let caster be caster

Caster Semenya proves she's all woman | World News | News.com.au


SOUTH Africa's world 800m champion Caster Semenya said the gender debate that has erupted around her is "a joke", in an interview with a South African magazine that posed her in a fashion shoot.

"I see it all as a joke, it doesn't upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself," she told You magazine, South Africa's biggest-selling English-language magazine.

"I am who I am and I'm proud of myself."

Semenya appeared on the cover of the magazine's latest edition, but the masculine runner's makeover in stilettos and skinny jeans only served to revive the national debate about gender and what it means to be a woman.

The magazine said it was under restrictions that prevented staff from commenting on the shoot.

The International Association of Athletics Federations announced shortly before her win at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin last month that the 18-year-old would have to undergo a barrage of tests aimed at verifying her gender.
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* Reader's Comments: Caster Semenya proves she's all womanNEWS.com.au,
* Back off wonder womanHerald Sun, 27 Aug 2009

Your Say

Just as Semenya said,this is a whole big joke and am so loving how she is taking it all.Go girl and remember this always YOU ARE FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY CREATED and thats why the ...

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Ladwene of Kenya
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"I don't want to talk about the tests - I'm not even thinking about them," she told the magazine.

"When I was in Berlin, I called my parents and said I'd heard people were talking about me.

"I told them not to listen to any of it. They know me and they know who I am."

She told the magazine that she wished she had more opportunity to change out of her track gear, but the photo shoot fueled the flames of the debate about gender roles.

"It's amazing how, in order to accept her, we have to turn her into our stereotypical image of what a woman should be," Colleen Lowe Morna of the advocacy group Gender Links said in The Times newspaper.

"Let Caster be Caster," she said.