These new photos of Caster Semenya in You Magazine were taken after she won the gold in Berlin but were just starting to circulate in the US around the time she was waiting for the verdict on whether or not she could keep the medal she won there. And the gender test results say she can, yay!

I love Caster’s makeover but can’t help but think of how brawny much like an Amazon goddess she looks in these photos though.

Caster Semenya first caused an uproar when her fleet feet ran circles around the other runners at the 2009 World Championship Games in Berlin. Observers of the events were confused by why someone whose gender appears outwardly male was competing against females.

Very soon after the games, the sheltered little girl simply known as Caster to her friends and family was at the center of a worldwide debate discussing exactly what was in her green biker shorts.

Caster was also put through the public embarrassment of genetic testing to determine her “true” sex while pundits and onlookers were placing bets on whether Caster was packing a starter pistol or just the holster. Turns out, she has both.

Caster Semenya, in fact is what some might call a hermaphrodite, although it is more correct to say she was born intersex.

Caster is not the first intersex athlete whose indeterminate gender has perplexed the peanut gallery. And she’s certainly not the first intersex person from South Africa.

The southernmost African country has one of the highest percentages of intersex persons in the world.

Genetics is a funny thing. It’s like a roulette wheel that doesn’t just spin one way. It can spin the other, undulate like a roller coaster, and even spin upside down. It’s chaos come to life, that unpredictable force in parents’ lives that, before sonograms were invented, lead doctors to count a newborn’s fingers and toes to allay the parents’ fears of a less than perfect bundle of joy.

Caster Semenya video interview.

Inevitably however, not all newborns will appear “perfect”. Some will even have physical and mental differences from the “norm” that won’t show up until later in that child’s life.

When Caster Semenya was born on January 7th, 1991, in the South African village of Ga-Masehlong, the doctor announced news of a healthy baby girl. By all accounts, Caster lived as a sister among three others and a brother in the village of Fairlie.

I can’t help but wonder what life was like for Caster growing up in that village. Was she a lot taller than the other girls? Did she have facial hair and get teased for it?

Reportedly, Caster was a teen tomboy and was disqualified from girls football for being too rough at age 14.

I’m also curious about Caster’s years training as a runner, a sport she picked up in preparation for playing association football. What kind of workout regimen was she on during this time, which might explain her man-ish muscle definition. What did she eat during this time? Could her training diet explain her fast, super lean physique?

What kinds of performance drugs was she taking, if any?

Because, if by all accounts Caster Semenya lived and dressed as a girl while in Fairlie, without suspicion about her being anything other than your typical everyday girl, what happened during the time she was training for association football?

Being disqualified for being “too rough” at a sport doesn’t mean you’re a buffed bruiser. Just means you’re aggressive as hell, and a good number of girls are like that.

I’d like to see a picture of Caster before she started running seriously. Perhaps even a picture of her as a child.

It would tell us not only more about Caster, but it would give us insight into whether her training program contributed to her masculinization.

An important component of this story is not being talked about much, but could have a lot to do with Caster’s present appearance and the fact that she has three times the testosterone of most women. And it has something to do with her coach.

Because if Caster Semenya, an African girl born intersex to unwitting parents lived as a “typical” little girl without anyone suggesting she might be otherwise her whole life, it’s possible that she may have been drugged into virtual manhood during her training as a runner.

Sounds crazy doesn’t it?

But, given her East German coach’s past record with drugging female athletes, this is an angle that I think should be explored. Caster’s coach, Ekkart Arbeit is the same coach who infamously turned a female athlete into a man.

And supposedly, suspicions did not arise about Caster’s gender until her remarkable speed increases during her races. According to Wikipedia:

In July 2008 Semenya participated in the 2008 World Junior Championships, and won the gold in the 800 m at the 2008 Commonwealth Youth Games with a time of 2:04.23.^[11]
In the 2009 African Junior Championships Semenya won both the 800 m and 1500 m races with the times of 1:56.72 and 4:08.01 respectively.^[12][13]

With that race she improved her 800 m personal best by seven seconds in less than nine months, including four seconds in that race alone.^[2][3] The 800 m time was the world leading time in 2009 at that date.^[3] It was also a national record and a championship record. Semenya simultaneously beat the Senior and Junior South African records held by Zelda Pretorius at 1:58.85, and Zola Budd at 2:00.90, respectively.^[14]

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) says it was “obliged to investigate” after she made improvements of 25 seconds at 1500 m and eight seconds at 800 m – “the sort of dramatic breakthroughs that usually arouse suspicion of drug use.”^[15]

The IAAF also asked Semenya to undergo a gender test after the win.^{[16][note 1]} News that the IAAF requested the test broke three hours before the 2009 World Championships 800 m final.^[3] IAAF president Lamine Diack stated, “There was a leak of confidentiality at some point and this led to some insensitive reactions.”^[17]

Then all hell broke loose in Caster’s world.

Although she told You Magazine in the issue where she graces the cover that she loves who she is, being the center of media attention is never easy. And like most teenagers, Caster is probably going thru more or less the same issues of being, place and identity most other teenagers are dealing with, intersex or not.

And now she is discovering that she is not the gender she thought she was her whole life.

Of course, like all intersex persons, Semenya was partially there at birth. When intersex children are born, their outer sex organs can be typically male, typically female, a combination of both, or indefinable as either male or female.

And in areas of countries without sonogram technology, when a child is born the most likely sex of the child is selected to be that child’s lifelong gender role. In Caster’s case, she appeared to have female organs so a gender assignment of “female” was given to her.

Being born intersex, with it’s huge variety of genetic differences from the sexual “norm” is not as uncommon as people might assume. And with the genotypical and phenotypical hodgepodge that is intersexuality, what’s under the hood doesn’t always match the person’s outward appearance.

An intersex person could be completely female on the outside, but have male internal sex organs, and vice versa. Like Beyonce on the outside and Jay-Z on the inside. And vice versa.

I suppose that might be the biggest unexplored angle of all in this Caster clusterfuck.

Because with intersex identity not being in the jeans, but in the genes…isn’t it pretty much impossible to know without genetic testing the “true” sex of any person on earth with certainty?

Which leads to the logical conclusion that it is also impossible to know exactly how many intersex athletic sports title and medal holders there have already been in the past – and will be in the future.


Perhaps the only problem with Caster’s intersexuality, if there is one to point out, is not that she doesn’t fit into any of our conveniently pre-made gender categories. Perhaps with the number of persons, intersex or not, that comfortably fit somewhere inside both and in between the sexes, there should have been a category for them in the first place.