Caster Semenya and the cruel history of contested black femininity

In the 10 years since Caster Semenya won the 2009 World Championships at just 18 years old, the sports world has whittled her story down to one thing: her body.

Narrow hips. Wide shoulders. Pronounced jawline. Manly.

Based on the tones of disgust used to discuss her physicality, one might think that Semeya is the only runner to ever possess a body that so greatly differed from everyone else’s in the field. It seems the sports world has forgotten the peculiarities of Ira Murchison’s stocky, 5’4 frame, which earned him both the nickname “Human Sputnik” and an Olympic gold medal in the 4x100. Or that world record-holder Usain Bolt was taller with longer legs than any of his competitors.

Unlike those men, Semenya’s body is often deemed unwanted and out of place, most notoriously by her sport’s governing body. Throughout her career, World Athletics, formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations, has insisted she undergo intrusive testing and hormone regulation, and ultimately banned her from competition after instituting rule changes that seemingly targeted her in 2019.

But Semenya is not alone. Burundian runner Francine Niyonsaba, one of Semenya’s competitors in the 800-meter run, has since revealed she is one of a growing number of female athletes, mostly from the Global South, whose hyperandrogenism puts them directly in the crosshairs of World Athletics’ regulations. Former top junior-athlete Annet Negesa, an intersex runner from Uganda, recently disclosed that she underwent invasive surgery at the behest of World Athletics doctors to ensure she could continue competing. Complications from the procedure left her damaged both mentally and physically.

Underlying this harsh, discriminatory treatment is not simply an adherence to faulty biological metrics or antiquated, binary conceptions of gender, though these aspects have undoubtedly played a role. In fact, “sex verification” practices originated in the 1950s out of the as yet unfounded suspicion that some countries were allowing men to compete disguised as women, and involved little more than asking athletes to remove their undergarments. (Some of the athletes subjected to this scrutiny, like 1932 Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh, were discovered to have genetic conditions resembling intersex characteristics.)

Semenya’s treatment is rooted in something far more disturbing.