Blameless champion finds herself on trial again

Caster Semenya is once more in the spotlight over questions about her gender rather than her athletic prowess

We live, supposedly, in an age of enlightenment, where all shades of human sexuality are tolerated and celebrated to a degree unthinkable even a generation ago. An entire industry has grown up around the concept of selfacceptance, of countering the fear of being different. Try telling that, though, to Caster Semenya. We can control many variables in life, but never our chromosomes. And yet Semenya, through nothing more than an abnormality of birth, has spent the past decade as a tragic sporting pariah.

Next week, Semenya, the double Olympic champion over 800metres, finds her identity on trial once more. In an effort to redress her dominance, the International Association of Athletics Federations is trying to compel the 28-year-old to take testosterone suppressants if she intends to continue competing as a woman.

Semenya, who grew up in acute poverty in South Africa’s Limpopo province, was born with internal testes and a testosterone level three times that of the average female. As such, the governing body argues, she has experienced the same increases in bone size, muscle mass and haemoglobin that a male undergoes during puberty, and which afford men a pronounced performance advantage over women. The debate, due to be heard next week at Lausanne’s Court of Arbitration for Sport, is but the latest twist of a controversy that spins in philosophical circles.

For 10 years, ever since she surged to prominence at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, Semenya has struggled to have her genetic designation agreed upon. Initially, she was labelled “intersex”, falling outside the binary gender distinction. Today, the favoured term is “DSD”, describing athletes with differences in sexual development. Semenya presents such an intractable moral conundrum that even the terminology around her biological status keeps shifting.

Sometimes it can be easy to gloss over the human anguish at the heart of all this. For most of her adult life, Semenya has had her body pored over by lawyers and geneticists, treated with all the detached scrutiny one might reserve for a curious scientific exhibit. After she won her first gold medals on the global stage, she was subjected to invasive sex-testing.

As the dispute escalated, she fell at the mercy of unscrupulous PR gurus, who decided to truss her up for the cover of South Africa’s You magazine as a female fashion icon, complete with lipstick, frizzy hair and a heavy gold necklace. “We turn SA’S power girl into a glamour girl,” read the strapline. “And she loves it!” But Semenya did not love it. Indeed, she has hated every facet of the crude exposure that the wrangling over her gender has created. For the indignity of that glossy photo shoot, she was paid £2,000.

If the public humiliation was not painful enough, she has also been frequently ostracised by her middle-distance rivals. A picture taken just after the 2016 Olympic final in Rio spoke volumes: while Semenya, as the victor, extended a consoling arm to Lynsey Sharp, who had finished sixth, the British runner snubbed her with an icy stare. It is little wonder that she maintains a low profile these days, restricting herself to boilerplate aphorisms on social media, such as: “Whoever is trying to bring you down is already below you.”

In her native country, and across much of Sub-saharan Africa, Semenya’s ordeal is regarded with outrage. She was raised a woman, has always identified as a woman, and there, runs the consensus in her homeland, the discussion should end. In 2009, with the embers from the Berlin furore still burning, I paid a visit to her village of Ga-masehlong and spoke to her mother, Dorcus. “They are just jealous,” she said of critics of Caster, to whom she referred by her first name, Mokgadi. “They don’t want to see black people improving themselves – they can go to hell. Mokgadi is a girl.”

Undeniably, there is a disconcerting racial dimension to the Semenya story.

When Poland’s Joanna Jozwik crossed the line fifth in Rio, she talked of being “the first European, the second white” to finish. Katrina Karkazis, a leading scholar in bioethics at Stanford University, has questioned whether the relentless inquest into Semenya’s case is racially motivated, pointing out how interest in this field of genetics has coincided with a power shift in the women’s 800m, from Caucasian to African athletes.

The IAAF is adamant that its logic behind forcing Semenya to reduce her testosterone is scientifically sound. In 2017, its