In this extract from her autobiography, the South African runner reveals what went on behind the scenes at the 2009 world championships in B
The day I returned home from the championships, the blood report was leaked to the press, alongside the results of a second test conducted while I was in Berlin. There it was. The things I did not know about my body. I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspapers reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher than normal levels of testosterone. They went on to call me a hermaphrodite. In my culture, this term does not apply to people like me, but the world media forced that label on me and that is what I am called to this day.
It was as if some kind of bomb had exploded … and the fallout just kept getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t escape it. My face and story was plastered across television screens and newspapers all over the world. It was as if the entirety of humanity had discovered some kind of alien that had been living amongst them. I remember thinking: “Now what? Am I going to run again? OK, so this explains why I haven’t gotten a period. All right. If these people are saying I don’t have a womb, then this means I will never be able to carry a child. I want a family.”
[…]
I kept thinking: “This thing can never be undone.” The girl I had been before I got on that plane to Berlin – happy, joking, innocent, eager, hopeful – she’d been disappeared on the way back. And in these early days of my exile, there was nothing to put in that empty space. Imagine you are told one day that because of some medical this or that, you are actually not a woman. Think about it. In the eyes of the entire world, you are now something other than what you know yourself to be. And the entire world will not stop talking about you. Ever. Until the day you die, you will be the punchline of a joke about genitals or gender or sex or whatever.
Caster Semenya found out she was being gender tested when she showed up for the test, she thought it was a doping test. She found out the results - that she’s intersex - on the news with everyone else. She was 18 years old.
What they did to this woman is evil. She’s handled it with so much grace but she shouldn’t have to. It’s so awful. I’m never going to stop being mad about this.
