The Race to be Myself E-Book

Caster Semenya

• Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 540

Beschreibung

Aged eighteen, Caster Semenya shot to fame on the global sporting stage for her blistering speed. But shrouding her monumental win were fierce rumours about her physical body rather than her phenomenal performance. Called 'a threat to the sport' and 'not woman enough', she found herself at the centre of the debate around the newly drawn line between gender and sport. Throughout the intense speculation, harmful rumours and long legal battle she has remained quiet, letting her running do the talking until she was banned from competing and defending her Olympic title in 2020. Now, Caster is ready to own her story and tell it in full. In this book, Caster speaks openly about growing up in a loving family and community that never regarded her as different, just Caster; of her early years understanding her agency, sexuality and athletic ability; and of her infectious spirit and tenacity to be the best. Told with conviction and humour, The Race To Be Myselfis the story of a life lived in the spotlight, a manifesto for acceptance and change for all. This is the unforgettable story of one of the most recognisable athletes in the world, and of a woman's journey to run free. 'A story that makes us all interrogate our humanity and the world we build with our actions every day.' Trevor Noah

Leseprobe

About the Author

Caster Semenya is a professional runner from South Africa. She is a two-time Olympic Games gold medallist and a three-time World Athletics Championships gold medallist. She lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

Caster Semenya

THE RACE TO BE MYSELF

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

PART I

:

THE BEGINNING

Chapter 1

:

GOD MADE ME

Chapter 2

:

A DIFFERENT KIND OF GIRL

Chapter 3

:

I AM NOT AFRAID

Chapter 4

:

HUNTING WITH BOYS

Chapter 5

:

THE CHANGE

Chapter 6

:

THABISO

PART II

:

THE RISE

Chapter 7

:

WHERE I BELONG

Chapter 8

:

THEY SAW ME RUN

Chapter 9

:

ON THE WAY UP

Chapter 10

:

A HIGHER EDUCATION

Chapter 11

:

THE TROUBLES BEGIN

Chapter 12

:

BERLIN

PART III

:

THE AWAKENING

Chapter 13

:

NOT WOMAN ENOUGH

Chapter 14

:

YOU

MAGAZINE

Chapter 15

:

THE NOTHINGNESS

Chapter 16

:

HOPE

Chapter 17

:

THE COMEBACK

Chapter 18

:

LOVE AND HAPPINESS

PART IV

:

THE REDEMPTION

Chapter 19

:

ROAD TO LONDON 2012

Chapter 20

:

GOLD IN RIO

Chapter 21

:

RETURN OF THE IAAF

Chapter 22

:

INSIDE THE COURT

Chapter 23

:

THE AFTERMATH

Epilogue

:

THE COBRA

Images

Acknowledgments

Copyright

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Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Begin Reading

For those who are born different and feel they don’t belong in this world, it is because you were brought here to help create a new one.

Prologue

I AM MOKGADI CASTER SEMENYA. I AM ONE OF THE greatest track & field athletes to ever run the 800-m distance. I’ve won two Olympic gold medals and three world championships, along with dozens of Diamond League meets, and went unbeaten for almost four years. Unfortunately, it is not what I have achieved on the track that has likely brought me to your attention.

Much has been written about me in virtually every major international outlet in the world since I came into the public’s eye in 2009, and most of it is outright lies or half-truths. I have waited a long time to tell my story. For more than a decade I have preferred to let my running do the talking. After what has happened to me, it felt easier that way.

In 2019, the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) banned me from running my favored 800-m event, along with the 400-m and the 1500-m distances. My last IAAF-sanctioned 800-m race was on June 30, 2019, when I won the Diamond League Prefontaine Classic at Stanford University. I was not banned because I was caught doping or cheating. Rather, I am no longer allowed to run those distances because of a biological condition I was born with and that I refuse to take unnecessary drugs to change.

I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the varying genetic conditions where an embryo responds in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs. To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus. I do not menstruate and my body produces an elevated amount of testosterone, which gives me more typically masculine characteristics than other women, such as a deeper voice and fewer curves. I cannot carry a child because I don’t have a womb but, contrary to what many people think, I do not produce sperm. I can’t biologically contribute to making new life. I did not know any of this about my body until soon after August 2009, when I won the gold medal in the 800-m race at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. I was only eighteen years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day.

People believed all sorts of insanity about me—that I was a boy who managed to hide his penis all the way to the world championships, that I was paid to have my penis removed so South Africa could bring home a medal in the women’s category, that I was a hermaphrodite forced to run as a girl for political gain. Journalists descended into my village and every school I’d ever attended. My parents and siblings, friends, and teachers, were harassed with calls and by visitors, day and night. I can still hear my mother wailing desperately as she tried to explain to perfect strangers that I was born a girl, and that I was her little girl, and why was all of this happening?

I have never spoken in detail about what happened during this time of my life but I am now ready to do so. It is said that silence will not protect us. From the moment I stepped on to the track for the final meet in Berlin on August 19, 2009, I have been vilified and persecuted. My accomplishments since have been celebrated, yes, but it is hard to think of another athlete at the elite level who has endured as much scrutiny and psychological abuse from sports governing bodies, other competitors, and the media as I have. It has affected me in ways I cannot describe, although I will try. And while I have faced significant hardships throughout my life, I want to make clear that my story is not one of pain and torment, but rather about hope, self-confidence, and resilience.

I am still standing; I am still here. What has been said about me in the media is not who I really am. I’ve heard myself described as “surly,” “rude,” “shy,” “stoic,” “dignified,” and “superhuman.” All those things may seem true, at times. I’m also quite charming and funny, and I’ve been said to have a biting wit. Like every human, I am many things—a proud Black woman from Limpopo, a rural province in the northernmost part of South Africa, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and now I am a mother to two baby girls: Oratile, who was born in 2019, and Oarabile, who was born in 2021. I feel and I hurt just like a regular person, although I am not considered by science or some people to be a regular woman.

The scientific community has labeled my biological makeup as “intersex,” and I am now one of, if not the, most recognizable intersex person in the world. The truth is I don’t think of myself that way. I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman. Of course, growing up I knew I looked and behaved differently from many of my peers, but my family, my community, and my country accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider. The beauty of my childhood was that I never felt othered or unwanted—this is the source of my strength. I have never questioned who I am.

And I am a runner. I love running with all of my heart. It is one of those things that just makes sense to me. Runners at every level know what I mean when I say running makes me feel free but also grounds me. It is like meditating for me—it centers me. There’s this thing that happens every time I get to the starting line of a race. My mind goes completely silent. I hear nothing, except my own breathing. I see nothing, except the track in front of me. Some people call this the zone, where the line between nothing and everything no longer exists—we are simultaneously in and out of our bodies.

I think it’s important to talk about lines. We humans are obsessed with them. There are starting lines and finish lines, there are the lines we draw around ourselves that tell others where to stop, where they are not wanted, and there are the lines that define what kind of human we are—our race, our gender, our sexuality. Most people are content to walk the line as it is drawn, to be defined by it, to stay in their place. I am not one of those people. I never have been. The biological makeup of my body, the way I look on the outside and the way I live my life, is a crossing of lines in many people’s minds. The way I look may be what brought me to the IAAF’s attention in the first place. According to Sebastian Coe, the current president of the IAAF, there is no line more important, no line more worth protecting than the difference between men and women in sports competition. As you will see in my story, that line is hard to define, and it keeps moving depending on who is doing the defining. I have been banned from running because women are a “protected class” in athletics, and women with differences in sexual development are considered a threat to the line between genders.

I sometimes remind myself of how blessed I am to be where I am today. Not that many years ago, the sports governing body of my own country of South Africa wouldn’t have allowed me to run in the Olympics because I am Black. I was born in 1991, just a few years before the first democratic elections in 1994 would finally begin to unravel that insidious and dehumanizing system of government that defined people and even ripped families apart based on the color of their skin and other physical features. My parents, older siblings, and extended family lived through this time. They were not allowed to travel or live where they wanted; some were forcibly relocated. Black people didn’t have access to higher education. And unlike me, so many great Black athletes never got a chance. There is still so much trauma in our communities from the brutality of apartheid. I carry that history of discrimination and resistance and the yearning for freedom within me; they are there in everything I do.

As a young girl, I heard Nelson Mandela, the beloved leader of our country and icon of freedom and resistance around the world, speak about sports as having “the power to inspire … the power to unite people in a way that little else does…” And I loved sports. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be known and appreciated for my physical talents. My siblings thought I was crazy when, as an eight-year-old girl, I would point up to the skies and say, “One day, it will be me on that plane.” Of course, in those days I believed I was going to be a famous soccer player and travel with our national team, Bafana Bafana. No notable athletes had ever come out of our small village, and people were more concerned with surviving than dreaming. I had no real reason to believe in my eventual success, but I was sure I was going to make it.

Well, this girl child ran so fast that people insisted no girl could possibly run that fast. Unless, the rumors went, I wasn’t really a girl. Or maybe I was a girl, but one whose coaches had pumped her full of drugs that turn women into men anyway. After all, the media said, I had “come out of nowhere” to win. The point seemed to be that I did not belong at the world championships and that my win had to be because I was cheating in some form or other. Sports and entertainment commentators discussed my facial features, the size of my arms and legs and breasts, the muscles in my abdomen. They would zoom in on pictures of my crotch and wonder what could possibly be going on between my legs. I would say I was being treated like an animal, but I grew up tending to my family’s livestock, and we treated them with more respect than that.

I’m aware that Black women’s bodies in general have been objectified and treated as spectacles. The most well-known historical example is Saartjie Baartman, a fellow South African brought to Europe where she was put on display in circus-like exhibits for a paying audience in the 1800s. Her body’s proportions were considered abnormal by Western standards. After her death in 1815 at the age of twenty-five, her genitals were cut from her body, preserved, and displayed along with her skeleton in a French museum until 1974. The circumstances of her death aren’t clear, but it is said she died of disease, far from the comfort of her people and homeland. Nelson Mandela had Saartjie’s remains repatriated once he was in power, and she was finally laid to rest in the country of her birth in 2002.

At times, it seems not much has changed from Saartjie’s days. We only have to look at the way women like Michelle Obama and Serena Williams have been treated by today’s media and parts of society. They have been called monkeys, accused of being men. Every part of their body, their musculature, their facial features, have been openly derided and insulted. Black women have always been held to some standard of beauty and femininity that makes us something other than women.

I am a tall, dark-skinned, African woman with well-defined muscles, a deep voice and not a lot up on top. I know I look like a man. I know I sound like a man and maybe even walk like a man and dress like one, too. But I’m not a man. I’ve made no secret of preferring to play soccer and baseball and basketball with boys and hanging out with them when I was growing up. In my village, boys were playing the sports I wanted to play, and my parents didn’t stop me from doing what made me happy. I was accepted, but it didn’t mean people didn’t see that I was different. Like I used to say to would-be bullies, “You think I look like a boy? So what? What are you going to do about it?” One thing about me is that I’ve never tolerated bullying—of myself or others in my presence. If the situation escalated, I’d let my fists do the rest of the talking. Playing sports and having muscles and a deep voice make me less feminine, yes. I’m a different kind of woman, I know. But I’m still a woman. Growing up, my family and friends just understood I was what the Western world calls a “tomboy.”

I WAS EIGHTEEN years old and had just run in the biggest race of my life when Pierre Weiss, the IAAF’s general secretary, cruelly said to the media, “It is clear she is a woman. But maybe not 100 percent.”

The IAAF and the International Olympic Committee have been gender-testing women in various ways since the beginning of organized competition, but by the time I won my first World Championship in 2009, there was no uniform test required for all women athletes. Rather, there was an arbitrary policy that anyone (say, an envious coach or athlete) could anonymously report their suspicion that an athlete wasn’t the gender they claimed. If the IAAF chose to do so, that female athlete would have to prove themselves through a battery of invasive psychological, gynecological, and endocrinal tests. Women in my position have attempted to and even killed themselves. Many more have just left athletics out of fear and shame.

Like me, other women caught in the IAAF’s gender investigations had no idea about their condition. The only solutions offered are medically unnecessary and potentially harmful. The diagnosis not only ends their dreams of running on the international stage and a way of helping their families, but depending on where they live in the world, a medical determination may also have more severe consequences. Rumors arising from an IAAF investigation may end their dreams of building a family or lead to them being ostracized by their communities or injured or worse. It is hard to explain the psychological violence of having your gender identity questioned or ripped away, of feeling rejected by society. I’m sure the IAAF thought I would be one of the ones who just went away. They were wrong. It is not in my nature to give up. Like I said, I don’t like bullies.

Many people thought I would never run again after the 2009 debacle. That I would go back to my village and live the rest of my days as best I could. Well, I have achieved more than many thought possible, although the circumstances of my success have caused me great mental and physical injury, and my refusal to bow my head to the IAAF’s regulations on testosterone limits for women has hobbled what future I have left in athletics. In some ways, I know my time as a competitor is coming to an end. It is an eventuality that every athlete must confront. I am now thirty-two years old. As someone who works with their body, I know that no one can outrun time.

I feel that the IAAF has confiscated a large part of my life. I’ve spent as much time fighting them as I have training and racing. They have stolen years of performances not only from me but also from the audience—their joy at seeing me on the track over the years, win or lose, has brought me joy. The blow of every insult hurled at me has been softened by the love and admiration of people who watch me run.

I dreamt of defending my gold medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. I’d appealed the IAAF’s reinstatement of testosterone regulations to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2018 and hoped its members would see things our way in time for me to compete. They did not. We tried again with the Swiss Supreme Court and unfortunately lost again. But the fight is not over yet. As I write this, my lawyers are challenging the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights. We hope they agree perfectly healthy women should not have to undergo surgeries or take drugs that alter their natural bodies to compete; this is a barbaric infringement on our human dignity. The World Medical Association and the United Nations Humans Right Council have both publicly condemned the IAAF’s decision.

By now, it is no secret that when the IAAF sidelined me for almost a year after I won gold in 2009, I was so desperate to get back on the track, to fulfill my dreams and help my family, that I did take medication to lower my testosterone level. It was the only way. I took the drugs for years. The side effects were horrible. During those years, I ran despite feeling sick, and I ran while injured. I’ve had some great running years and some terrible ones. Contrary to what some think, I’ve never thrown a race to appear slower than my competitors and, unlike a few I’ve run against, I’ve never taken illegal substances to gain an edge. I am a pure athlete, win or lose. I’ve worked hard throughout my life, sacrificed time with my loved ones, sacrificed many normal life experiences, in order to have the privilege and opportunity to do what I love.

I was lucky to be born with these special talents—my mind has a special ability to focus, my body can stand the pain and exhaustion of endless training. It’s not the testosterone in my body that makes me great, it’s my ambition, perseverance, and faith in myself. Every time I’ve been knocked down, I get back up. Every setback has made me stronger.

I am not a scientist. I am not here to deliver a lecture on human biology. I am not here to prove my humanity—that has been granted to me by God. It is true we athletes tend to think in simple ways—win or lose, train hard and try again the next day. My world has always been very black and white and, I admit, very small. I have traveled all over the world and never explored the outside of a hotel or a race track. It had to be that way so that I could endure the physical and mental requirements of elite athletics, especially given the situation I was shoved into after Berlin in 2009.

“I DON’T HAVE TIME for nonsense,” I have replied to the journalists who’ve approached me about the “gender issue” throughout the years. And I mean it. Because that’s how I’ve always seen it. Nonsense and stupidity and ignorance. I’m here to run and put on a show. That was the totality of my job. But the way I was treated by the IAAF and the media, and the way I have carried myself despite it all, has catapulted me beyond athletics. I have become a human rights icon in many people’s eyes. I will miss running my beloved 800- and 1500-m distance races, but I know I can never again put my body through what I did in order to compete, and I hope no other girl has to.

I accept and love myself just the way I am. I always have and I always will. God made me. I am fortunate to have had a family who never tried to change me, and a country that wrapped its arms around me and fought for my right to run. There is always a sadness to the end of an era, but I will run as long as my body allows me to. When I can no longer run, either because of time or more regulations targeting people like me, you will still see me on the track supporting the coming generations.

I am a proud South African woman born in a tiny village to people who loved me. They have survived more humiliations than I could possibly know. It is from them that I know about maintaining dignity in the face of oppression. It is my hope that by telling my truth, I inspire others to be unafraid, to love and accept themselves. May this story contribute to a more tolerant world for us all.

Part I

THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 1

God Made Me

I’MRUNNING HARD AND FAST. THE GROUND HAS cracks everywhere, and I keep tripping. I am climbing over metal fences and floating and then falling and pushing up with my body and floating again. My feet are caked with dirt, and they are also wet. Sometimes they hurt, but the pain goes away. I am happy. I feel free. No one can catch me. My mother and sisters try, but I’m too fast for them. I believe this is the first time I felt like “me.” That I was a person, separate from the people and things around me. It is my earliest memory. I was around two years old.

My mother says I was an early walker. I took my first steps at seven months. From there, it seemed like I was flying from one place to the next. My feet were always bleeding because the floor of my parents’ home was made of rough cement. It was easy for a toddler to stumble and fall. My legs and knees were always scratched and bruised. They said I wouldn’t cry when I fell, I’d just get up and keep going. And I was strong. If my older siblings wanted to take something away from me, they’d have to work hard to pry it out of my tiny hands. Even as a toddler, I was fierce. My mom said she knew I was something special right from the start.

I was born to Dorcas and Jacob Semenya on January 7, 1991, in a rural village called Ga-Masehlong, located in what is today called Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa. Our village is small and remote; only about a thousand people lived there. There was a time when it couldn’t be found on Google Maps. There is only one road that leads into the village. If you were driving from the city of Polokwane, capital of the Limpopo province, you’d drive about 60 kilometers northwest on the only main road, and then make a left and head into nothing but open sky, wilderness, and dirt tracks. Eventually, you would arrive at a tree that holds a sign with our village’s name on it.

We had eight main streets, which sat parallel to each other. Mostly there were homes on rectangular plots of land and a few shops, what we call “spaza” or “tuck” shops, convenience stores that sold basic household items and snacks and drinks. Anyone could put up a spaza shop; many were in people’s homes. We had one liquor store, a supermarket, and a primary school. And of course, we had a church. Our small church was part of the Zion Christian Church family, the largest in South Africa. The church was the hub of the village, and you’d find almost everybody gathered there on Sundays, and sometimes during the week, singing, dancing, and calling out to God and his Son. Many of the working-age people left during the day to work as farmers and laborers and domestic workers in towns and cities or in the larger neighboring villages.

I’ve often described my village as a “dusty, dusty place.” And it was that. The flat dry land surrounding the homes seemed like it could go on forever. It was dotted with baobab and jacaranda trees, bushes, brambles and thorns. You could see mountains in the distance. There wasn’t much to do there except survive. When I was growing up, the houses were made of mud and stone. Some folks built their roofs with corrugated tin, and others used tightly woven dried grass or thatch. There was wire fencing around many of the homes to keep in the cows and goats and sheep, although the animals would also roam freely around the village. Everyone in the village knew each other, and kids were allowed to roam freely, too. We call the wilderness surrounding our village “the bush,” and it’s where I spent most of my childhood.

My mom had been a teacher in her youth, but once she married my father, he preferred that she stay home. My mom still wanted to contribute financially to our family, so she opened a spaza shop in our yard. She sold a little of everything, mostly foodstuffs like raw cuts of meat and fish and sweets from the back of our home. During the week, she would also take some merchandise to our school and sell to students during lunchbreaks. She’d have candy and fresh-baked bread with raisins. I used to love the sweet bread, but I didn’t like the raisins, so I would pick them and throw them on the ground. My mother didn’t like that I wasted perfectly good food. When they were home, my sisters would help my mom. When I got older, I helped my mom sell, too. My mother was beautiful, with rich brown skin and a rounded face and curves that made others stop and look. Like most of the women in my family, she was not tall, but she carried herself with a dignity that made her seem much taller. My mom was very motherly, by which I mean patient, kind, and protective. I inherited her easy, wide smile. She was tough, too—not a woman you wanted to cross.

My father worked as a municipal gardener in Pretoria, a city about 310 kilometers from our village. The work kept him away from home a lot. He’d be gone sometimes for months at a time and come back for holidays or when he was given a break. I loved my mom with all my heart but I was what they call a “daddy’s girl.” I missed him terribly when he would go off to the big city. I remember he would come home and I would run to him and hug him for a long time. He’d pick me up and spin me around and around. Most would say I inherited my height, facial features, and disposition from my father, who was thin and long-limbed but muscular, with sharp cheekbones. He, too, had a big smile. My dad could come off as shy and reserved, but he was also a jokester, and it seemed you could hear his laughter from miles away.

My mother gave birth to me at WF Knobel Hospital, the closest hospital to our village. I am the fourth child of six children, five girls and one boy. My eldest sister, Wenny, was born in 1980, and then Nico was born in 1985, followed by Olga, born in 1987. I came into the world in 1991, and my younger sister Murriel was born in 1993. My baby brother, Ishmael, the only boy in our family and final child, was born in 1996. The real baby of our family was my niece, Neo, Wenny’s daughter, who lived with us from the day she was born in 1998. My older sisters would come and go from the village as they searched for opportunities in schooling and work in Johannesburg. I would end up being the eldest in the household and the main caretaker of my younger sister, brother, and niece, while my mother and father worked. I had plenty of extended family in our village—aunts and uncles on both sides with children of their own.

We were not rich people, but we were not poor. Sometimes people say someone is “poor,” but they don’t know what poverty is. Or I suppose poverty has levels to it depending on where you are. Our family may not have had a lot, but we had plenty of food. I never had to go to bed hungry. For me, being poor is when a family must end the day without eating, when they don’t have clothes, and they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. “Poor” is when you don’t have shelter. Our family had all of this, so we weren’t poor.

Our home was large by our standards, with five bedrooms and a living room. We were a big family, and we needed the space. There was no electricity or running water. We fetched enough water from the village well for our needs and used candles and paraffin lamps. When I was four or five years old, my father installed a solar energy system; government-run electricity didn’t come to our village until 2001, when I was ten. Our toilet was outdoors, a good walk away from the main house. It was a wooden shack built around a deep hole in the ground. We called it the “long drop.” No need for water to flush. You sat and did your business and went on with life.

We had about a third of a hectare of land, and we grew fruits and vegetables on one side and kept our animals on the other. The weather allowed us to farm lemons, oranges, figs, guava, mangoes, peaches, grapes, pomegranates, and even a little sugar cane. We also had tomatoes, potatoes, and spinach. We didn’t sell what we grew; we farmed only to feed ourselves. There was an area inside the house that could be called a kitchen, but the actual cooking of meals happened outside in our yard. I loved to run into the bush and collect firewood. We had a pit in the back of our home, and when the wood was glowing red and orange, we’d put our iron pots on it. We owned about thirty domesticated animals—cows and goats and sheep. I loved to take care of them, too.

My mother told me one of our ancestors came to her in a dream while she was pregnant and gave her my full name. Mokgadi Caster Semenya. Mokgadi was my maternal grandmother’s name. In Pedi, our native tongue, it means “one who guides” and “one who gives up what they want so that others may have what they need.” Caster is an English name, and I learned it means “one who seeks.”

I was a big baby, the biggest of all my siblings. I weighed around twelve pounds at birth. I was barrel chested, my mother said, with big lungs that allowed for a deep-throated cry, unlike any of her other daughters. I know that after three girls, my parents probably wanted a boy, but here I was. They were happy. A new healthy soul in the family is always a cause for happiness.

My parents adored me. If they did have a favorite child, it would have been me. I kept going back to that feeling of being adored by the two most important people in my life when later it seemed the rest of the world thought I was some kind of monster.

CHAPTER 2

A Different Kind of Girl

THECIRCUMSTANCES OF MY BIRTH WERE NOT remarkable—except for my size and strength—but, as I would get older, it soon became clear I wasn’t interested in the same things other girls were interested in. I’d be given a doll or teddy bear, and I would toss it around a bit and then get rid of it. I never took to dolls the way it is assumed girls should. I also didn’t want to play make-believe with the other girls. It seemed to me a waste of time to sit around talking to stones or playing hand-clapping games. My parents say I wasn’t soft-acting like baby girls usually were. They’d already raised four of them, so they knew. I wasn’t affectionate, and I didn’t want to be kissed or held much. What I wanted was to run around, take things apart and figure out how they worked, and I didn’t care about getting dirty or hurt.

Journalists swarmed my childhood and later my grandmother’s village to find what they call the “smoking gun”—someone, anyone, who would say “Caster is really a boy.” I’m sure they were surprised when they interviewed all the people I’d grown up with. Everyone knew I was born and raised as a girl, and no one had a bad word to say about me. They accepted that I was a girl who dressed like a boy, spent most of her time with other boys, and loved sports. I may have looked like a boy, which everyone generally agreed with, but that didn’t mean I was a boy, which was the thing I was being accused of being by the international media.

By the time I became a professional runner, I had already been through years of comments, whether good or bad, about my looks. The thing was I came from a place where people did not question my gender.

I have one or two baby pictures of myself. I remember one in which I look to be eight or nine months old. I was sitting on a blanket in our yard wearing a cute sleeveless dress and a frilly hat and socks. I have a scowl on my face. Even then, I don’t think I liked my outfit. When I was a baby, of course, I had no choice over my clothing. Eventually, though, I learned how to speak. And I was never afraid to speak my mind.

I remember the day my father came home after one of his long stays in Pretoria. He would usually bring us gifts and other household necessities. This time, he was holding up a dress for me. It was red and white and it had ruffles and lace around the bottom with a little belt that tied around the waist.

“Mokgadi, my baby, this is a nice one.” My father said with a big smile on his face while turning the dress this way and that.

“Thank you, daddy. It’s nice. It’s a fine dress. But I don’t want to wear it.”

“Why not?” Here my father pretended to be surprised but I know he wasn’t.

“I will not wear it. I don’t like it.”

“Maybe you try it on first and then you see what you think,” my father pretended to be sad with an exaggerated frown on his face.

“No. You wear it first. You should lead by example, like you say to me. See how it suits you. If you like wearing it, then I’ll wear it.” It was playful banter between us but it was how I really felt.

Instead of forcing me to wear it, or calling my mother for help, I remember my father just shook his head, laughed, and said, “OK, Mokgadi. As you wish.”

That was the day I stopped wearing dresses. More like the day I decided I would wear a dress if, and when, I wanted to. I was maybe five or six years old. When I started preschool soon after, I insisted on wearing track suits, which is what we called the boys’ uniform—grey pants and a white button-down shirt. My parents allowed it.

Dresses and skirts didn’t suit the life I was leading. I spent my days fetching firewood and pails of water from the village well. I loved going around our yard and tending to our fruits and vegetables. By then, I’d even started heading into the bush with my older cousins to learn how to care for our animals. The bush had all kinds of things that could take a person down. At least wearing pants gave you a fighting chance against something like a sneaky cobra. And I played soccer with the boys in my village. There’s a lot of falling and jostling in soccer—I didn’t want my teammates to make fun of my underwear. Kids did that a lot. And if they saw a hole or something else in someone’s undies you wouldn’t hear the end of it for months. Dresses didn’t make sense for me. I needed more protection than they offered.

IN MY PART of the world, the issue of gender is simple. If you are born with a vagina, then you are a girl. Hanging around with boys, dressing like a boy, playing sports with boys, having muscles, etc., didn’t change your gender. Even if was I occasionally mistaken for a boy when I was growing up.

“Hey, boy-boy!” someone would call out to get my attention when I was going around the village helping my mom sell things.

I’d just turn around and reply, firmly, “I am not a boy. I am a girl. What can I do for you?”

That would clear things up right away. I wasn’t offended that they mistook me for a boy, and people didn’t argue or insult me or insist I was actually a boy. Most of the time they apologized and that was that. People in my village did not meddle in each other’s business, especially not the kind of business that occurred below someone’s belly button. It is rude and out of order. My parents would say this often to me and my siblings: “Unless invited, you mind your business, let others mind theirs.” It is a very good life lesson.

Growing up, I was never made to feel like anything was wrong with my behaving differently from the other girls. It’s not that the people didn’t make comments about me acting like a boy and wearing boys’ clothes. I had some run-ins with bullies, mostly boys, but I learned from a young age how to deal with them. Kids can be cruel. I would find out later in life, once I left my village, that adults, who should know better, are the cruelest of all.

Once I started winning major racing events and the questions about my gender started, I barely spoke about it. I didn’t know how to speak about something so intimate. I didn’t have the language. I figured the best thing to do was just stay quiet and run. When I was young, though, I had a different way of dealing with things.

“Hey, Mokgadi … you look like a boy.”

“I know I look like a boy. What are you going to do about it?”

“Why don’t you put a dress on and go play with girls?”

“I don’t think I’m going to do that. So, like I said, what are you going to do about it?”

By that point, I and this unfortunate kid, whoever he was, would be standing eye to eye, because I was a pretty tall girl. The other kids would have already swarmed around us, anticipating a show.

I didn’t like wasting time when it came to these arguments. Time has always felt precious to me, and I had things to do and places to be. I let my fists finish the conversation. Soon the would-be bully would find himself knocked back on his ass. I know that violence is never the answer, and I wouldn’t necessarily teach my daughters to throw the first punch. My wife and I plan to teach our daughters to resolve things with words, to walk away from nonsense. That is, unless someone puts their hands on them. Now that’s a different story. If you get hit, my philosophy is to hit back as good as you can. Even if you lose, at least you stood up for yourself. I say make the bully work for it. When I was growing up, if you disrespected me, well … you were going to feel it one way or the other. That’s the law of the bush.

In Ga-Masehlong, I had to be tough, show the boys I wasn’t to be made fun of. I never once turned the other cheek as the bible taught us to do; I never walked away from a fight. I’m not particularly proud of the ass beatings I handed out, but I never started a fight with anyone. If someone started with me, I knew how to finish it good. Once I knocked down whatever boy was making fun of me, you could see their brains calculating what to do next—the options were to get up and fight and risk the embarrassment of what could be a severe beating from a girl, or … maybe it was wiser to have me on their side. Most of the time they chose wisely.

“Eh, Mokgadi,” they’d say while wiping the dust off their pants. “Come on, now. I was just playing with you. No need for all this. Heard you were a good striker. Let’s go kick.”

The bullies became competitors or teammates, all of us running barefoot on the rock- and bramble-ridden soccer pitches of our village. They learned to respect me because I respected myself. I was fair, I minded my business, and I could play well. I’m still friends with many of those boys today, all now men with families of their own.

What I started realizing even from my young days is that people treat you the way you treat yourself. I never hid or felt ashamed to look and act the way I did. If you gave me something sour to taste, I gave it right back. And no one likes the taste of their own medicine.

I was six years old when I had my first real fight. There was a kid everyone called Biggie because he was fat and reminded us of Biggie Smalls, the American rapper we all loved. Biggie was in my grade. He’d always stare at me and I’d just stare right back at him until he looked away.

He came out of nowhere one day in front of all our classmates and said, “Hey boy. You think you’re a boy, Mokgadi? You’re an ugly boy,” he sneered. “I’m going to beat you like you’re a boy.”

Usually, what happened at this moment is that Biggie would have picked up a stone or a handful of dust and thrown it at me to signal he wanted to get physical. I wasn’t one to wait for a pile of dust in my face. If someone says they’re going to beat you, might as well get things going. Even at six years old, I wasn’t one for talking nonsense. Like I said, I was impatient and didn’t like wasting time.

“You, the fat ass? You’re going to beat me? OK.” Then I just started punching him, and Biggie went down. He tried to hit me back, but I threw myself on top of him and kept punching and kicking. I’m sure we looked like one of those cartoons where the people are twisting around so much you can’t tell who’s who. I can still hear the sounds—the other kids shouting and the thud every time a hit landed. Mostly mine. Then some teachers came and pulled us apart.

Biggie either told his mom what happened or someone else did because the next day, Biggie and his mom came to our house. I remember it was a Saturday and my mom was out working, and I was home with my younger sister and baby brother. Some of my cousins were also around. Biggie’s mom banged on our door. I could hear her even before I opened it. She was upset that a girl had beaten up her son. She was yelling at him about how embarrassing it was and how he’d brought shame on their family.

“You’re going to fight this girl right now,” she yelled. “She’s a girl, for God’s sake! You can’t let a girl beat you,” his mom cried.

Poor Biggie. You could see he wanted to be anywhere but in our yard.

I told my sister to stay inside with our brother, and I came out and shut the door behind me. Biggie’s mom stopped yelling at her son, and her gaze settled on me. She was sizing me up, trying to understand what kind of a girl had humiliated her child.

“Are you really going to do this to your child?” I asked.

Then she pushed Biggie toward me. “Fight her.”

I guess she was. My cousins just laughed. They knew what was about to happen.

Biggie just took a deep breath and put his hands up in a boxer’s stance. I almost felt sorry for him. I walked up and punched him a few times and he went down. He put up less of a fight now than he did at the school. I don’t know why I did this but when Biggie went down, I stopped hitting him and instead took off his belt and gave him a few licks with it. I could hear my sister gasp from the window and then she made a sound like she was trying not to laugh. My cousins were bent over howling. A couple were laughing so hard they fell and were rolling around in the dirt.

Biggie didn’t even try to grab his belt back from me. He just laid on the ground and covered his head and face. It was done. I threw the belt down and then I looked at his mother, “Your son is not an embarrassment. The embarrassment is you bringing your son to our house for another beating.”

Biggie’s mother didn’t say a word. She helped her son up, dusted him off, and they left our yard. Biggie never stared at or called me a boy again. Whatever issues Biggie and I had should’ve stayed between us. We were kids. His mother should’ve never gotten involved except to discipline her son for being a bully. He got what he deserved. I didn’t tell my mom about this incident, but she heard about what happened from the neighbors. I didn’t get in trouble. Not even for smart-talking Biggie’s mom. She shouldn’t have encouraged her son to hit a girl or had the nerve to show up at our home. A parent shouldn’t force kids to fight.

Biggie eventually moved to a neighboring village. He is a grown man now, still big, and with a wife and children of his own. We crossed paths many years later when I visited that side for an event. We remembered each other instantly and both started laughing.

“Heeeey!! Yooooooo! Mokgadi! You remember? Don’t start with me! Don’t start with me, girl. We’re cool now, you and me.”

“This one,” Biggie said to his family and friends standing around, “this woman here, she’s a cruel one. Took off me own belt and whipped my ass with it.” Everyone cracked up. “Mokgadi, the great Olympic champion … you did not do me good that time, my friend.”

I could see Biggie had enjoyed telling this story, and I reminded him that I’d first whipped his ass at the school, so I’d actually given him two beatings.

MY PARENTS COULD SEE I was different than my sisters. All of my sisters took after my mom—they were short, very curvy and pretty, while I was tall, with a wiry muscular frame. They’d wear skirts and dresses and form-hugging clothing, while I preferred my clothes to be loose. I liked that American street style of baggy jeans and shirts. My mom told me she walked by my room one day and saw me organizing my clothes into things I wanted to wear and things I didn’t. I didn’t know she saw me doing this. I remember I made sure to place the shorts and pants, golf shirts and T-shirts where I could reach them easily, and I put the dresses and skirts in a place where I couldn’t.

I wore my sisters’ hand-me-downs, but only what suited my tastes. The rest of my things I got from my male cousins and friends. I didn’t care about “fashion.” I didn’t care about being “in style.” I also knew my parents couldn’t afford these things. If I had to wear used clothes or the same shorts and vests every day for a year, it didn’t matter to me—as long as it wasn’t a dress. My mother bought our clothes, and clothes were bought only during Christmas. On very special Christmases, we’d have clothes handmade from a tailor, but those were rare occasions. There weren’t any clothing stores in the village. Traders would come to our village and set up street markets. You could find most anything: clothing, food, toys, electronics. It was fun to walk around and look at things. The air vibrated with music and the sounds of adults negotiating prices and children laughing.

I wasn’t the only girl who was “boyish” in my village or the surroundings villages. Girls who preferred to wear trousers or who played with boys weren’t considered abominations. It really was not a big fucking deal. These girls would grow out of it and get married and have kids with a guy or not. That’s life. And it was no one’s business but theirs. There are many ways to be a girl.

If there were family members or villagers who tried to discuss my behavior or clothing with my parents, I didn’t know about it. Looking back, I’m sure there were comments from nosy adults, but my parents shielded me from those. If anything, as I got older, my mother and father would show appreciation for the things I was willing to do in the household. They’d marvel at how strong and fearless I was and tell me I was a child of God. Once they understood how I expressed myself, I can’t say they ever tried to change me. At least not in any real way.

My parents were true believers; they had a deep faith in God and made sure their children had the same. We went to church every Sunday. We attended the special prayer services held in different homes. I loved going to church and prayer services because of the singing and dancing and clapping. Sometimes it got to be too much. The service would last for hours with several pastors delivering hour-long sermons one after the other. By the time it was over, you felt like your brains were messed up.

We had church in the middle of our village. People would gather outdoors and sit on these white plastic chairs. Everyone clean and nicely dressed and ready to hear the word of the Lord. The women wore skirts and dresses. And I did, too. Until I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. One Sunday, I came out of my room wearing a freshly laundered and ironed pair of pants and button-down shirt I’d gotten from one of my cousins. My mother saw me and didn’t say a word. She may have taken an extra-deep breath. It was expected for girls and women to wear dresses and skirts and men to wear pants and button shirts, at least in church. But there weren’t actual rules about it. If the pastors and fellow worshippers thought it was inappropriate for a girl to wear trousers at church, no one said anything. The people in my village really did understand the part of Christianity that said, “Do not judge others.”

Besides, we may have accepted Christianity, but we still believed in our gods, our ancestors, and our African traditions. We often combined the two. If a pastor said a special blessing or calling must be sought by a particular family, congregations from neighboring villages would come together in someone’s yard and it would turn into a huge party. Cows and goats were slaughtered and cooked. There would be morning tea and cakes and fresh bread and candies. I loved these gatherings because after the prayers and singing and drumming I could eat as much as I wanted. Truth be told, people came for the food anyway, not for the prayers. We made sure our African beliefs were mixed in with the White man’s religion. Our ancestors didn’t make regulations about girls not being able to wear pants when they wanted, so what could a pastor in my village complain about, really?

Our church had a boys’ choir and a girls’ choir, and they took turns singing to the congregation. They never sang together, always separate. I loved to hear the boys singing. The girls were good, but I preferred the boys’ voices. They sounded more like me. This one day, I guess I was filled with the spirit because I jumped up and ran over and started dancing and singing with the boys. No one stopped me. There was no rule that said girls couldn’t sing with boys. People seemed to think what I did was funny because they laughed and clapped along to the beat. I knew the song and I had a good voice. I wasn’t messing up the boys’ performance, so they didn’t mind me either.

MY SISTERS GAVE ME a harder time about my behavior than my parents ever did. I loved my siblings. But there were definitely times when we would try each other’s nerves.

We only had one television in our house, and when my sisters were home, they always wanted to watch stupid romantic movies. To me, those things were silly. I wanted to watch things that were exciting—action movies, sports, stuff like that. So, we’d fight over the channel. Each of us would get up and change the channel or stand in front of the TV to prevent the other one from changing it. Of course, during those fights, they’d talk about my clothing.

“Mokgadi, what are you wearing those clothes for? You’re really starting to look like a boy now.”

And my answer to them was the same throughout the years, “So what?” Eventually, I was the only one who could fix the TV when it broke. I realized all I had to do was make sure it didn’t work when my sisters wanted to watch those stupid movies. Then they’d go do something else and I’d get it working again so I could watch what I wanted.

The thing that really pricked my sisters’ skin, though, was the household chores.

Where I come from, everyone must contribute to the maintenance of the household, even small children. As I grew bigger and stronger, I made it known that I didn’t want to do things like cooking or cleaning. I wanted to do other things, things that challenged me physically.

Our house had a leaky roof, and during the rainy season, we’d have to put buckets all over the house to catch the rainwater. Starting from around eight or nine, I loved to climb up to the roof and patch the holes. It was a one-story house, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous to be up on the roof. A fall from up there could’ve seriously injured me. Still, I enjoyed it because I liked to work with my hands. I liked to put my body in risky situations. I trusted in myself. These kinds of tasks felt natural to me. I was also an amateur mechanic. If one of our machines broke, I would take it apart and fix it. I had a knack for figuring these things out. No one taught me; I learned on my own. If I hadn’t found success on the track, sometimes I liked to think maybe I would have tried to find a way to pay for an electrical engineering degree.

I WANTED TO do the gardening and take care of the animals. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. As a child, especially a girl child, you are supposed to do what you are told. My sisters would constantly remind me of this.

“Mokgadi. It’s your turn to wash the dishes,” my older sister Nico would say.