THE RACE TO BE MYSELF

A furiously proud memoir by “the most recognizable intersex person in the world.”

A two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time world champion in the women’s 800 meters, professional runner Semenya, born in 1991 in a small village in the rural South African province of Limpopo, is better known for the media speculation on her gender and subsequent 2019 competition ban by the Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) than for her immense talent and unparalleled success. Semenya was born with external female genitalia but also hyperandrogenism and undescended testicles. As a child, she mostly played with boys and was aware of looking “boyish,” but to her close-knit community, “it really was not a big fucking deal….There are many ways to be a girl.” At the age of 18, she was thrust onto the world stage when the IAAF forced her to take humiliating gender confirmation exams at the 2009 Berlin World Championships. Semenya’s impatience and anger at the bureaucracy and media circus are palpable, and she candidly discusses how she has a vagina, was raised as a girl, and is now inarguably a woman. It’s clear that philosophical debates about what makes a woman are beside the point to the author and that the worst part of becoming the focus of an international conversation is not the speculation, embarrassment, or attention from the paparazzi and other media; it’s the lost opportunity to run fast and win. Wherever readers stand on the question of intersex women in sports, they will certainly agree with her grim summary of her experience: “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.”

Moving, inspiring testimony by a woman facing hardship merely “because of a biological condition I was born with.”