The Race to Be Myself by Caster Semenya review – the right to run | Autobiography and memoir

“There is some doubt about the fact that this person is a lady.” It was 2009, and 18-year-old Caster Semenya had just won a gold medal in the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin. The general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) was addressing the media, announcing that Semenya was clearly “a woman, but maybe not 100%”.

Semenya has, to this day, not watched this press conference: “I’ve heard about it, but I don’t care to see it,” she writes in her memoir, The Race to Be Myself. Why should she? It marked the public start of a long campaign of harassment and discrimination by the IAAF that had already begun behind closed doors. In the run-up to the race, officials had subjected Semenya to two rounds of “gender tests”, in Pretoria and Berlin.

When the IAAF’s findings were leaked to the press after the race, Semenya (who had previously never even been to a gynaecologist) read the news along with everyone else: “There it was. The things I did not know about my body.” The reports said that although she had a vagina, she did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes, and that undescended testicles were the source of her higher than average levels of testosterone. All of this, the IAAF said, threw her eligibility to compete into question.

After her anger over the breach of privacy subsided, Semenya felt relief. “Looking at it the other way, whoever leaked the results did me a big favour: I now knew what was going on with my body,” she writes in the coolly self-assured tone that characterises this book. “And now everybody else knew, too.” It had long been apparent to Semenya that her body was different. But in the village of Ga-Masehlong in South Africa where she grew up, this didn’t pose a particular problem. “We noted I was different, but different didn’t mean wrong.” She writes: “I wasn’t the only girl who was “boyish” in my village or the surrounding villages. Girls who preferred to wear trousers or play with boys weren’t considered abominations. It really was not a big fucking deal. These girls would grow out of it and get married and have kids with a guy or not. That’s life.”

Semenya was born in 1991 – the year before the IAAF allowed South African athletes to rejoin international competitions after the end of apartheid – and she draws an explicit connection between the investigation of her gender and broader currents of racism. “For us it became about more than gender – it became about race. It became about white people coming and telling us Africans what we were and what we were not based on our looks – the same categorisations and violations of human rights that were happening during apartheid,” Semenya writes.

A title like The Race to Be Myself suggests a journey of self-discovery, but Semenya never expresses doubts about her identity as a woman or an athlete. The real race she’s describing is a race against time – a race to outmanoeuvre the IAAF’s shifting criteria about whether or not, and under what terms, women with “differences of sexual development” could compete. In the case of her own career, Semenya opted to take a a potent dose of estrogen to bring her testosterone down to a level deemed acceptable by the IAAF for as long as she could. The medication had intense physical and psychological side effects, but that didn’t stop her from running – and winning, repeatedly. Other young elite athletes, subjected to gonadectomies, entirely vanished from the field.

Who gets to determine the categories of “men” and “women” in athletic competition – and to what end? The science and methods behind this sorting are contentious and fallible. Earlier this year, Semenya won a discrimination case against the IAAF in the European court of human rights. But the testosterone rules that ended her career remain. Perpetually accused of “cheating” by the IAAF, Semenya argues persuasively that, in fact, it was the other way around: “They were the ones who had cheated me. They had cheated me out of my young adulthood; they had almost cheated me of my own sanity, my mental and physical well-being.”

“There is some doubt about the fact that this person is a lady.” It was 2009, and 18-year-old Caster Semenya had just won a gold medal in the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin. The general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) was addressing the media, announcing that Semenya was clearly “a woman, but maybe not 100%”.

Semenya has, to this day, not watched this press conference: “I’ve heard about it, but I don’t care to see it,” she writes in her memoir, The Race to Be Myself. Why should she? It marked the public start of a long campaign of harassment and discrimination by the IAAF that had already begun behind closed doors. In the run-up to the race, officials had subjected Semenya to two rounds of “gender tests”, in Pretoria and Berlin.

When the IAAF’s findings were leaked to the press after the race, Semenya (who had previously never even been to a gynaecologist) read the news along with everyone else: “There it was. The things I did not know about my body.” The reports said that although she had a vagina, she did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes, and that undescended testicles were the source of her higher than average levels of testosterone. All of this, the IAAF said, threw her eligibility to compete into question.

After her anger over the breach of privacy subsided, Semenya felt relief. “Looking at it the other way, whoever leaked the results did me a big favour: I now knew what was going on with my body,” she writes in the coolly self-assured tone that characterises this book. “And now everybody else knew, too.” It had long been apparent to Semenya that her body was different. But in the village of Ga-Masehlong in South Africa where she grew up, this didn’t pose a particular problem. “We noted I was different, but different didn’t mean wrong.” She writes: “I wasn’t the only girl who was “boyish” in my village or the surrounding villages. Girls who preferred to wear trousers or play with boys weren’t considered abominations. It really was not a big fucking deal. These girls would grow out of it and get married and have kids with a guy or not. That’s life.”

Semenya was born in 1991 – the year before the IAAF allowed South African athletes to rejoin international competitions after the end of apartheid – and she draws an explicit connection between the investigation of her gender and broader currents of racism. “For us it became about more than gender – it became about race. It became about white people coming and telling us Africans what we were and what we were not based on our looks – the same categorisations and violations of human rights that were happening during apartheid,” Semenya writes.

A title like The Race to Be Myself suggests a journey of self-discovery, but Semenya never expresses doubts about her identity as a woman or an athlete. The real race she’s describing is a race against time – a race to outmanoeuvre the IAAF’s shifting criteria about whether or not, and under what terms, women with “differences of sexual development” could compete. In the case of her own career, Semenya opted to take a a potent dose of estrogen to bring her testosterone down to a level deemed acceptable by the IAAF for as long as she could. The medication had intense physical and psychological side effects, but that didn’t stop her from running – and winning, repeatedly. Other young elite athletes, subjected to gonadectomies, entirely vanished from the field.

Who gets to determine the categories of “men” and “women” in athletic competition – and to what end? The science and methods behind this sorting are contentious and fallible. Earlier this year, Semenya won a discrimination case against the IAAF in the European court of human rights. But the testosterone rules that ended her career remain. Perpetually accused of “cheating” by the IAAF, Semenya argues persuasively that, in fact, it was the other way around: “They were the ones who had cheated me. They had cheated me out of my young adulthood; they had almost cheated me of my own sanity, my mental and physical well-being.”