Ain't She a Woman? Caster Semenya Wins Olympic Gold, and Praise

In a rebuke to continuing questions about whether she is too masculine to compete agains women, South African middle-distance-runner Caster Semenya won the women's 800 Sunday in the fifth-fastest time in Olympic history, then went on to tell reporters that she is undeterred by criticism because "sports," as the iconic Nelson Mandela once told her, "is meant to make people feel united."

“I think I have made a difference,” she said addressing reporters questions after her win in Rio de Janeiro Saturday. “I have meant a lot to my people. I have done well. They are proud of me. And that was the main focus. I was doing it for my people, the people who support me.”

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Complaints from competitors in 2009 that Semenya's masculinity gave her an unfair advantage led the International Association of Athletics Federation to test her for the hormone testerone. Their conclusion that Semenya's high level of the hormones meets the IAAF's classification of hyperandrogenism is particularly upsetting to Black South Africans, who are haunted by the legacy of a woman who died 200 years ago this year.

So obsessed were Europeans with Sarah Baartman's protuding derriere — a characteristic typical of the Khoisan people who lived for centuries at the southern tip of Africa — that a British Marine surgeon whisked her off to London and put her in a cage for all the world to see. The surgeon subsequently sold her to an animal trainer, who took her to Paris where gawkers sized up her nude form and named her the "Hottentot Venus."

Even in death, her humiliation did not end; a surgeon made a cast of her body, dissected her and stored her brain and genitals in bottles of formaldehyde. The painted plaster cast of Baartman's body was displayed in Paris' Musee de l'Homme until 1974.

Many South Africans see in the ogling of Semenya's physique the same dehumanizing treatment that was afforded Baartman – and perhaps even more sinister, an assertion of white and male supremacy. Since her emergence in 2009 as the world champion in the women's 800m event, she has been shoeboxed as "hyperandrogenic" and "intersex," and described as "breathtakingly butch" by the New Yorker Magazine. Pierre Weisse, the IAAF's general secretary has joked, “She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”

Following her triumph in the 800m Saturday, reporters peppered her with questions about her "hypermasculine" physique, and asked if she should be allowed to compete without taking testosterone-suppressing drugs.

"It's all about loving one another," Semenya told reporters. "It's not about discriminating people. It's not about looking at people [and] how they look, how they speak, how they run. You know, it's not about being muscular. It's about sports. When you walk out of your apartment, you think about performing. You don't think about how your opponents look. You just want to do better. I think the advice to everybody is to go out and have fun."

Under IAAF rules requiring her to take hormone-supressing drugs, Semenya won the silver medal in her race in the London Olympics four years ago. But after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned the IAAF requirement in in 2015, her times have improved dramatically, flirting with Jarmila Kratochvilova's world record set in 1983.

Twitter and South African media exalted in her win Sunday.

"Caster Semenya represented SA women so well," read one tweet posted on the South Africa Broadcasting Commission's website."Been crying for the past 4 hours," read another "Caster! Caster! Caster!"

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Still, the IAAF has signaled that the organization will challenge CAS’s ruling in an attempt to restore the anti-hormonal drug-regimen for women athletes whose testerone limits eclipse maximum standards. But Saturday, Semenya simply refused to answer questions about the IAAF's binary definitions of what a woman is, or isn't.

"My friend, tonight is all about performance. We're not here to talk about IAAF, we're not here to talk about some speculations. Tonight is all about performance. This press conference is about the 800m that we saw here today. So, thank you."