All About Caster
What You Think You Know About Caster Semenya
I knew little about Caster Semenya beyond the 2009 headlines about a South African runner who was forced to undergo gender verification tests. When I signed on to write a play about her for a festival this spring, my first worry was: “What if she reads it?”
The prospect of writing about a living person makes me nervous. Deadline approaching, I spent days scouring the web for background information. I wanted this play to be especially true — whatever true might mean as applied to drama, a medium that by definition deals in artifice and constructed realities.
At the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, 19-year-old Caster Semenya was a promising unknown who had already beaten the South African record for 800 meters in the qualifying rounds. She won the title in Berlin by nearly two and a half seconds at 1:55:45. The archival footage shows her barreling far ahead of all the other runners.
The world took notice immediately. Unfortunately, the next day the International Association of Athletics Federations, in a breathtaking breach of Semenya’s privacy, let slip that she had undergone gender verification testing—with the results still pending.
Overnight Semenya’s name became entangled, not with her astonishing achievement on the racetrack, but with lurid speculation about her gender. Was she or wasn’t she a she? What was she exactly?
Reporters rushed to quote family and school friends back in her remote home village in Limpopo, plus a roster of experts who had never met Semenya but who nevertheless had an opinion. In account after account, what was missing from the conversation was Caster Semenya herself.
It should have been the happiest moment of her life, yet she withdrew from the spotlight. Reportedly traumatized by an onslaught of the wrong kind of media attention and poorly equipped at age 19 to understand what was happening, there were rumors she was on suicide watch.
Imagine yourself at 19, ambitious and exceptional. What if your life’s purpose was disrupted suddenly, based on tests you had been told were “routine” anti-doping checks for every athlete? What if someone else, from one day to the next, completely rewrote your reality for you: You are not female. You cannot keep your medals. You cannot compete again.
Most disturbing about Semenya’s story is that it has happened before, and it keeps happening, again and again and again. A friend of mine put it crisply: “Every time a female athlete does anything exceptional, people suddenly need to examine her vagina.”
We don’t ever ask whether male athletes are male enough to compete professionally. Does it make any sense that female athletes are scrutinized based on arbitrary criteria for femininity? And is a “higher level of male hormone” any different of a physical advantage than Michael Phelps’ perfect swimmer’s build or Usain Bolt’s long legs?
The play I ended up writing is not the play I expected to end up writing. As any dramatist, I had set out to bridge the emotional gap between public spectacle and the private, lived experience of Caster Semenya, by trying to imaginatively render her emotions into words. I wanted to tell the story not told in all the media coverage about her — who is Caster Semenya really?
Midway through my research, I felt a visceral reluctance to “imagine” anything at all about what she might have been thinking or feeling in 2009 — and thereby to contribute to the speculative noise about her. Instead, I decided to let Caster Semenya speak for herself, in her own words.
All About Caster is what I might call a “non-fiction drama” — it represents a mash-up of quotes from newspaper and magazine articles, television interviews, and video footage available publicly. My work in “writing” this play has been to weave texts together to tell Caster Semenya’s story dramatically, including the words Caster Semenya herself has spoken.
In every sense of the word, every word of the play is true. Unusually for a writer who deals in fiction, I take great pride in having imagined nothing this time.
Then I found out Caster Semenya has a twitter handle. Well, then. Please follow her, as she continues to write the remainder of her story herself.
All About Caster was performed in Chicago and NYC (2018 Documentary Play Festival / Waltzing Mechanics, Women’s Rights As Human Rights Festival / JACK, 365 Women NYC Festival / The Sheen Center, and Salon Lounge /Dixon Place).
