Cis lesbian South African runner Caster Semenya has said that she does not identify as intersex.
“That identity doesn’t fit me; it doesn’t fit my soul,” the two-time Olympic gold medalist writes in a powerful New York Times essay, adapted from her upcoming memoir, The Race to be Myself. “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’m a woman. I’m a different kind of woman, I know, but I’m still a woman.” Casters For Medical Equipment
The cisgender South African Olympic gold medal-winning runner has been battling World Athletics’ discriminatory rules for years.
In the piece, the runner — who was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl, and has never identified as anything other than female — details her years-long fight to be allowed to compete against other female athletes in elite track and field events, including the Olympics, after it was revealed in 2009 that she was born with differences in sex development (DSD).
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Semenya describes being forced to undergo medical testing when she was just 18 due to speculation about her sex and gender that arose from fellow athletes, sports officials, the media, and fans ahead of the 2009 Berlin World Championships. She only learned about the results of those tests when they were leaked to the media that same year.
“I learned that I had XY chromosomes, rather than the typically female XX pairing, and high levels of testosterone, produced by undescended testicles I didn’t know I had,” she writes. “In order to continue racing as a woman, I was told, I needed to have surgery to remove them.”
Semenya writes that she refused to have surgery. “I was healthy, I loved my body, and it had made me a champion. Why must I go and mutilate it to conform to someone else’s rules?”
Instead, she writes, she opted to take medication to artificially lower her body’s natural testosterone levels in order to meet the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF, now World Athletics) requirements for female athletes, despite potentially dangerous side effects. She says she began to feel sick almost as soon as she started taking the medication.
At the same time, she endured continual scrutiny.
“I’d been called a hermaphrodite. I had to walk back out into the world with this thing hanging around my neck. I wasn’t oblivious to the stares and whispers from other runners,” she writes. “I wasn’t going to take on an identity that did not fit my soul because some doctors had taken my blood and images of my organs. I was not a hermaphrodite or anything other than a woman.”
After learning in 2015 that Indian runner Dutee Chand had won her challenge against the IAAF’s requirement that she artificially lower her own testosterone levels, Semenya says she stopped taking the medication. She went on to compete in the 2016 Olympics and the 2017 IAAF World Championships.
In 2018, the IAAF announced new regulations that prevented Semenya from competing against other women in her events. (World Athletics expanded and made the rules stricter this year.) “To me, its restrictions aren’t about leveling the playing field; they are about getting certain types of women off the field completely,” she writes.
She blasts the IAAF’s hypocrisy in celebrating white male athletes like Michael Phelps for their natural physical advantages, and for accepting bribes from Russian athletes who had used performance-enhancing drugs, all while forcing her to alter her own body.
As writer Precious Adesina noted in her profile of Semenya for The Cut, a 2020 Human Rights Watch report found that female athletes from Africa and Asia have disproportionately been subjected to “sex testing,” “gender verification,” or “femininity testing.”
“It was people like Chand and me whose natural bodies were seen as abnormal and were being targeted and shamed out of the sport,” Semenya writes. “We were the ones enduring public humiliation when people who had taken illegal drugs were often portrayed as just victims of their government’s thirst for medals.”
Semenya also rejects the IAAF’s 2018 offer to allow female athletes with DSD to participate in male categories or a hypothetical category for intersex runners, which does not even exist yet.
“For me, participating in a third category of human gender identity would be accepting being othered, accepting the discrimination that I had fought against,” she writes. “It would mean giving up the identity I’d been born with and had never questioned to take on a new one I didn’t believe.”
“Even though I understand that those in the medical community call me an intersex person because of the way my internal organs are structured,” she continues, “I do not call myself intersex. That identity doesn’t fit me; it doesn’t fit my soul.”
Semenya has refused to go back to taking medication to lower her testosterone levels, forcing her to sit out the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. In 2019, she lost an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport challenging the rules. The following year, she lost a second appeal to Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court.
Earlier this year, she won an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against World Athletics’ rules regulating testosterone levels in elite female athletes. The ECHR found that Semenya “had not been afforded sufficient institutional and procedural safeguards in Switzerland to allow her to have her complaints examined effectively, especially since her complaints concerned substantiated and credible claims of discrimination.” The ECHR ruled that her appeal to the Swiss Supreme Court “should have led to a thorough institutional and procedural review” of World Athletics’ rules.
The Swiss government was ordered to pay Semenya 60,000 euros ($66,000) for costs and expenses related to her appeal. However, as Adesina notes in The Cut, World Athletics’ rules have not changed and Semenya is still not allowed to race against other elite female athletes.
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