FOR MUCH OF HER EARLY 20S, CASTER SEMENYA FELT PHYSICALLY SICK. The South African runner had risen to sudden global acclaim in 2009, when she won gold in the 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin at the age of just 18. It was her first major world competition. But her win was marred by questions of her sex and gender. Given her speed, muscular build and husky voice, some quietly asked whether she was a man. The sport’s governing body, the IAAF (known since 2019 as World Athletics), had required Semenya to take gender verification tests the day before the race, with a spokesperson telling the press “the rumours, the gossip was starting to build up”, and needed investigating.
Semenya’s subsequent victory would mark the start of a decade-long story, full of twists and turns that would take her from the top of the world championships podium to the European court of human rights – and would lead to a career-defining battle between the runner and World Athletics about her right to compete, as well as a monitored medical treatment plan that would leave her feeling, as she tells me today, “like the walking dead”.
Two sets of test results were leaked in the months that followed the Berlin championships: blood tests reportedly showed Semenya had three times more testosterone in her system than the average woman. Then the results of her medical examinations were published by Australian papers, suggesting Semenya was a “hermaphrodite” with internal testes and no womb. After 11 months of uncertainty, the IAAF announced in July 2010 that they had agreed on a “process” with Semenya, to allow her to compete at elite level (she hadn’t been able to run a race since August 2009 but had kept her first gold medal).
The process was a course of hormonal contraceptives, which neither she nor the IAAF made public. Instead, Semenya says that she had to secretly start taking the hormones at the end of 2009 to bring her naturally high testosterone levels down to a concentration accepted by the IAAF. And it didn’t go well. “I’d describe [the medication’s effects] like this: you’re living every day
