CASTER'S SPELL
Semenya charms the world
“SHUT up and run!” Not the subtlest words ever spoken by Madiba, but they did the trick for Caster Semenya. When South Africa’s golden girl met the former president in August 2009, she was under attack. A storm had erupted over her victory at the world championships in Berlin. “Shut up and run!” advised Madiba. So Caster did exactly that. And now, according to her nearest and dearest, she is impervious to the persistent attacks on her right to compete. She lets her legs — and her medals — do the talking. On Wednesday, the Sunday Times watched Caster’s 800m heat on TV in Pretoria with her wife, Violet Raseboya, and two of their close friends, Kgothatso “KG” Montjane, a Paralympic tennis player, and the SABC talkshow host Aaron Moloisi.
“Ever since Madiba gave her that message, she has blocked all the negativity and focused only on running. That’s one reason she has few friends,” Moloisi said.
But quality beats quantity — and Violet, KG and Moloisi are a trio of world-class cheerleaders. They have known Caster since their teenage years in Limpopo: Caster and KG grew up in GaMasehlong, while Moloisi hails from nearby Seshego.
All three were nervous as Caster loosened up in lane four. But none as nervous as Violet, who married Caster in a traditional ceremony last December.
Didn’t she wish she was in Rio? “I would be more nervous,” Violet said softly.
As Caster, 25, primed herself for the gun, Violet leant forward in her seat and twirled her forefinger, in tribute to Caster’s habitual pre-race gesture.
The pistol barked, the runners leapt forward, and Caster quickly joined a group bunched up in lane one. Violet is an accomplished athlete herself, fascinated by race tactics, and could not contain herself. “Dom lane! No, you don’t do that, wena!”
But Caster had it all mapped out. In the final bend, she pulled rank with imperious authority for an easy victory without draining precious energy.
On Caster’s wrist was the leather bracelet given to her by Violet, inscribed with the words “I Love You, Caster”.
“That’s her lucky charm,” said KG. “It was damaged the day before she left, and we were running around looking for an elastic band to fix it.”
There is another, flashier symbol of their union. Caster and Violet drive a luxury 4x4, with a number plate that combines the first halves of their names: CASVIO.
Violet has spoken to Caster every day during the Olympics. “She sounded happy today. I think it’s because of the funny video message she got from Somizi [Mhlongo], saying: ‘Go run, girl!’ You can feel when she’s OK, when she’s ready.”
Watching a later heat, Violet cheered for Francine Niyonsaba, a promising Burundian. A threat to Caster? “No,” laughed KG. “Caster is the only threat!”
Violet represented South Africa in cross-country events for five years, and ran on the track at the All-Africa Games. Nowadays she is settling into a career in logistics at Transnet.
They met at an athletics meet in Limpopo when both were 15, and there was already a difference between their ambitions.
“She always dreamt big,” said Violet. “Me, I take things as they come. The Olympics is everybody’s dream, but I’m not that strong, I have speed but I don’t have power like hers.
“I do believe in myself, but you just need to accept that, you know, there are different levels. She is world-class. She’s got it all. When I watch her running, it’s like she entertains me. It’s like watching people dancing. They’ve got these unique moves that you don’t know.”
Caster is nominated as athlete of the year at this year’s G-sport for Girls next weekend. The NGO raises the profile of South African women in sport and has been rallying behind her during the Olympics.
Violet believes Caster has not felt any weight of expectation from the millions who have rallied to her defence through the #HandsOffCaster campaign.
“She puts her own pressure on herself,” she said. “We may support her, but it’s up to her what she wants.”
But the supreme importance of this moment was not lost on Caster, said Violet. “She will be thinking: ‘Maybe I will be too old at the next Olympics.’ You can’t predict whether you’ll be fit. So this one, it’s do or die.”
Visit sundaytimes.co.za for updates on Caster
When I watch her, it’s like she entertains me, like watching people dancing
FACES OF A WOMAN: Caster Semenya at the London Olympic Games in 2012 where she won silver in the women’s 800m race, left, and with pupils from her former school in her Limpopo home village, right
IT was one of the biggest controversies of the Rio Olympics, that Mokgadi Caster Semenya, the outright favourite to win the women’s 800m race, had been allowed to compete. Her critics had for some time suggested that Semenya should not have been allowed to take part in the race as she might have an “unfair advantage” over other competitors because of her alleged high testosterone levels.
As the claim appears not to be scientifically justified, the suspicion arises that the objections are informed by prejudice and by stereotypical assumptions about women (and in this case, specifically, a black woman).
After Semenya won the 800m at the world athletic championships in 2009, she was humiliated by the International Association of Athletics Federations which ordered her to undergo the bizarrely named “gender verification test”.
In 2011, and in response to the controversy it stirred up around Semenya, the IAAF announced a new rule that allowed women to compete in women’s events only if their testosterone levels were “below the male range”. However, this rule was challenged, and in 2015 the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld Indian sprinter Dutee Chand’s appeal against the rule.
The decision is important because it was partly based on the fact that there was no convincing scientific evidence that women with elevated testosterone levels had an “unfair” performance advantage. (It is unclear what might constitute an “unfair” advantage and how one might determine this.)
As Peter Sonksen and Daryl Adair pointed out in a recent article, a study investigating the hormone profiles of female and male athletes found that the IAAF rule was based on bogus science.
This study measured hormone profiles, including testosterone, from a sample of 693 elite athletes across 15 sporting categories. The authors note that many unexpected findings emerged in the study, such as that “16.5% of men had a testosterone level below 8.4 nanomole per litre (the lower limit of the normal male reference range). Some were unmeasurably low. And 13.7% of the elite female athletes had a level higher than 2.7nmol/l, the upper limit of the normal reference range for women. Some were in the high male range.
Thus, there was a complete overlap of testosterone levels between male and female elite athletes. This challenged existing knowledge, which had assumed there was no such overlap.”
I therefore contend that many of Semenya’s critics (and critics of other women athletes who do not conform perfectly to the deeply entrenched stereotypical notion of how women are supposed to look) are not in the first instance advancing a scientific argument.
They might use “scientific language”, but they are almost certainly channelling (perhaps even without knowing that they are doing this) their deeply entrenched social beliefs about women: about what in essence makes somebody a woman; about how they think women are supposed to look, about how they think women should behave. (If I wanted to put on my academic cap and sound clever, I would note that the disciplining male gaze is ever present in all of this.)
Athletes excel for many reasons. Biological or genetic characteristics give some athletes an advantage over others, but these are celebratto ed “as a source of inborn excellence” — as Silvia Camporesi, a Kings College London bioethicist, recently pointed out.
Why then single out testosterone levels in women when there is no clear evidence that high levels of testosterone in women’s bodies give them an “unfair advantage” over other women?
Caster has a gift. But because that gift comes in a package that disturbs stereotypical assumptions about women, some cannot acknowledge it as a gift, but must invent a reason argue that she should be disqualified from competing. What makes the attacks on her even more egregious is that they are often highly personal, and based on shockingly ignorant views of biology and identity. The attacks also directly and indirectly rely on and promote gender stereotypes.
We live in a patriarchal world, in which gender stereotypes are not always properly identified as stereotypes. The patriarchal culture is so deeply invested in promoting and policing these stereotypes and so invested in these stereotypes being accepted as “normal” or as “natural” — as just the way the world is — that people are more often than not convinced that the toxic stereotypes they rely on are nothing more than “common sense” about sex and gender.
When you do not conform to the fictional “common sense” expectations of society — if you are a femme man or a butch woman or otherwise gender non-conforming; if you are a feminist among patriarchs; if you do not essentialise identity — you will face many challenges because your very existence threatens the status quo. Mokgadi Caster Semenya experienced this first-hand.
Maybe this is a moment for us as a society so deeply invested in a patriarchal idea of what a “normal” or “natural” woman is, and how such a woman should behave, to reflect on the importance of respecting individuals who do not conform to gender stereotypes (or any other stereotype associated with race, sex, sexual orientation, language or ability).
Why are so many people invested in the idea that all humans must be neatly fitted into discrete boxes (black/white; male/female; gay and lesbian/straight; cisgender/transgender)? Why do so many believe these boxes tell an essential truth about those who “belong” in them?
Many people think and talk about sex and gender as if these categories — with their strictly policed boundaries (who act as the police officers?) — are so obvious, so naturally true, so accurate about every person, so fixed, that it is not worth talking about.
But, of course, these boxes — identity categories, if you will — are not “natural”, not “self-evident”, not “common sense”. They are constructed, perhaps partly to make the world simpler and safer. (I almost added, “safer for patriarchy”.)
Argentine poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges illustrated the often arbitrary way in which humans make classifications — into which boxes we believe things and people must be placed, and which rules we use to put things and people in these boxes.
Borges invented an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge in which, he claimed, animals were classified as follows:
“Those that belong to the emperor; embalmed ones; those that are trained; sucking pigs; mermaids (or sirens); fabulous ones; stray dogs; those that are included in this classification; those that tremble as if they were mad; innumerable ones; those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; et cetera; those that have broken the flower vase; those that, at a distance, resemble flies.”
We classify people and use rules to do so, but future generations might not understand. Often the classification has a political aim: to subjugate and to control society to serve the needs of those in power.
I am suggesting that the original decision by the IAAF that women could only compete in the sport if their testosterone levels were “below the male range” was an attempt by the body to impose its highly problematic and stereotypical view of who can be a woman.
I would suggest the athletic body did this (probably without knowing it) because of its fears and anxiety about gender non-conforming athletes.
(It is telling that it ordered Se- menya to do a “gender verification test”, when what was supposedly the issue was not her gender, but her biological sex.)
One may also ask why the IAAF only reacted when Semenya burst onto the scene. Before Caster, many woman athletes from the US and Europe competed despite not perfectly conforming to the toxic stereotype of how a woman “ought to look”.
One could possibly write a thesis about how Semenya’s race as a black African impacted on the response of the IAAF to her winning the world championships.
Semenya’s success — and the hateful people who unthinkingly invoke different stereotypes, or deploy the power of a certain medical discourse to try to delegitimise her achievements — call on all of us to think again about whether it is wise to talk with such certainty about the identity categories we rely on to get us through the day.
Maybe it is time to have a conversation about why these categories are not absolutely fixed; why they do not tell the complete truth about any human being; and why they can never encompass the infinitely diverse ways in which we make our way in the world.
De Vos lectures on constitutional law at the University of Cape Town. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on the Daily Maverick website
There was a complete overlap of testosterone levels between male and female elite athletes Why are so many people invested in the idea that all humans must be neatly fitted into discrete boxes?