Caster's love story with her wife: She thought I was a boy

08 August 2017 - 07:16

Caster and Violet's wedding

Caster and Violet's wedding

Image: Caster Semenya

Athlete Caster Semenya has opened up about her love story with her wife, Violet Raseboya in a TV interview about her life.

Being Caster Semenya was aired on BET on Monday night and the Olympic champion said that her first encounter with her wife was a "funny" meeting.

"We met in a restroom in 2007. She was a runner and was being escorted by doping officials. She thought I was a boy and said 'What is a boy doing in here?'"

ADVERTISING

Caster said the comment immediately got her back up and she was on the defensive.

"I'm not a boy. You think I'm lost? You think I can just walk in here?"

It took a while for them to start dating and Caster said it was her that told Violet about her feelings for her.

"We were in denial. She had a past. She had a boyfriend. (She) was trying to deny being in love with a woman"

Now, ten years later, Caster said Violet is the one person who was there for her at her lowest point.

"She is someone I can rely on. Through thick and thin."

Caster also admitted that the couple would like to have children and the athlete, who is from a family of six children, would like at least three.

"I'd love to have twins. My wife is a twin, so ja."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4031059&forum_id=2#36466039)

RIO DE JANEIRO — Caster Semenya of South Africa, heavily favored to win the Olympic women’s 800 meters, ran a quick opening round this week and then breezed past reporters.

Who could blame her?

Perhaps no female athlete has faced such brutal scrutiny by fellow competitors, sports officials and journalists.

When Semenya, then 18, dominated the 800 at the 2009 world track and field championships, winning by more than two seconds, a fellow competitor called her a man. Pierre Weiss, the general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federations, track and field’s world governing body, said, “She is a woman, but maybe not 100 percent.”

Semenya was barred from competition and subjected to sex tests. She returned months later, but the insensitivity shown toward her was sad.

Advertisement

Katrina Karkazis, a Stanford University bioethicist, said Semenya was punished simply for “being too fast and supposedly too masculine” by Western standards.

The questioning of Semenya’s success led to a policy enacted in 2011 by the I.A.A.F., the sport’s governing body, that restricted the permitted levels of testosterone, which occur naturally high in some women. That condition is called hyperandrogenism.

You have 4 free articles remaining.

Subscribe to The Times

Female athletes above the testosterone threshold of 10 nanomoles per liter — considered at the lower end of the male range — faced the prospect of invasive, humiliating and potentially risky measures if they wanted to continue competing. These included hormone-suppressing drugs and surgery to remove internal testes, which can produce testosterone.

It is not known for certain what, if any, procedures were undergone by Semenya, who won a silver medal at the 2012 London Olympics. Nor could it be verified, as reported in 2009 in The Daily Telegraph of Australia, that Semenya had internal testes and three times the testosterone level of a typical woman.

At this point, it does not matter. Last year, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Swiss-based high court for international sport, suspended track and field’s testosterone policy for two years.

EDITORS’ PICKS

3 Days in Wyoming With Kanye West

The A.C.L.U. vs. Trump: 170 Legal Actions (So Far)

Inside Nicaragua’s Protest Movement

Advertisement

The court said it had been “unable to conclude that hyperandrogenic female athletes may benefit from such a significant performance advantage that it is necessary to exclude them from competing in the female category.”

Did elevated testosterone provide women with a 1 percent competitive advantage? Three percent? More? Available science could not say, the court ruled. It gave the I.A.A.F. two years to try to discern that advantage. The ruling was based on the case of Dutee Chand, a sprinter from India.

Rising to the Challenge

9 Photos

View Slide Show ›

Image

Doug Mills/The New York Times

The court ruling was the correct one.

As the arbitration panel noted, science has not conclusively shown that elevated testosterone provides women with more of a significant competitive edge than factors like nutrition, access to coaching and training facilities, and other genetic and biological variations.

All Olympians have some exceptional traits. That is why they are elite athletes. A level playing field for everyone remains elusive, perhaps unattainable.

Kenyan and Ethiopian marathoners live and train at altitude, naturally enhancing their oxygen-carrying capacity. And they tend to have long, thin legs that make running more energy efficient. Kevin Durant and Brittney Griner are great basketball players in part because they are nearly 7 feet tall.

Eero Mantyranta, a Finnish cross-country skier who won seven Olympic medals in the 1960s, including three golds, was found to have a genetic mutation that increased his hemoglobin level to about 50 percent higher than the average man’s.

Advertisement

There is “no fundamental difference” between a congenital disorder that produces high testosterone levels and a genetic mutation that produces elevated hemoglobin levels, according to a recent commentary, “The Olympic Games and Athletic Sex Assignment,” in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Yet elevated levels of naturally occurring hemoglobin do not disqualify athletes. In any case, the Journal commentary said, “all of these biological differences are minuscule compared with the suspected use of performance-enhancing substances.”

If elevated testosterone provided an overriding competitive advantage, said Karkazis, the Stanford bioethicist, why did Chand, the Indian sprinter, not advance beyond the first round of the Olympic 100 meters?

“If you believe this is jet fuel, then what’s going on?” said Karkazis, who testified on Chand’s behalf before the arbitration court.

The I.A.A.F. does not investigate further if atypically high levels of testosterone in men are determined to occur naturally, an editorial in Scientific American recently noted. It added, “Fairness and science both dictate that women should be treated exactly the same.”

There are reasonable people on both sides of the testosterone debate. And there is deep emotion, too. It is an extremely complex issue, which includes the Olympic participation of transgender athletes.

Experts do not suggest that Semenya has taken banned substances. No one serious is calling her a man. No prominent voices suggest that separate categories should not exist for women’s and men’s sports.

Advertisement

But many remain concerned that women’s sports will be threatened if some athletes are allowed to compete with a testosterone advantage, even if athletes are reluctant to address the testosterone issue during the Olympics.

Semenya easily advanced out of the semifinals on Thursday night; the final is Saturday. Ajee Wilson of the United States, who finished second to Semenya in their opening heat, said, “It is something that should be revisited.” But Wilson also said: “At this point, what I think doesn’t really matter. We’re all on the track. Whoever’s on there is racing.”

Image

Semenya celebrated after the women’s 800 meters final at the 2009 world track and field championships. She won by more than two seconds.CreditOlivier Morin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dr. Eric Vilain, a medical geneticist from U.C.L.A., told my colleague Juliet Macur last year that “if we push this argument, anyone declaring a female gender can compete as a woman.”

He added, “We’re moving toward one big competition, and the very predictable result of that competition is that there will be no women winners.”

Paula Radcliffe of England, the retired world-record holder in the women’s marathon, told BBC Radio last month that it was “no longer sport” when a victory was so seemingly assured as Semenya’s appeared in Rio.

Radcliffe also suggested that some unnamed countries might actively recruit hyperandrogenic athletes to win more races.

Advertisement

But this feared “gender apocalypse,” as Karkazis calls it, seems unlikely. We are talking about a very small number of women. And male impostors exist in myth more than reality. It appears that Semenya’s case is being used to make wider assumptions based more on supposition than evidence.

The notion that women’s sports need to be protected is paternalistic, Karkazis said, calling it “the mantle under which all kinds of discriminatory and sexist ideas enter.”

In a sport once dominated by white Europeans, said Madeleine Pape of Australia, who competed against Semenya in the 2009 world championships, women who have fought so hard for the right to compete and for sustainable financial support can feel threatened by the rising success of a faster competitor. Especially, Pape said, if that athlete is non-gender-conforming and is married to another woman, as Semenya is.

In truth, Radcliffe is more of an outlier than Semenya. Radcliffe’s marathon record of 2 hours 15 minutes 25 seconds is about 10 percent slower than the fastest men’s time of 2:02:57. Meanwhile, Semenya’s best performance at 800 meters of 1 minute 55.33 seconds, which is not the world record, is about 12 percent slower than the men’s record of 1:40.91.

Radcliffe and gold medal athletes in Rio, like the American gymnast Simone Biles and the swimmer Katie Ledecky, have been as dominant as Semenya or more dominant, but their gender has not been openly questioned, Pape said.

“When we look at it objectively, Caster Semenya is no more exceptional than they are,” Pape, who is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, said in an email. “So why do we celebrate them while persecuting Semenya?”

The Journal of the American Medical Association said it was appropriate for athletes who were born with a disorder of sex development and were raised as female to be allowed to compete as women.

Advertisement

That sounds like the right call. Let athletes compete as who they are.

“God made me the way I am, and I accept myself,” Semenya told You, a South African magazine, in 2009. “I am who I am, and I’m proud of myself.”

It would seem unfair to tell her, Sorry, you can’t run in the Olympics because of the way you were born.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4031059&forum_id=2#36466041)

Caster Semenya’s wife is pregnant!

By MIke Mswati: Monday, July 24th 2017 at 09:43 GMT +3 | Sports

Violet Raseboya and Caster Semenya

The first time she made headlines, South African female athlete, Caster Semenya was suspected of being a man after she won the 800 meters race at the Berlin World Athletics in 2009.

Due to her masculine physical attributes, controversy has trailed her since then, with some of her critics questioning her gender.

Some aggrieved losers pushed the joke a bit too far and even demanded she be taken in for a gender test to prove her femininity!

Some people still believe she is a man masquerading as a woman! Public debate over the athlete raged on further when she got married to the love of her life, Violet Raseboya last year.

Her wife, whom reports indicate she loves dearly, is now allegedly pregnant and Semenya is reportedly over the moon.

The controversy surrounding the athlete has started afresh, with locals wondering how the pregnancy came about. Others are ridiculing her, whilst some are genuinely dumbfounded.

Get the latest World Cup news updates. Subscribe to our SMS sports service by texting 'SPORTS' to 22840.

Pray, is Semenya responsible for the pregnancy, now that she is the ‘man’ in the marriage? Did the couple secretly enlist the services of a man who donated sperm? If so, who is the mysterious man? Questions abound and the debate doesn’t look like it is about to end any time soon.

Some observers, however, argue that Semenya’s is not a typical case of gender assignment, but an old stereotype on what a ‘normal’, ‘regular’ woman should look like and do. Well, by looking at her, one gets the feeling that she, for lack of a better way of putting it, looks like, err, a man.

Let’s face it, Semenya is not your conventional pretty lady. Needless to mention her bulgy and built biceps, her deep baritone voice and her relatively flat chest.

Oh, wait a minute. When you keenly observe her pictures while on the track, you can clearly notice she doesn’t shave her armpits! Something men are very fond of.

Just before a race, the girl has this macho attitude she expresses to cameras. And when talking to press, she speaks with a lot of bravado and machismo that would make the average man squirm with fear.

But Semenya is not the only ‘masculine woman’ we know of. We have many other women with similar masculinecharacter traits and personalities, especially in sports and pop culture.

Think our very own boxers Congestina Achieng’ and Fatuma Zarika. Far afield, think of world’s most famous celebrity models like Grace Jones, who was once quoted complaining that when she started modelling, “everybody thought I was a man.”

Several researches show that these kinds of women can’t help it, it is biology at work. Mainly because they get exposed to higher levels of male sex hormones such as testosterone as they grow up.

Biologist say that girls with such conditions tend to have unusual-looking body parts like broader than normal shoulders and enlarged privates.

Unlike tomboys — girls who exhibit characteristics or behavior that is considered typical of boys such as wearing masculine clothes and engaging in games and activities that are physical in nature — these types of women also tend to have physical attributes like those of men such as big, tough legs and hands.

Like tomboys, such women develop tastes and tendencies that are associated with masculine behaviours, such as preference for boys’ toys. They dislike fashion, shopping, makeup and the whole sissie shebang.

Interesting to note also is the fact that these women’s influence in society can never be gainsaid.

Look at what they did to designers, for example. They forced them back to the drawing board to come up with unisex clothes and footwear.

Important to note, however, is the fact that these women are not just unique to blacks and people of African origin.

We have a huge chunk of ‘mzungus’ with masculine-looking women. Think singer Annie Lennox of the UK and British actress Tilda Swinton. They are as masculine as they come.

Interestingly, these manly traits seem to be more of a blessing than curse to these women.

They have, for instance, helped many access rarefied realms of success, especially in sports. Think Mozambique’s Maria Mutola a.k.a Maputo Express!

Needless to mention some local world beaters. Or even Cathy Freeeman, the former Australian world beater sprinter, who specialised in the 400 metres event.

Generally, the average successful female athletes are not popular for their great looks. We, however, once in a while get stunners like Mercy Cherono, the Commonwealth Games 5000m champion and Janet Wanja of the national volleyball team, or the US’s retired sprinter Marion Jones.

Politics, too, has its fair share of these women. Despite politics being a dirty game, strong character attributes among some women have helped put up worthy competition and prosper. Some have been referred to as ‘men’ more for their approach than physical attributes.

Take, the case of Margaret Thatcher, for example. The former U.K Prime Minister was considered to be the “best man” in her Government for the longest time.

She was as abrasive and ruthless as they come. She is the same woman who is on record of having yelled at former US president George H. W Bush: “Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly wobbly!” at a conference in the 90s, turning him into an object of ridicule and a butt of jokes.

This was after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, yet Bush — the president of a superpower — was not only undecided about how best to act, but verbalised that fact.

In as far as gender identity is concerned, women with strong masculine physical traits have a special name; androgynous. This is because such types don’t fit in the ‘male or female’ mainstream gender boxes defined by society. But does this make them any less women?

Well, not all women are feminine. They, however, remain women despite some having odd features such as beards, broad shoulders, tough skins and looks that perhaps only their mothers can claim to love to bits.

We, unfortunately live in a man’s world where tough women like Semenya can’t peacefully compete with fellow regular women without “genetic advantage” being thrown around as an excuse. Forgetting that such women, despite their physical features also train hard.

At the average female sports event, masculine viewpoints seem to be the biggest consideration when marketing, yet some of us don’t mind the manly women, all we are interested in is their prowess on the field.

Marketers continue to use sex appeal as a marketing tool to lure audiences to sports arenas. They discriminate on this type of women and never feature them in advertisements for events.

Well, for eye candy, the average man will pick the likes of Anna Kournikova, Marion Jones over Congestina Achieng or Serena Williams. But when rubber meets the road, we are just interested in the best athlete not their beauty.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4031059&forum_id=2#36466046)