As a child, Semenya dreamed of flying high—literally. Growing up in a rural South African village, money and opportunities were both scarce, but she dreamed of someday being successful enough to fly in an airplane. She knew that sports were her ticket to that success—and as a teen and young adult, she proved over and over and over again that, on the track, she didn't need wings to fly.

But then came the questions, and the accusations, and the news articles: was Semenya secretly a man? And then the invasive questioning, and the invasive tests, and private medical results shared around the world.

"I was only eighteen years old and had been subjected to invasive and humiliating gender confirmation tests without my consent just prior to the race. What followed was a media firestorm that continues to this day." (loc. 46)

Semenya's story is the third memoir about being intersex—not a term that she uses, but I'll come back to that in a moment—I've read this year, but it's unique in its context. The other memoirs I've read by people who are intersex have been set in a white, western context; unlike Semenya, their physical differences were noted (and acted upon, for better or for worse and with or without their knowledge) early on. They did not have autonomy over their bodies either, but they had the privilege of being, you know, white and western. Semenya writes (reasonably!) only from her own point of view, but I would have *loved* more research, more numbers, more history. She cites other cases like hers that she knows of in the running world, but this feels like a subject that is just ripe for a (thoughtful, careful) investigative journalist to dive into.

I am not interested in who wins or loses races. I am interested in the wild discrepancy between 1) a man who has a much higher lung capacity than your average swimmer, and is celebrated for it, and 2) a girl who learns well into her running career that she has a condition that might help her succeed at running, and is forced to take medication or have surgery to make her less successful. I am interested in the damage done in places with more "advanced" medical care, where intersex children are operated on as infants, and the damage done in places where intersex status is less likely to be discovered and adults are told, or forced, to change something fundamental about themselves in order to be accepted. I am interested in what it means for a competition field to be "equal" when, even if all competitors have (e.g.) the same amounts of testosterone and estrogen, some have grown up with the best coaching and equipment and physical therapy money can buy, and others have run barefoot into their teenage years because athletic shoes are an unimaginable luxury. I am interested in Semenya's story and the ones beyond it that she touches on, and I hope a researcher-writer will take those stories and (forgive me) run with them.

Back to the use of the word "intersex": I'm using it because it's a broadly accepted term and, frankly, one that I understand better than "androgen insensitivity syndrome". But Semenya's voice is strong here, and she prefers an even simpler term: woman. Though I find her rationale (which sometimes boils down to "I sit down to pee") a bit reductive at times, she's applying that logic only to herself—not limiting other people's gender to their external genitals, any more than she wants to be limited by her chromosomes—and I love how strong and stubborn and *confident* her voice is in this book. I went back and forth on my rating, because the story and the voice are stronger than the writing itself, but...this is a story that deserves to be told the way Semenya chooses to tell it.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.