Caster Semenya, three-time 800m world champion whose hyperandrogenism is causing controversy

His shoulders are too square, his voice too deep, and his performance too loud. Two-time Olympic champion, three-time world champion in 800 meters, Caster Semenya, has been facing intense controversy for several years. His fault. Not being “woman enough”, experts say. Suffering from hyperandrogenism (like Algerian boxer Imane Khelief, whose victory at the Paris 2024 Olympics caused controversy), a syndrome that causes some people to have a natural excess of male hormones, including testosterone, has since been categorized. Caught between the rarity of his case and a behind-the-scenes rebellion by some competitors, the International Association of Athletics Federations (formerly known as the IAAF) finally decided in 2019 to force the runner to take a drug to lower blood testosterone levels. The categorical refusal of the latter, who has since been disqualified from the competition. “God made me the way I am, I accept myself and I’m proud,” she declared in a 2009 magazine cover. you .

Football and fighting

As a young girl, the one we would soon call “Cobra” already knew her “difference.” But while at the age of 5 he loved football and fighting and wore neither dresses nor ribbons, Mokgadi Caster Semenya never felt like a “man”. Born on January 7, 1991 in Petersburg (also known as Polokwane), in the impoverished Limpopo province of South Africa, she is the last of three sisters. Strange fact. before his wife gave birth, the father, Jacob Semenya, had prayed to all the gods that this time they would have a boy, which was “completely” fulfilled years later with the birth of his son Thabang. In a magazine portrait Young Africa In 2009, the patriarch remembered the youth of his younger sister, dedicated to the sportswoman, between her masculine voice and non-existent breasts. “We often mistook him for a man on the phone,” she said. However, he never doubted that his daughter was always a girl. A girl is “not like the others”, simply.

In his remote base on the border with Botswana in the early 1990s, Custer said little about his resemblance. There they see him only as a “drum”, no doctor will ever examine him. In his autobiographical book. Race to be myself (Race to become me), which was published in October 2023, it even recalls this childhood as an era of a certain carelessness. Despite some teasing, he likes to walk around in his tracksuit and enjoys walking a few meters past boys who scream and run after him. When did Caster Semenya realize his talent? As far as she remembers, the athlete was already training, a young girl and always barefoot, on the dusty slopes bordering her house. That’s how in 2009, at the age of 18, he took part in the World Championship held in Berlin, which was his first major competition.

“Femininity Test”

The jump between Limpopo and Germany is dizzying. In the capital’s Olympic Stadium, which can hold 75,000 spectators, the young woman sets out alongside 1,895 athletes from 200 countries. “Very quickly, the happiest day of my young life turned into an international scandal,” he writes in his book. Because his feat of one minute, 55 seconds and 45-hundredths of a second this August 19, propelling him to the world 800-meter title, isn’t enough to silence, or even exacerbate, doubts. Rumors are spreading in the dressing room. Caster Semenya allegedly lied about her gender. At the end of the award ceremony, the journalist even dared to ask him this question. “I heard you were born a man.” To calm the confusion, the International Athletics Federation subjected her to the first “femininity test”. the latter was taken to a German hospital in the evening of the same day. Scandal in women’s sports world. After barely a teenager, her identity is questioned, while her body, face are plastered on the front page of all magazines. As he explained in 2019 before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which challenged his medication as a hyperandrogenic runner, that day he was subjected to “the most powerful and humiliating experience of his life”.

In this media surge, one Australian newspaper claims that “according to a source close to the IAAF”, Caster Semenya has been diagnosed by experts as a hermaphrodite. The information, however, was kept secret, provided to the press without prior notification. Still in his autobiography, he returns to the violence of this pasture, learning at the same time as the world the existence of his syndrome; Madame Figaro Sports and health sociologist Hugo Garcia. Faced with his case and in the interest of “sporting justice”, he had to undergo treatment to return to normal. In shock and anxious to quickly resume competition, the athlete accepts. In 2010, she began taking medication and discovered her side effects.

This is followed by fever, sweating, weight gain, nausea and abdominal pain. Symptoms that quickly lead to loss of self-confidence and depression. He has to undergo regular blood tests to monitor his testosterone levels, in addition to unannounced IAAF tests, which he now accuses of being moved to be a “lab rat”. If he retains the title of world champion in 2011, then the medical treatment will have a very negative effect on his performances. Although since that year the International Association of Athletics Federations has established regulations related to hyperandrogenism, setting testosterone thresholds to better define the “female sports gender”, the athlete decided in 2015 to stop treatment. It’s time for him to start a whole new fight.

During the rebellion

For almost 15 years now, Caster Semenya has been fighting fiercely against the institution that is now called World Athletics. For Hugo Garcia, the stakes are high because they are part of the history of sexism and discrimination inherent in the sports world and crystallize the debate around biological sex. “Athletes like Semenya, Dutee Chand (hyperandrogenic Indian sprinter, editor’s note) and many others, there is no way they should be forced or encouraged to take testosterone lowering drugs when their bodies are designed to do so. It’s absolutely amazing that people have to undergo hormone treatments or surgery to enter competitions because they end up changing their bodies to meet what is naturally considered normal.” For a better understanding, the latter quotes the words of one of his colleagues, Beatrice Barbus: “We learned in school that there are only two fixed sexes, but science allows us to know that there are several ways to determine this: hormonal, genetic, anatomical, chromosomal. “. “This shakes many of our beliefs,” Hugo Garcia continues. We are scientifically incapable of defining what a real woman or a real man is.

At the same time, and with regard to performance, many sports sociologists cite the treatment of male figures to contradict fantasies of intersex “integrity”; “It doesn’t exist. Usain Bolt had a physiological disposition that gave him an advantage. performance itself is unequal.’ And continue. “Caster Semenya is a cis (gender) woman. Therefore, whatever its advantage is, it is neither unfair nor artificial. You can’t disqualify a great basketball player because he’s above average, or disqualify a chess player because he has a higher IQ. After going back and forth between several second-tier competitions for several years and waiting for a final decision from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Caster Semenya was finally banned from international competition in 2019. treatment

Traditional wedding

In all this turmoil, the fighter never lost the support of her country, South Africa, and her partner Violet Raseboya, also a former athlete. The two women got married in December 2015 in a luxurious villa in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. Photos of their union, posted on Instagram, showed Caster Semenya, 24, in a dark suit next to his wife in a gorgeous, flawless white dress. Five years later, the couple welcomed their first child, a baby girl named Ora. Then, in July 2021, the arrival of their second, Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Fingers. Our family is growing with love and grace. This precious soul that God has decided to give us. We look forward to meeting you,” he wrote on social networks.

After referring the case to the European Court of Justice on February 18, 2021, Caster Semenya partially won his case in July 2023 following an appeal against Switzerland. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has in fact confirmed that the athlete was a victim of discrimination by the Swiss justice system in 2020. The first victory, which seems to be the beginning of a renewal for him. When asked by BFM TV how she fights to protect her rights, her mother stated very confidently. “You never fight for the truth, you never get tired. I’m happy, I love my life and I don’t need anyone’s validation to lead it. I always give the same answer to these questions: I am Caster Semenya, I am a woman, I am fast and incredible. I will never get tired of being myself. The day I stop fighting, I’ll be in the grave.”