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Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in the state of New York, and a tireless abolitionist & women's rights campaigner in the mid-late 19th C, was regularly, as were other Black women, told by white men & women when she spoke at meetings that she must "prove" that she was a woman.
the way @caster800m has been shamefully bullied for her entire adult life in the public eye, a public eye that she is in because of her brilliance (& hard work) as an athlete, cannot be separated from the colonial & racialised histories thru which gender has been/is constructed
Truth was an unusually tall woman for that era, and was proud of her strength, which she believed she had gained through her ability to work and to survive through three unimaginably arduous decades of slave labour.
women speaking publicly in the 1850s was still very rare, even more so for a Black woman who couldn't read or write. so many women, regardless of how they were racialised, were questioned for their "authenticity" because their behaviour was considered "unwomanly."
the questioning of Truth was specifically racialised, linked to meanings ascribed to her body & appearance & how that measured up to bourgeois, feminine constructions of motherly, genteel, white womanhood that belonged to a separate "sphere" of an industrial division of labour
The legacies of this live on all around us and so many women racialised as Black have always to had to face the kind of racist scrutiny and judgement that bullies like @sharrond62 and @paulajradcliffe are publicly mobilising against Caster Semenya.
Once when Truth was told by pro-Slavery white men in Indiana to show white women from the audience her breasts to "prove" she was a woman, she instead bared her breasts to the entire crowd and talked of how many white children she'd had to nurse with them.
in a similar way, Caster Semenya's public comments and profile have refused to be cowed into the shame and ostracism intended for her, she is proud of her sporting beauty and excellence, living a proud queer life and love and saying fuck you, i'm proud of who I am.
to be clear: she shouldn't have to, it's all of our failure that this is a world in which she has to be brave having been treated so disgustingly but she really is so amazing, what a hero.
