‘They thought I had a dick,’ Semenya says in new HBO documentary
Gold medallist Caster Semenya has revealed that she once offered to show sporting officials her vagina in order to prove she was female after blitzing the competition.
The 31-year-old won a gold medal in the women’s 800-metre World Championships in 2009, as an 18-year-old, by a huge margin, beating her previous best – at the African Junior Championships just a month earlier – by four seconds.
Semenya’s coronation was put on hold as officials at world athletes announced there would be an inquiry and ordered her to undergo gender verification tests.
Despite being assigned female at birth, Semenya has a condition known as hyperandrogenism, which refers to higher than usual levels of male sex hormones including testosterone.
For the last decade, track star Caster Semenya says she's been at the center of a gender war. Forced to take hormone therapy in order to compete, Semenya is now suing World Athletics for violating her human rights. @Andrea_Kremer reports tonight on #RealSports on @hbomax pic.twitter.com/SNGTMZ8ICa
— Real Sports (@RealSportsHBO) May 24, 2022
In a new HBO documentary, the South African athlete opens up about the issues she faced, stating she offered to show the governing body her vagina in order to prove she’s female.
“They thought I had a dick, probably,” she told HBO’s Real Sports.
“I told them: ‘It’s fine. I’m a female, I don’t care. If you want to see I’m a woman, I will show you my vagina. All right?’”
In 2011, World Athletics – previously the International Association of Athletics Federations – ordered that all female athletes with hyperandrogenism had to lower their testosterone levels through medication.
But the side effects were severe, with Semenya adding: “It made me sick, made me gain weight, panic attacks, I don’t know if I was ever going to have a heart attack.”
She said taking the medication was like “stabbing yourself with a knife every day”.
“But I had no choice. I’m 18, I want to run, I want to make it to Olympics, that’s the only option for me.”
Semenya went on to win at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics and the 2011 and 2017 World Championships.
HBO also interviewed World Athletics lawyer Jonathan Taylor, who disagreed with the backlash against women with sex development differences being made to take medication.
“You say medically it’s not healthy for me, then my question back to you is: ‘Why do the world’s leading experts say that that is what we would prescribe?” he says in the documentary.
Semenya responded: “Jonathan must cut his tongue and throw it away. If he wants to understand how that thing has tortured me, he must go and take those medications. He will understand.”
Last year, Semenya was unable to defend her title at the Tokyo Olympics after refusing to take medication or having surgery to reduce her testosterone levels.
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