The Personal is Political as Memoir
A Review of Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself
by Scott F. Parker
In another world, Caster Semenya’s memoir might have told the archetypal story of an athlete working hard with her considerable natural talent to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Needless to say, Semenya did just that in the course of setting numerous records and winning three world championships and two Olympic gold medals at 800 meters.
But in this world, Semenya’s memoir, like her career, gets totally subsumed by gender controversy. For all her accomplishments on the track, Semenya is far better known for her disputed status as a woman. “To put it simply” Semenya writes, “on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” This fact was revealed by a gender test given in response to suspicions about Semenya’s race results. “I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspaper reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher-than-normal levels of testosterone.” The official diagnosis was a variant of DSD (difference in sex development) condition known as 46XY, which is to say Semenya has male chromosomes.
Despite this seemingly undeniable fact, Semenya devotes much of The Race to Be Myself to asserting her status as a woman. Take two typical passages: “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.” and “I want everyone to understand that despite my condition, even though I am built differently than other women, I am a woman.” The claim lands squarely on Semenya’s sense of identity. She was raised as a girl, accepted as a girl, and understood herself as a girl and then as a woman, and therefore takes herself to be a woman, regardless of what anyone else says: “To be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are.”
Even the most sympathetic readers will notice that this emphasis on identification, no matter how understandable, avoids the central question, which is not how we define woman as such but how we define woman in track and field. The definition itself is relevant because women are protected from having to compete against men due to their relative physical disadvantages. A better analogy than to say LeBron James’s genes give him an unfair advantage over his competitors but we don’t ban him from the NBA would be to say that we have weight divisions in boxing to give more people a chance to compete. Following this analogy, Semenya simply has the misfortune of belonging to a class too small to field its own division within the sport. If this is unfair to Semenya — and it is — wouldn’t it be similarly unfair to the other athletes to let her race against women?
If you’d rather gain access to Semenya’s experiences of the extraordinary events of her life than engage such arguments, The Race to Be Myself feels mostly like a missed opportunity. As she writes, “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.” Yet the book largely neglects the emotional toll that this experience placed on her in favor of defensive posturing. The greatest exception to this tendency comes in the book’s strongest chapter, “Nothing,” which depicts the low period in Semenya’s life after her private medical records were made public. “How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?” Yes, how do you explain that? I would love to find out.
Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.