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the varying genetic conditions where an embryo responds in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs. To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus. I do not menstruate and my body produces an elevated amount of testosterone, which gives me more typically masculine characteristics than other women, such as a deeper voice and fewer curves. I cannot carry a child because I don’t have a womb but, contrary to what many people think, I do not produce sperm. I can’t biologically contribute to making new life. I did not know any of this about my body until soon after August 2009, when I won the gold medal in the 800-m race at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. I was only eighteen years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day.

People believed all sorts of insanity about me—that I was a boy who managed to hide his penis all the way to the world championships, that I was paid to have my penis removed so South Africa could bring home a medal in the women’s category, that I was a hermaphrodite forced to run as a girl for political gain. Journalists descended into my village and every school I’d ever attended. My parents and siblings, friends, and teachers, were harassed with calls and by visitors, day and night. I can still hear my mother wailing desperately as she tried to explain to perfect strangers that I was born a girl, and that I was her little girl, and why was all of this happening?

I have never spoken in detail about what happened during this time of my life but I am now ready to do so. It is said that silence will not protect us. From the moment I stepped on to the track for the final meet in Berlin on August 19, 2009, I have been vilified and persecuted. My accomplishments since have been celebrated, yes, but it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports governing bodies, other competitors, and the media as I have. It has affected me in ways I cannot describe, although I will try. And while I have faced significant hardships throughout my life, I want to make clear that my story is not one of pain and torment, but rather about hope, self-confidence, and resilience.

I am still standing; I am still here. What has been said about me in the media is not who I really am. I’ve heard myself described as surly, rude, shy, stoic, dignified, and superhuman. All those things may seem true, at times. I’m also quite charming and funny, and I’ve been said to have a biting wit. Like every human, I am many things—a proud Black woman from Limpopo, a rural province in the northernmost part of South Africa, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and now I am a mother to two baby girls: Oratile, who was born in 2019, and Oarabile, who was born in 2021. I feel and I hurt just like a regular person, although I am not considered by science or some people to be a regular woman.

The scientific community has labeled my biological makeup as intersex, and I am now one of, if not the, most recognizable intersex person in the world. The truth is I don’t think of myself that way. I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman. Of course, growing up I knew I looked and behaved differently from many of my peers, but my family, my community, and my country accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider. The beauty of my childhood was that I never felt othered or unwanted—this is the source of my strength. I have never questioned who I am.

And I am a runner. I love running with all of my heart. It is one of those things that just makes sense to me. Runners at every level know what I mean when I say running makes me feel free but also grounds me. It is like meditating for me—it centers me. There’s this thing that happens every time I get to the starting line of a race. My mind goes completely silent. I hear nothing, except my own breathing. I see nothing, except the track in front of me. Some people call this the zone, where the line between nothing and everything no longer exists—we are simultaneously in and out of our bodies.

I think it’s important to talk about lines. We humans are obsessed with them. There are starting lines and finish lines, there are the lines we draw around ourselves that tell others where to stop, where they are not wanted, and there are the lines that define what kind of human we are—our race, our gender, our sexuality. Most people are content to walk the line as it is drawn, to be defined by it, to stay in their place. I am not one of those people. I never have been. The biological makeup of my body, the way I look on the outside and the way I live my life, is a crossing of lines in many people’s minds. The way I look may be what brought me to the IAAF’s attention in the first place. According to Sebastian Coe, the current president of the IAAF, there is no line more important, no line more worth protecting than the difference between men and women in sports competition. As you will see in my story, that line is hard to define, and it keeps moving depending on who is doing the defining. I have been banned from running because women are a protected class in athletics, and women with differences in sexual development are considered a threat to the line between genders.

I sometimes remind myself of how blessed I am to be where I am today. Not that many years ago, the sports governing body of my own country of South Africa wouldn’t have allowed me to run in the Olympics because I am Black. I was born in 1991, just a few years before the first democratic elections in 1994 would finally begin to unravel that insidious and dehumanizing system of government that defined people and even ripped families apart based on the color of their skin and other physical features. My parents, older siblings, and extended family lived through this time. They were not allowed to travel or live where they wanted; some were forcibly relocated. Black people didn’t have access to higher education. And unlike me, so many great Black athletes never got a chance. There is still so much trauma in our communities from the brutality of apartheid. I carry that history of discrimination and resistance and the yearning for freedom within me; they are there in everything I do.

As a young girl, I heard Nelson Mandela, the beloved leader of our country and icon of freedom and resistance around the world, speak about sports as having the power to inspire … the power to unite people in a way that little else does… And I loved sports. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be known and appreciated for my physical talents. My siblings thought I was crazy when, as an eight-year-old girl, I would point up to the skies and say, One day, it will be me on that plane. Of course, in those days I believed I was going to be a famous soccer player and travel with our national team, Bafana Bafana. No notable athletes had ever come out of our small village, and people were more concerned with surviving than dreaming. I had no real reason to believe in my eventual success, but I was sure I was going to make it.

Well, this girl child ran so fast that people insisted no girl could possibly run that fast. Unless, the rumors went, I wasn’t really a girl. Or maybe I was a girl, but one whose coaches had pumped her full of drugs that turn women into men anyway. After all, the media said, I had come out of nowhere to win. The point seemed to be that I did not belong at the world championships and that my win had to be because I was cheating in some form or other. Sports and entertainment commentators discussed my facial features, the size of my arms and legs and breasts, the muscles in my abdomen. They would zoom in on pictures of my crotch and wonder what could possibly be going on between my legs. I would say I was being treated like an animal, but I grew up tending to my family’s livestock, and we treated them with more respect than that.

I’m aware that Black women’s bodies in general have been objectified and treated as spectacles. The most well-known historical example is Saartjie Baartman, a fellow South African brought to Europe where she was put on display in circus-like exhibits for a paying audience in the 1800s. Her body’s proportions were considered abnormal by Western standards. After her death in 1815 at the age of twenty-five, her genitals were cut from her body, preserved, and displayed along with her skeleton in a French museum until 1974. The circumstances of her death aren’t clear, but it is said she died of disease, far from the comfort of her people and homeland. Nelson Mandela had Saartjie’s remains repatriated once he was in power, and she was finally laid to rest in the country of her birth in 2002.

At times, it seems not much has changed from Saartjie’s days. We only have to look at the way women like Michelle Obama and Serena Williams have been treated by today’s media and parts of society. They have been called monkeys, accused of being men. Every part of their body, their musculature, their facial features, have been openly derided and insulted. Black women have always been held to some standard of beauty and femininity that makes us something other than women.

I am a tall, dark-skinned, African woman with well-defined muscles, a deep voice and not a lot up on top. I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man. I’ve made no secret of preferring to play soccer and baseball and basketball with boys and hanging out with them when I was growing up. In my village, boys were playing the sports I wanted to play, and my parents didn’t stop me from doing what made me happy. I was accepted, but it didn’t mean people didn’t see that I was different. Like I used to say to would-be bullies, You think I look like a boy? So what? What are you going to do about it? One thing about me is that I’ve never tolerated bullying—of myself or others in my presence. If the situation escalated, I’d let my fists do the rest of the talking. 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. Growing up, my family and friends just understood I was what the Western world calls a tomboy.

I WAS EIGHTEEN years old and had just run in the biggest race of my life when Pierre Weiss, the IAAF’s general secretary, cruelly said to the media, It is clear she is a woman. But maybe not 100 percent.

The IAAF and the International Olympic Committee have been gender-testing women in various ways since the beginning of organized competition, but by the time I won my first World Championship in 2009, there was no uniform test required for all women athletes. Rather, there was an arbitrary policy that anyone (say, an envious coach or athlete) could anonymously report their suspicion that an athlete wasn’t the gender they claimed. If the IAAF chose to do so, that female athlete would have to prove themselves through a battery of invasive psychological, gynecological, and endocrinal tests. Women in my position have attempted to and even killed themselves. Many more have just left athletics out of fear and shame.

Like me, other women caught in the IAAF’s gender investigations had no idea about their condition. The only solutions offered are medically unnecessary and potentially harmful. The diagnosis not only ends their dreams of running on the international stage and a way of helping their families, but depending on where they live in the world, a medical determination may also have more severe consequences. Rumors arising from an IAAF investigation may end their dreams of building a family or lead to them being ostracized by their communities or injured or worse. It is hard to explain the psychological violence of having your gender identity questioned or ripped away, of feeling rejected by society. 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. Like I said, I don’t like bullies.

Many people thought I would never run again after the 2009 debacle. That I would go back to my village and live the rest of my days as best I could. Well, I have achieved more than many thought possible, although the circumstances of my success have caused me great mental and physical injury, and my refusal to bow my head to the IAAF’s regulations on testosterone limits for women has hobbled what future I have left in athletics. In some ways, I know my time as a competitor is coming to an end. It is an eventuality that every athlete must confront. I am now thirty-two years old. As someone who works with their body, I know that no one can outrun time.

I feel that the IAAF has confiscated a large part of my life. I’ve spent as much time fighting them as I have training and racing. They have stolen years of performances not only from me but also from the audience—their joy at seeing me on the track over the years, win or lose, has brought me joy. The blow of every insult hurled at me has been softened by the love and admiration of people who watch me run.

I dreamt of defending my gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. I’d appealed the IAAF’s reinstatement of testosterone regulations to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2018 and hoped its members would see things our way in time for me to compete. They did not. We tried again with the Swiss Supreme Court and unfortunately lost again. But the fight is not over yet. As I write this, my lawyers are challenging the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights. We hope they agree perfectly healthy women should not have to undergo surgeries or take drugs that alter their natural bodies to compete; this is a barbaric infringement on our human dignity. The World Medical Association and the United Nations Humans Right Council have both publicly condemned the IAAF’s decision.

By now, it is no secret that when the IAAF sidelined me for almost a year after I won gold in 2009, I was so desperate to get back on the track, to fulfill my dreams and help my family, that I did take medication to lower my testosterone level. It was the only way. I took the drugs for years. The side effects were horrible. During those years, I ran despite feeling sick, and I ran while injured. I’ve had some great running years and some terrible ones. Contrary to what some think, I’ve never thrown a race to appear slower than my competitors and, unlike a few I’ve run against, I’ve never taken illegal substances to gain an edge. I am a pure athlete, win or lose. I’ve worked hard throughout my life, sacrificed time with my loved ones, sacrificed many normal life experiences, in order to have the privilege and opportunity to do what I love.

I was lucky to be born with these special talents—my mind has a special ability to focus, my body can stand the pain and exhaustion of endless training. It’s not the testosterone in my body that makes me great, it’s my ambition, perseverance, and faith in myself. Every time I’ve been knocked down, I get back up. Every setback has made me stronger.

I am not a scientist. I am not here to deliver a lecture on human biology. I am not here to prove my humanity—that has been granted to me by God. It is true we athletes tend to think in simple ways—win or lose, train hard and try again the next day. My world has always been very black and white and, I admit, very small. I have traveled all over the world and never explored the outside of a hotel or a race track. It had to be that way so that I could endure the physical and mental requirements of elite athletics, especially given the situation I was shoved into after Berlin in 2009.

I DON’T HAVE TIME for nonsense, I have replied to the journalists who’ve approached me about the gender issue throughout the years. And I mean it. Because that’s how I’ve always seen it. Nonsense and stupidity and ignorance. I’m here to run and put on a show. That was the totality of my job. But the way I was treated by the IAAF and the media, and the way I have carried myself despite it all, has catapulted me beyond athletics. I have become a human rights icon in many people’s eyes. I will miss running my beloved 800- and 1500-m distance races, but I know I can never again put my body through what I did in order to compete, and I hope no other girl has to.

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 had a family who never tried to change me, and a country that wrapped its arms around me and fought for my right to run. There is always a sadness to the end of an era, but I will run as long as my body allows me to. When I can no longer run, either because of time or more regulations targeting people like me, you will still see me on the track supporting the coming generations.

I am a proud South African woman born in a tiny village to people who loved me. They have survived more humiliations than I could possibly know. It is from them that I know about maintaining dignity in the face of oppression. It is my hope that by telling my truth, I inspire others to be unafraid, to love and accept themselves. May this story contribute to a more tolerant world for us all.

Part I

THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 1

God Made Me

I’M RUNNING HARD AND FAST. THE GROUND HAS cracks everywhere, and I keep tripping. I am climbing over metal fences and floating and then falling and pushing up with my body and floating again. My feet are caked with dirt, and they are also wet. Sometimes they hurt, but the pain goes away. I am happy. I feel free. No one can catch me. My mother and sisters try, but I’m too fast for them. I believe this is the first time I felt like me. That I was a person, separate from the people and things around me. It is my earliest memory. I was around two years old.

My mother says I was an early walker. I took my first steps at seven months. From there, it seemed like I was flying from one place to the next. My feet were always bleeding because the floor of my parents’ home was made of rough cement. It was easy for a toddler to stumble and fall. My legs and knees were always scratched and bruised. They said I wouldn’t cry when I fell, I’d just get up and keep going. And I was strong. If my older siblings wanted to take something away from me, they’d have to work hard to pry it out of my tiny hands. Even as a toddler, I was fierce. My mom said she knew I was something special right from the start.

I was born to Dorcas and Jacob Semenya on January 7, 1991, in a rural village called Ga-Masehlong, located in what is today called Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa. Our village is small and remote; only about a thousand people lived there. There was a time when it couldn’t be found on Google Maps. There is only one road that leads into the village. If you were driving from the city of Polokwane, capital of the Limpopo province, you’d drive about 60 kilometers northwest on the only main road, and then make a left and head into nothing but open sky, wilderness, and dirt tracks. Eventually, you would arrive at a tree that holds a sign with our village’s name on it.

We had eight main streets, which sat parallel to each other. Mostly there were homes on rectangular plots of land and a few shops, what we call spaza or tuck shops, convenience stores that sold basic household items and snacks and drinks. Anyone could put up a spaza shop; many were in people’s homes. We had one liquor store, a supermarket, and a primary school. And of course, we had a church. Our small church was part of the Zion Christian Church family, the largest in South Africa. The church was the hub of the village, and you’d find almost everybody gathered there on Sundays, and sometimes during the week, singing, dancing, and calling out to God and his Son. Many of the working-age people left during the day to work as farmers and laborers and domestic workers in towns and cities or in the larger neighboring villages.

I’ve often described my village as a dusty, dusty place. And it was that. The flat dry land surrounding the homes seemed like it could go on forever. It was dotted with baobab and jacaranda trees, bushes, brambles and thorns. You could see mountains in the distance. There wasn’t much to do there except survive. When I was growing up, the houses were made of mud and stone. Some folks built their roofs with corrugated tin, and others used tightly woven dried grass or thatch. There was wire fencing around many of the homes to keep in the cows and goats and sheep, although the animals would also roam freely around the village. Everyone in the village knew each other, and kids were allowed to roam freely, too. We call the wilderness surrounding our village the bush, and it’s where I spent most of my childhood.

My mom had been a teacher in her youth, but once she married my father, he preferred that she stay home. My mom still wanted to contribute financially to our family, so she opened a spaza shop in our yard. She sold a little of everything, mostly foodstuffs like raw cuts of meat and fish and sweets from the back of our home. During the week, she would also take some merchandise to our school and sell to students during lunchbreaks. She’d have candy and fresh-baked bread with raisins. I used to love the sweet bread, but I didn’t like the raisins, so I would pick them and throw them on the ground. My mother didn’t like that I wasted perfectly good food. When they were home, my sisters would help my mom. When I got older, I helped my mom sell, too. My mother was beautiful, with rich brown skin and a rounded face and curves that made others stop and look. Like most of the women in my family, she was not tall, but she carried herself with a dignity that made her seem much taller. My mom was very motherly, by which I mean patient, kind, and protective. I inherited her easy, wide smile. She was tough, too—not a woman you wanted to cross.

My father worked as a municipal gardener in Pretoria, a city about 310 kilometers from our village. The work kept him away from home a lot. He’d be gone sometimes for months at a time and come back for holidays or when he was given a break. I loved my mom with all my heart but I was what they call a daddy’s girl. I missed him terribly when he would go off to the big city. I remember he would come home and I would run to him and hug him for a long time. He’d pick me up and spin me around and around. Most would say I inherited my height, facial features, and disposition from my father, who was thin and long-limbed but muscular, with sharp cheekbones. He, too, had a big smile. My dad could come off as shy and reserved, but he was also a jokester, and it seemed you could hear his laughter from miles away.

My mother gave birth to me at WF Knobel Hospital, the closest hospital to our village. I am the fourth child of six children, five girls and one boy. My eldest sister, Wenny, was born in 1980, and then Nico was born in 1985, followed by Olga, born in 1987. I came into the world in 1991, and my younger sister Murriel was born in 1993. My baby brother, Ishmael, the only boy in our family and final child, was born in 1996. The real baby of our family was my niece, Neo, Wenny’s daughter, who lived with us from the day she was born in 1998. My older sisters would come and go from the village as they searched for opportunities in schooling and work in Johannesburg. I would end up being the eldest in the household and the main caretaker of my younger sister, brother, and niece, while my mother and father worked. I had plenty of extended family in our village—aunts and uncles on both sides with children of their own.

We were not rich people, but we were not poor. Sometimes people say someone is poor, but they don’t know what poverty is. Or I suppose poverty has levels to it depending on where you are. Our family may not have had a lot, but we had plenty of food. I never had to go to bed hungry. For me, being poor is when a family must end the day without eating, when they don’t have clothes, and they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Poor is when you don’t have shelter. Our family had all of this, so we weren’t poor.

Our home was large by our standards, with five bedrooms and a living room. We were a big family, and we needed the space. There was no electricity or running water. We fetched enough water from the village well for our needs and used candles and paraffin lamps. When I was four or five years old, my father installed a solar energy system; government-run electricity didn’t come to our village until 2001, when I was ten. Our toilet was outdoors, a good walk away from the main house. It was a wooden shack built around a deep hole in the ground. We called it the long drop. No need for water to flush. You sat and did your business and went on with life.

We had about a third of a hectare of land, and we grew fruits and vegetables on one side and kept our animals on the other. The weather allowed us to farm lemons, oranges, figs, guava, mangoes, peaches, grapes, pomegranates, and even a little sugar cane. We also had tomatoes, potatoes, and spinach. We didn’t sell what we grew; we farmed only to feed ourselves. There was an area inside the house that could be called a kitchen, but the actual cooking of meals happened outside in our yard. I loved to run into the bush and collect firewood. We had a pit in the back of our home, and when the wood was glowing red and orange, we’d put our iron pots on it. We owned about thirty domesticated animals—cows and goats and sheep. I loved to take care of them, too.

My mother told me one of our ancestors came to her in a dream while she was pregnant and gave her my full name. Mokgadi Caster Semenya. Mokgadi was my maternal grandmother’s name. In Pedi, our native tongue, it means one who guides and one who gives up what they want so that others may have what they need. Caster is an English name, and I learned it means one who seeks.

I was a big baby, the biggest of all my siblings. I weighed around twelve pounds at birth. I was barrel chested, my mother said, with big lungs that allowed for a deep-throated cry, unlike any of her other daughters. I know that after three girls, my parents probably wanted a boy, but here I was. They were happy. A new healthy soul in the family is always a cause for happiness.

My parents adored me. If they did have a favorite child, it would have been me. I kept going back to that feeling of being adored by the two most important people in my life when later it seemed the rest of the world thought I was some kind of monster.

CHAPTER 2

A Different Kind of Girl

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF MY BIRTH WERE NOT remarkable—except for my size and strength—but, as I would get older, it soon became clear I wasn’t interested in the same things other girls were interested in. I’d be given a doll or teddy bear, and I would toss it around a bit and then get rid of it. I never took to dolls the way it is assumed girls should. I also didn’t want to play make-believe with the other girls. It seemed to me a waste of time to sit around talking to stones