Wow, look at Caster go now! Gender-row runner gets chance
to show she's all woman in new photoshoo



We are used to seeing her in green and yellow Lycra as she trounces the rest of the pack on the running track. But now the world's fastest 800m female runner Caster Semenya - who caused an international storm after athletics officials questioned her gender - has taken the chance to showoto-shoot for South African glossy magazine YOU. In make-up, feminine clothes, and with her usually tightly-braided hair loose and styled over her shoulders, Caster's transform she is all woman. The 18-year-old was transformed from 'power girl to glamour girl' in a new phation is compelling. And the photographs bring the gender row, which had just faded from international news, roaring back into the foreground. The new-look Caster appears on the cover of the magazine and in a four-page spread inside. She is quoted as saying: 'I'd like to dress up more often and wear dresses but I never get the chance. I'd also like to learn to do my own make-up.' She also claims: 'I've never bought my own clothes - my mum buys them for me. But now that I know what I can look like, I'd like to dress like this more often.' 'I am who I am and I am proud of myself,' she added. Her outfits for the shoot included black leather trousers with a sequined top, a grey knee-length dress worn with a grey cropped jacket, and a black-and-white cocktail dress worn with stilettos. The magazine - which hit news stands in South Africa on Monday evening - has divided South Africans. Many phoned into radio stations to praise Caster for her new look - while others argued there was no need to 'improve' her. '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. Caster herself has remained defiant in the wake of the row following her astonishing run to win the gold medal at the Berlin World Championships last month. 'I see it all as a joke, it doesn't upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself,' she said.