Caster Semenya, the Olympic gold medalist, detailed her mental and physical pain from using the contraceptive pill to compete.
Legally classified as a female at birth, the 32-year-old South African runner won Olympic gold in the 800-meter event in 2012 and 2016. However, due to a medical condition, her body generates testosterone at naturally elevated levels compared to women without the condition.
Semenya and other DSD athletes have to take hormone-suppressing medication to run 400-meter and one-mile events in 2018. A testosterone-inhibiting contraceptive pill answered Semenya’s need.
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During her time taking the Pill, the decorated athlete stated that Woman’s Hour that it caused her to experience “panic attacks,” “severe stress,” and “a daily desire to vomit.” She asserted that she does not pose a threat to other female athletes.
Additionally, she disclosed to host Emma Barnett that, due to her own experience, she does not wish for her two children, whom she shares with Violet Raseboya, to pursue athletics as adults. Rather, she intends to motivate them to participate in alternative activities.
Semenya Medical Record:
Semenya’s medical records were disclosed during her career after a test confirmed her gender. She was born without ovaries or a womb and had internal testes. She had three times the ‘normal’ testosterone levels for a woman.
Caster wrote about her severe competition rules, including having to take a test to verify she was a woman and suppressing testosterone, in her novel The Race to Be Myself.
Semenya took the gender recognition test at 18 before winning a gold medal in Berlin at the World Championships.
“I was taken aback to discover that this was a gender test,” she exclaimed.I assumed a doping test.
After the medic told Semenya about the gender test, she felt like she had ‘nothing to hide’ and consented.
‘I know I am a lady,’ she added:
The athlete discovered her reproductive organs were unusual after the test. The results of the test were revealed without obtaining her consent.
After ‘years’, she ignored the news to run.
‘It’s a violation, but I can’t control it,’ Semenya said of the leak. It taught me and others.
People acknowledge women’s differences.
“Different women are not threats.”
Semenya took testosterone-lowering medicine with World Athletics after her test showed abnormal levels.
The athlete said, ‘I took it out of desperation for me to get into the running space again.’
“It made me sick,” she said. Life stressed me. You suffer daily in darkness.
“You have stomach pain, panic attacks, nausea, and you want to vomit every day.”
Semenya called her experience ‘hell’ and lost herself by ‘disliking herself’.
She said, ‘You don’t sleep, always thinking, ‘Why am I doing this’?
Despite her professional crisis, Semenya claimed that her increased testosterone levels gave her an edge over women.
There’s no unfair advantage:
According to World Athletics, ‘almost a decade of study’ from athletes with sexual development variants demonstrated that higher testosterone levels ‘do confer an unfair advantage in the female category’
Semenya won’t discuss transgender women’s sports.
World Athletics’ criteria keep women’s sports ‘alive, appropriate, and proportionate.
In retirement, Semenya runs daily but instructs young children to prevent future young athletes from experiencing the ‘garbage’ of her career.
She told her two children and Violet Raseboya, a fellow athlete, not to follow their moms.
‘They will not do athletics,’ she replied, proposing tennis, golf, or swimming.
she said “I need to take them away from this nonsense of women being treated like animals,”.
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