Caster Semenya Biography

[CaveMum]

Wonder how much misinformation will be in this book? The press release is already thick with hyperbole.

https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/merkybooks-strikes-gold-for-olympic-champion-semenyas-memoir

“Publisher Helen Conford and senior commissioning editor Lemara Lindsay-Prince acquired UK and commonwealth rights, excluding South Africa and Canada, for The Race To Be Myself, from Caspian Dennis and Rachel Clements at Abner Stein on behalf Peter McGuigan at Ultra Literary. It will publish 31st October 2023.

North American rights were won by Nneoma Amadi-obi at Norton and Simon Boughton at Norton Young Readers from Peter McGuigan at Ultra Literary. Southern African rights have been sold to Jeremy Boraine at Jonathan Ball Publishers. A young reader’s edition will be published by Puffin.

The publisher said: “Banned from competing in the sport she loved and trained her whole life for, Olympic and World Champion Caster Semenya is finally ready to share the vivid and heart-breaking story of how the world came to know her name.

Thrust into the spotlight at just 18 years old after winning the Berlin World Championships in 2009, Caster’s win was quickly overshadowed by criticism and speculation about her body, and she quickly became the centre of a debate which continues today about gender in sports, and the right to compete as you are.

“Told with captivating speed, immediate candour and the spirit of defiance, The Race to Be Myself is the journey of Caster’s years as an athlete in the public eye, and her private life behind closed doors. From her rural beginnings running free in the dust, to crushing her opponents in record time on the track; to the falsehoods spread about her by the press and sporting bodies, the legal trial she went through in order to compete, and the humiliation she has been forced to endure publicly and privately.”

Semenya said: “My life has had its struggles, but it has mostly been a joy. Through my example, I want to educate, enlighten and inform about how the world can welcome those born different. You may have heard some of my story over the years, and you might have seen me running or standing proudly on the podium at the Olympics. But there is still so much I need to relate about strength, courage, love, resilience and being true to who you are. I want this book to show people around the world how to do just that.”

Lindsay-Prince added: “I’ve always admired Caster Semenya’s journey as an extraordinary athlete and iconic activist, incredible pioneer and unfortunate pariah. Her fight to run as she is a race for respect, justice and ultimately everyone who has ever been told no and prevented from doing the thing they love.

"This book is her setting the record straight and owning her entire story. It’s unflinching in its honesty and empowering in its tone, and captures the full scope of her life – from a little girl running in the dust, to a record breaking athlete running to be free.”

I also suspect so for the same reasons Datun.

I’m tempted to buy the electronic version of the book and see if the term “5 alpha reductase 2 deficiency” appears anywhere in the entire thing 🤨.

I think you may be able to buy the kindle version, perhaps do a quick search and then return it for a refund.

Link to the NY Times article.

They have a DSD and Caster, interestingly, is a male name.

I would buy your book!

The opening sentence in the first review says it all, “thrust into the limelight at just 18 years of age”.

So Caister is 18. Has not had a period, has not developed breasts, has distinctly male facial features, muscular and skeletal development. And runs extremely fast. But the SA sports federation are not concerned, Caisters family are not concerned. Someone , somewhere is telling huge porkies. No one is querying why this 18 “woman” is presenting in the way they do? Or are they assuming that once Caister has won a few races and medals that their periods will start and their breasts grow.

Caister knows who he is. The SA sports federation know who he is. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that there has been a long standing conspiracy attempt to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for the sake of medals.

Like others I do feel some degree of sympathy for Caster as a child. Caster was born in a system which does not have the NHS and Caster's parents were told they had a daughter. A daughter who was different, but a daughter. People trust medics and go with what they're told. Fine.

The thing is that this account of Semenya’s childhood appears to be untrue and designed to elicit sympathy. Semenya’s running coach and head teacher was very surprised to learn Semenya was “female.” There appears to have been no suggestion of it till about the age of 16 when Semenya was recruited by national scouts. In childhood photos Semenya wears the boys’ school uniform. The birth certificate says “female” but that was only issued when Semenya was 16/17.

I almost want to read this autobiography because it is going to be so much bullshit but, having read the excerpts, I think it’s also going to be whiny and boring.

That's not as unreasonable as it could have been. At least they acknowledge, more than once, that CS's T levels are the product of healthy testes, rather than, as we see more usually, dancing round the issue/implying that they're the result of freak chance, e.g. CS having at some point accidentally pricked her finger on a [probably unusually ladylike] spinning wheel.

At the time this story broke CS was a sports science [university] student, hailing from a culture whose puberty rituals are the stuff of legend. It's deeply insulting to suggest that CS either didn't know what a chromosome was or that she'd been through male puberty.

Just a point of accuracy; Caister is a coastal village near Great Yarmouth.

Caster is a fine grained sugar and a monumental sporting cheat.

I see they are planning a young readers edition to be published by Puffin. I expect there will be a lot of omissions and edge blurring in that version.

Sorry!

Interesting that the second place went to Francine Niyonsaba, who was of course a medalist in the Rio Womens 800 m , where all the medals went to genetically male athletes!

Let’s play spot the female athlete.

The opening sentence in the first review says it all, “thrust into the limelight at just 18 years of age”.

Interesting. This kind of sympathetic infantilisation is much more frequently applied to male teenagers than female teenagers. I think they secretly know what sex Semenya is.

(Infantilisation might be the wrong word, I think handling international fame at age 18 is probably hard for anyone! But girls of that age who are in the limelight don’t tend to get age-based excuses or sympathy.)

Easier to play spot the ball/s!

@puffyisgood
Wind assistance is not an example of a little unfairness being tolerated because

1. all the athletes in the race are benefiting equally from the wind, so it is not an unfair advantage to any one person
2. the wind is not under the control of any specific athlete or class of athletes and any athlete could find themselves benefiting from wind assistance (or high altitude, or an especially fast running track, etc) at any time.

Male people with DSDs are men. People are just going to have to expand their ideas about what a man can look like. (Not that there is anything ambiguous about the sex of the 46XY, 5-ARD athletes that I've seen.) We can't be mesmerised by appearance.
People with dwarfism/restricted growth who are over the age of 18 are adults. It wouldn't be right or respectful to treat them, on the basis of their height, as if they were children.

Play the ball and not the man … or something?

These disorders are exceedingly rare, yet we're expected to believe that it just so happens, entirely coincidentally, that the three best 'female' track athletes in the world at that time all have one. Isn't that just amazing? I'm not good at maths, but I wonder what the odds are. 🤔

Just came across this article and thought I'd add it here. I quote, "her body naturally produces higher levels of testosterone than is typical for a woman". How completely misleading!

https://www.thecut.com/2023/10/caster-semenya-race-to-be-myself-memoir-interview.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

That article is disgraceful but the comments, particularly truthbadgerer and keccek, set the record straight.

someone shared a copy of the book with me, I skim read. no real eye-openers. didn't at all change my prior view that, in a sport with only two divisions, male and female, it's a no brainer that the male division is by a huge distance the better fit for someone with CS's makeup.

in the cook CS is about as coy as you'd expect about mentioning the source of her high T levels, namely testes (the word crops up a couple of times, both times paraphrasing what journos have said about her), far less so about 'vagina', which gets used all the time (she goes to considerable pains to tell the reader that she's got one), though from a couple of other things she says (about an ultrasound probe that a doctor wanted to use on her at one point and about the vaginoplasty procedure that she describes as being recommended for some people with her condition) I think she probably means '(something that looks a bit like) vulva'.

she says in the first couple of pages that she's incapable of fathering children.

ultimately what she describes, fighting as hard as she can to gain admission into a sporting which would allow her to make a good living (I won't say that validates her gender identity, since a central theme of the early book is that she much prefers male company and competition when it comes to recreational sport) is entirely understandable and maybe even admirable on some level, it's not difficult to see why she might have maybe even sincerely seen herself as a bit of a borderline case in sex terms, but, obviously, there can be no question of self certification in cases like this, in the end it has to come down to an objective assessment, and, when you strip all the emotion away and focus on the purpose of the women's sporting category it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the xx competitors who she beat were more deserving.

Thank heavens for the times review!
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a444a5b6-7983-11ee-b7b9-8366d5b01474?shareToken=47e00da483f23c8e6d4dda3a05a99eea

On taking the pill to reduce T levels: A homeopathic dose of the female condition and Semenya hated it.

Good to see some clarity on Semenya’s male state.

The decision to publish the photo of 'our girl' in swimwear aged 15 is outrageous. The pic obviously chosen because the subject of the biog likes it. A pair of baggy trunks to hide the not-conventionally-masculine pelvic area but otherwise flaunting maleness, from the square-jawed, shaven skull to the v shaped torso. Publishing the photo is big two fingers to the naysayers - 'yeah the "raised as a girl" line is a load of old rubbish, wotchoo gonna do about it?"

@MrsJamin well she wasn't. She's African and truly assigned female at birth and was raised as a gender non conforming girl.
@OhHolyJesus That's private unless CS chooses to share. The DSD she has results in infertility, the XY foetus does not produce the hormone to grow external male genitalia or the structures to produce sperm.
We can't have it both ways. We (people broadly of GC beliefs) say sex is a binary, immutable and is observed and recorded at birth and some sorts of social organisation are predicated on sex - who uses certain spaces and places, sport, etc.
We can't demand that individuals with certain medical conditions have to follow different rules and have their sex class change as they develop or have to justify their sex class by the sorts of invasive procedures that CS was subject to.
Years ago Intersex Groups didn't want to be used by the alphabet soup people to support their ideology. People with diagnosed DSD have medical conditions which make the appearance, function and experience of their sex different from those without these conditions and as a result face multi levels of discrimination. Which is what CS has been subject to. It's a form of ableism.