The Race to Be Myself Young Readers Edition

by Caster Semenya

Overview

In this memoir for young readers, Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya reflects on her groundbreaking career and her fight for identity in professional sports.

Caster Semenya is a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a three-time world champion in track from South Africa. Since her first spectacular performance at the 2009 World Championship in Berlin, she has been at the center of a growing debate about female eligibility rules in professional athletics because of her naturally high testosterone levels. After she was forced to take devastating hormone-altering drugs in order to continue competing, this debate has moved to center stage in the future of inclusivity for professional athletes.

In this middle grade adaptation of her debut adult memoir, Caster recounts her childhood growing up in a small village in South Africa, the love for and acceptance of her identity from her community, and her trailblazing fight for the right to compete in professional sports. The Race to Be Myself is an illuminating and necessary story of identity and self-acceptance that will resonate with young readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324082729
Publisher:	Norton Young Readers
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

Caster Semenya, OIB, is a South African middle-distance runner and winner of two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800 meters. She lives in Pretoria, South Africa.

Editorial Reviews

2024-03-23
The life story of a two-time Olympic gold medalist runner from South Africa who’s faced scrutiny and prejudice.

Semenya pulls no punches in the prologue to the young readers’ adaptation of her memoir. “I have what is called a difference of sex development,” she explains. “To put it simply, on the outside I am female and I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.” These details become relevant as Semenya describes, in painful detail, her experience with medicalized discrimination as she underwent invasive exams, hormone replacement therapy (with terrible side effects), and legal battles to be allowed to race in the 2012 Olympics. The beginning of the narrative struggles with cohesion, but Semenya tells her story in an intimate, loose, conversational tone that will make readers feel close to her. Her story is frustrating and tragic, providing an early example of attitudes displayed in the anti-trans movement currently spanning the globe. Semenya, who writes that her Pedi community always “accepted me as I was and never made me feel like an outsider,” asserts her own understanding of herself and her gender in ways that sometimes don’t align with Western medical or activist frameworks and language. While she was assigned female at birth and asserts that she’s a “proud Black woman…a daughter, a sister, a wife, and…a mother,” this story will resonate with anyone who’s felt like their gender and their body are right for them but wrong for the world.

Informative and inspiring. (Memoir. 11-16)

Kirkus Reviews